"This time-defying preservation of selves,
this dream of plenitude without loss, is like
a snow globe from heaven, a vision of Eden
before the expulsion."
(Ch. 2 in Henk Oosterling & Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (Eds.), Intermedialities: Philosophy, Arts, Politics , Lexington Books, October 14, 2010)
"The term 'spacing' ('espacement ') is absolutely central to Derrida's entire corpus, where it is indissociable from those of différance (characterized, in the text from 1968 bearing this name, as '[at once] spacing [and] temporizing' 1), writing (of which 'spacing' is said to be 'the fundamental property' 2) and deconstruction (with one of Derrida's last major texts, Le Toucher: Jean-Luc Nancy , specifying 'spacing ' to be 'the first word of any deconstruction' 3)."
1 Jacques Derrida, “La Différance,” in Marges – de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p. 14. Henceforth cited as D .
2 Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” trans. A. Bass, in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 217. Henceforth cited as FSW .
3 Jacques Derrida, Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000), p. 207.
. . . .
"… a particularly interesting point is made in this respect by the French philosopher, Michel Haar. After remarking that the force Derrida attributes to différance consists simply of the series of its effects, and is, for this reason, 'an indefinite process of substitutions or permutations,' Haar specifies that, for this process to be something other than a simple 'actualisation' lacking any real power of effectivity, it would need “a soubassement porteur ' – let’s say a 'conducting underlay' or 'conducting medium' which would not, however, be an absolute base, nor an 'origin' or 'cause.' If then, as Haar concludes, différance and spacing show themselves to belong to 'a pure Apollonism' 'haunted by the groundless ground,' which they lack and deprive themselves of,16 we can better understand both the threat posed by the 'figures' of space and the mother in the Timaeus and, as a result, Derrida’s insistent attempts to disqualify them. So great, it would seem, is the menace to différance that Derrida must, in a 'properly' apotropaic gesture, ward off these 'figures' of an archaic, chthonic, spatial matrix in any and all ways possible…."
16 Michel Haar, “Le jeu de Nietzsche dans Derrida,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’Etranger 2 (1990): 207-227.
. . . .
… "The conclusion to be drawn from Democritus' conception of rhuthmos , as well as from Plato's conception of the chôra , is not, therefore, as Derrida would have it, that a differential field understood as an originary site of inscription would 'produce' the spatiality of space but, on the contrary, that 'differentiation in general' depends upon a certain 'spatial milieu' – what Haar would name a 'groundless ground' – revealed as such to be an 'in-between' more 'originary' than the play of differences it in-forms. As such, this conclusion obviously extends beyond Derrida's conception of 'spacing,' encompassing contemporary philosophy's continual privileging of temporization in its elaboration of a pre-ontological 'opening' – or, shall we say, 'in-between.'
For permutations and a possible "groundless ground," see
the eightfold cube and group actions both on a set of eight
building blocks arranged in a cube (a "conducting base") and
on the set of seven natural interstices(espacements ) between
the blocks. Such group actions provide an elementary picture of the isomorphism between the groups PSL(2,7) (acting on the
eight blocks) and GL(3,2) (acting on the seven interstices).
"You said something about the significance of spaces between
elements being repeated. Not only the element itself being repeated,
but the space between. I'm very interested in the space between.
That is where we come together." — Peter Eisenman, 1982
(Up) Against the (In) Between: Interstitial Spatiality
in Genet and Derrida
by Clare Blackburne
Blackburne — www.parrhesiajournal.org 24 —
"The excessive notion of espacement as the resurgent spatiality of that which is supposedly ‘without space’ (most notably, writing), alerts us to the highly dynamic nature of the interstice – a movement whose discontinuous and ‘aberrant’ nature requires further analysis."
Blackburne — www.parrhesiajournal.org 25 —
"Espacement also evokes the ambiguous figure of the interstice, and is related to the equally complex derridean notions of chora , différance , the trace and the supplement. Derrida’s reading of the Platonic chora in Chora L Works (a series of discussions with the architect Peter Eisenman) as something which defies the logics of non-contradiction and binarity, implies the internal heterogeneity and instability of all structures, neither ‘sensible’ nor ‘intelligible’ but a third genus which escapes conceptual capture.25 Crucially, chora , spacing, dissemination and différance are highly dynamic concepts, involving hybridity, an ongoing ‘corruption’ of categories, and a ‘bastard reasoning.’26 Derrida identification of différance in Margins of Philosophy , as an ‘unappropriable excess’ that operates through spacing as ‘the becoming-space of time or the becoming-time of space,’27 chimes with his description of chora as an ‘unidentifiable excess’ that is ‘the spacing which is the condition for everything to take place,’ opening up the interval as the plurivocity of writing in defiance of ‘origin’ and ‘essence.’28 In this unfolding of différance , spacing ‘insinuates into presence an interval,’29 again alerting us to the crucial role of the interstice in deconstruction, and, as Derrida observes in Positions , its impact as ‘a movement, a displacement that indicates an irreducible alterity’: ‘Spacing is the impossibility for an identity to be closed on itself, on the inside of its proper interiority, or on its coincidence with itself. The irreducibility of spacing is the irreducibility of the other.’30"
25. Quoted in Jeffrey Kipnis and Thomas Leeser, eds., Chora L Works. Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman
(New York: The Monacelli Press, 1997), 15.
26. Ibid, 25.
27. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy.
(Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1982), 6 and 13.
28. Derrida, Chora L Works , 19 and 10.
29. Ibid, 203.
30. Derrida, Positions , 94.
Comments Off on Espacement: Geometry of the Interstice in Literary Theory
"You said something about the significance of spaces between
elements being repeated. Not only the element itself being repeated,
but the space between. I'm very interested in the space between.
That is where we come together." — Peter Eisenman, 1982
"The stars and galaxies seem static, eternal, or moving slowly
in deterministic patterns, becoming the background stage
on which we move. But if we could speed up the sequence,
we would see how dramatic and unpredictable this background
really is — an actor, director, script and stage all at once.
Moreover, it is a unified universe, a single unfolding event
of which we are an embedded part, a narrative of highly
dangerous and fine-tuned events, something more like
a detective thriller with many crimes and last-minute escapes
than the impersonal account of astronomy textbooks.
We are only just beginning to decipher the plot and figure out the Cosmic Code, as Heinz Pagels puts it."
— Charles Jencks, The Architecture of the Jumping Universe :
A Polemic (How Complexity Science is Changing Architecture
and Culture), Academy Editions, 1995, rev. ed. 1997
"A Grand Unified Theory (GUT) is a model in particle physics…."
— Wikipedia
"Under the GUT symmetry operation these field components
transform into one another. The reason quantum particles
appear to have different properties in nature is that the unifying
symmetry is broken. The various gluons, quarks and leptons
are analogous to the facets of a cut diamond, which appear
differently according to the way the diamond is held but in
fact are all manifestations of the same underlying object."
The Tale of
the Eternal Blazon
by Washington Irving
“Blazon meant originally a shield , and then
the heraldic bearings on a shield .
Later it was applied to the art of describing
or depicting heraldic bearings in the proper
manner; and finally the term came to signify ostentatious display and also description or
record by words or other means . In Hamlet ,
Act I Sc. 5, the Ghost, while talking with
Prince Hamlet, says:
‘But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood.’
Eternal blazon signifies revelation or description
of things pertaining to eternity .”
"Here, modernism is defined as an autonomous body
of ideas, having little or no outward reference, placing
considerable emphasis on formal aspects of the work
and maintaining a complicated—indeed, anxious—
rather than a naïve relationship with the day-to-day
world, which is the de facto view of a coherent group
of people, such as a professional or discipline-based
group that has a high sense of the seriousness and
value of what it is trying to achieve. This brisk definition…."
"Even as the dominant modernist narrative was being written,
there were art historians who recognized that it was inaccurate.
The narrative was too focused on France . . . . Nor was it
correct to build the narrative so exclusively around formalism;
modernism was far messier, far more multifaceted than that."
“Punctuation basically has to do with prose
and the printed word,” he said in the Paris Review
interview. “I came to feel that punctuation was like
nailing the words onto the page. Since I wanted
instead the movement and lightness of the spoken
word, one step toward that was to do away with
punctuation.”
"Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined
On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come."
— Wallace Stevens,
"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,"
Canto IV of "It Must Change"
This post was suggested by the following passage —
" … the Fano plane ,
a set of seven points
grouped into seven lines
that has been called
'the combinatorialist’s coat of arms.' "
An earlier post discussed other meanings for the commercial brand names
underlined above, but the brand name "Attribution" was omitted from that
earlier discussion.
Hence . . .
Related material — The un–attributed phrase "Concepts of Space"
in the previous post.
"And in this he showed me something small,
no bigger than a hazelnut,
lying in the palm of my hand,
and I perceived that it was round as any ball.
I looked at it and thought: What can this be?
And I was given this general answer:
It is everything which is made. I was amazed
that it could last, for I thought that it was so little
that it could suddenly fall into nothing."
"The relativity problem is one of central significance throughout geometry and algebra and has been recognized as such by the mathematicians at an early time."
— Hermann Weyl, "Relativity Theory as a Stimulus in Mathematical Research," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society , Vol. 93, No. 7, Theory of Relativity in Contemporary Science: Papers Read at the Celebration of the Seventieth Birthday of Professor Albert Einstein in Princeton, March 19, 1949 (Dec. 30, 1949), pp. 535-541
Weyl in 1946—:
"This is the relativity problem: to fix objectively a class of equivalent coordinatizations and to ascertain the group of transformations S mediating between them."
— Hermann Weyl, The Classical Groups , Princeton University Press, 1946, p. 16
In the case of PG(3,2), there is a choice of geometric models
to be coordinatized: two such models are the traditional
tetrahedral model long promoted by Burkard Polster, and
the square model of Steven H. Cullinane.
The above Wikipedia section tacitly (and unfairly) assumes that
the model being coordinatized is the tetrahedral model. For
coordinatization of the square model, see (for instance) the webpage Finite Relativity.
" When Mr. Roche received the Pritzker in 1982, he delivered
an acceptance speech that displayed both his capacity for
self-deprecating humor and his belief that architecture was
a noble pursuit. He quoted from a letter he had received
complaining that his work was 'moribund' and that the Pritzker
jury 'must be out of their minds' to have given him the prize.
He could only respond, he said, by asking: 'Is not the act of building
an act of faith in the future, and of hope? Hope that the testimony of
our civilization will be passed on to others, hope that what we are doing
is not only sane and useful and beautiful, but a clear and true reflection
of our own aspirations. And hope that it is an art, which will communicate
with the future and touch those generations as we ourselves have been
touched and moved by the past.' "
— Paul Goldberger
Goldberger on Roche's earlier career —
". . . He continued to finish projects Saarinen had started, including
the IBM Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, designed
in collaboration with Charles Eames . . . ."
This post continues a post from yesterday on the square model of
PG(3,2) that apparently first appeared (presented as such*) in . . .
Cullinane, "Symmetry invariance in a diamond ring," Notices of the AMS , pp. A193-194, Feb. 1979.
Yesterday's Wikipedia presentation of the square model was today
revised by yet another anonymous author —
Revision history accounting for the above change from yesterday —
The jargon "rm OR" means "remove original research."
The added verbiage about block designs is a smokescreen having
nothing to do with the subject, which is square representation
of the 35 points and lines.
* The 35 squares, each consisting of four 4-element subsets, appeared earlier
in the Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) of R. T. Curtis (published in 1976).
They were not at that time presented as constituting a finite geometry,
either affine (AG(4,2)) or projective (PG(3,2)).
Besides omitting the name Cullinane, the anonymous Wikipedia author
also omitted the step of representing the hypercube by a 4×4 array —
an array called in this journal a Galois tesseract.
Wolff himself, in a weblog post of Oct. 16, 2017,*
had some trenchant comments on religion . . .
See "How Odd of God." (See as well today's midnight
post in this journal, "Ghost in the Shell.")
Filed under: General — Tags: Facets — m759 @ 10:01 am
" What this research implies is that we are not just hearing different 'stories'
about the electron, one of which may be true. Rather, there is one true story,
but it has many facets, seemingly in contradiction, just like in 'Rashomon.' "
"What this research implies is that we are not just hearing
different 'stories' about the electron, one of which may be
true. Rather, there is one true story, but it has many facets,
seemingly in contradiction, just like in 'Rashomon.'
There is really no escape from the mysterious — some
might say, mystical — nature of the quantum world."
See also a recent New Yorker version of the fashionable cocktail-party
phrase "the Rashomon effect."
For a different approach to the dictum "there is one true story, but
it has many facets," see . . .
"Read something that means something."
— New Yorker motto
In the beginning of the 1954 film "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,"
Adam, oldest of the brothers, is paired with Milly. The problem then is
to find brides for Adam's six brothers.
Above is a video illustration, published on Aug. 12, 2016, of the six couples.
Matching them involves some choreography.
"… through the proposition machine of quantum mechanics
comes pregeometry; pregeometry makes geometry;
geometry gives rise to matter and the physical laws
and constants of the universe."
— Harvard professor Peter Galison,
defender of the faith of Scientism
For a different sort of quantum "proposition machine," see posts tagged Dirac and Geometry.
Paul Valéry, "Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci," La Nouvelle Revue , Paris, Vol. 95 (1895)—
"Regarded thus, the ornamental conception is to the individual arts
what mathematics is to the other sciences. …the objects chosen
and arranged with a view to a particular effect seem as if disengaged
from most of their properties and only reassume them in the effect,
in, that is to say, the mind of the detached spectator. It is thus
by means of an abstraction that the work of art can be constructed,
and is more or less easy to define according as the elements borrowed
from reality for it are more or less complex. Inversely it is by a sort of
induction, by the production of mental images, that all works of art are
appreciated, and this production must equally be more or less active,
more or less tiring, according as it is set in motion by a simple interlacing
on a vase or a broken phrase by Pascal."
— Translated by Thomas McGreevy (Valéry's Selected Writings,
New Directions, 1950)
. . . What, indeed, is truth? I doubt that the best answer can be learned from either the Communist sympathizers of MIT or the “Red Mass” leftists of Georgetown. For a better starting point than either of these institutions, see my note of April 6, 2001, Wag the Dogma.
See, too, In Principio Erat Verbum, which notes that “numbers go to heaven who know no more of God on earth than, as it were, of sun in forest gloom.”
Since today is the anniversary of the death of MIT mathematics professor Gian-Carlo Rota, an example of “sun in forest gloom” seems the best answer to Pilate’s question on this holy day. See