See the search for an Inarticulate Square in this journal.
Wednesday, August 3, 2016
Friday, October 17, 2014
Raiders of the Inarticulate
On Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators :
“Yet as the book’s five hundred–plus pages unwind, Isaacson interrupts himself to present small bromides about what it means to innovate and what we might learn from these innovators, our presumed betters. “Innovation requires articulation,” he tells us, after explaining how the main strength of Grace Hopper, a trailblazing computer scientist for the US Navy, was her ability to speak in the languages of mathematicians, engineers, programmers, and soldiers alike. ‘One useful leadership talent is knowing when to push ahead against doubters and when to heed them,’ he offers later.
The book is peppered with these kinds of passages, which often intrude on the narrative, depriving us of moments of real emotional power.”
— Jacob Silverman in Bookforum , Sept/Oct/Nov 2014
From Isaacson’s book:
Related material:
In memory of T. S. Eliot…
… and in memory of Stanley Chase, producer of Colossus: The Forbin Project
and of Threepenny Opera :
Ninefold square from Colossus
(“There is another system”) —
Fourfold square introducing Brecht
in Dreigroschen Trifft Vierfarben —
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
A Raid on the Inarticulate
“… And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate….”
— T. S. Eliot, “East Coker V” in Four Quartets
Thursday, March 4, 2021
Teaching the Academy to See
“Art bears the same relationship to society
that the dream bears to mental life. . . .
Like art, the dream mediates between order
and chaos. So, it is half chaos. That is why
it is not comprehensible. It is a vision, not
a fully fledged articulated production.
Those who actualize those half-born visions
into artistic productions are those who begin
to transform what we do not understand into
what we can at least start to see.”
— A book published on March 2, 2021:
Beyond Order , by Jordan Peterson
The inarticulate, in this case, is Rosalind Krauss:
A “raid on the inarticulate” published in Notices of the
American Mathematical Society in the February 1979 issue —