--- In wittgenstein-dialognet@y...,
"Jeremy Bowman" <jeremiad@e...> wrote:

> Kirby:
>
> > Look at 'Finnegans Wake' -- clearly the writings of a
> > lunatic right?
>
> -- Absolutely! And that is the reason why practically no one
> on our own planet has read it. (There are many who *pretend* to
> have read it, of course!) I can think of no clearer example of
> the writings of a seriously disturbed mind

OK, I guess I won't fight the archetypes. Genius and madness have
always been closely conjoined. I've said so myself, in an essay
web-published some years back:

Take this word "intelligence" for example. What are its
spectral lines, its signature connotations? Resonance with
bell curves and IQ are obvious, sun and sunlight abound in
its metaphors. Images of eccentricity, ostracism and iconoclasm
shimmer in its corona, as in the cliche about genius and madness
being intimately conjoined.

[ http://www.teleport.com/~pdx4d/gstwork.html ]

I'll admit to being one of those who hasn't read '... Wake' cover
to cover -- just sampled, read secondary literature about, and heard
a CD with the voice of James himself reading out loud from its
pages (I wonder if I can get that again for the car (just got me
one of them Panasonics with cigarette lighter adapter for wattage)).

I think of 'FW' as 'blarney on steriods' (that's a figure of speech
common to this neck of the woods -- anything that's hyper, super or
wildly exagerated is 'on steroids' (but now I'm free associating
again)). 'FW' is a high bandwidth convergence of signifiers that
puts a lot of energy into that twilight zone of tantalizingly
relevant memes, such that your sense-making faculties are challenged
to weave various dreams from it, almost reflexively. Far out stuff.

Anyway, my not having read it cover-to-cover doesn't keep me from
using 'FW' as a kind of icon. It represents a use of language
that's both remote from more ordinary patterns AND is taken
seriously by many scholars, is acceptable content for university-
based literature courses. I like to place this icon in close
proximity to 'Synergetics' for contrast, 'Synergetics' being a
work I've spent much more time with, and which many dismiss for the
same reason (that the language is so remote). One difference,
perhaps, is would-be readers of 'Synergetics' are more often your
math-science types and not so liberally trained in the humanities,
or are not willing to read it in that light, making the kinds of
allowances the Joyceans might (and some philosophers?).

So yes, you'll see me making this link from time to time, as
I've done here:

When the 876-page "big red book" of Synergetics was
published in 1975 by the Macmillan Publishing Company,
it confounded most readers and was never completely
accepted outside the domain of hardcore Fullerians.

"People couldn't make sense of it, and that still continues
to be a problem," said Kirby Urner, moderator of the
synergetics-l and whose Portland-based firm, 4D Solutions,
is named from an early Fuller text.

"It is multi-disciplinary, and should not be looked at
strictly through math and science," Kirby said. "It's not
the first 'hard' book - _Finnegan's Wake_ [sic] is hard -
but [the humanities] see the geometric figures, think
it's math and ignore it.

[ http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,6689,00.html ]

-- and it's a link on another level as well, in that one of the
major Joycean scholars, Hugh Kenner, author of 'The Pound Era', was
also an early Bucky fan (wrote the biography 'Bucky', as well
as 'Geodesic Math and How To Use It' -- unusual for a humanities-
trained scholar to publish a guide book to a math thicket (but then
that's the point -- it's this C.P. Snow bridge we comprehensivists
try to criss-cross (look, it's doable!)).

The link to LW, again, is re the status of "metaphysical language"
against the backdrop of aesthetic insights and "ways of looking"
embedded in the PI etc.

I think there's an elegant way of converging what I call
LW's "operationalism" (akin to Rorty's "anti-representationalism")
with Fuller's "operational mathemtics" -- signifiers designed to
do work in the context of an internally consistent, syntropic,
conceptual apparatus.

What the PI does is limber up our philosopher muscles such that
we're not so prejudicial when it comes to "knowing the meanings"
of various key terms. Because we've done our homework and dispelled
a lot of those illusions about "private ostensive definitions" which
supposedly keep signifiers anchored to experience.

There's "anchoring" going on in language I'd certainly agree (a kind
of gravitational phenomenon), but nothing so simple as "pointing"
explains it.

Kirby