Log24

Semantic Transparency

"… semantic transparency … would allow disparate systems to share some understanding of the actual concepts that are represented…"

— IBM Developer Works on October 7, 2003

From a Log24 entry of January 7, 2007:

"One of the primary critiques of modernism that Learning from Las Vegas was engaged in, as Frederic [sic] Jameson clearly noted, was the dialectic between inside and outside and the assumption that the outside expressed the interior. Let's call this the modernist drive for 'expressive transparency.'"

— Aron Vinegar of Ohio State U., "Skepticism and the Ordinary: From Burnt Norton to Las Vegas"

From this week's New Yorker (issue dated Jan. 22, 2007)–

"A Life," by Zbigniew Herbert
(translated from the Polish by Alissa Vales):

I was a quiet boy a little sleepy and–amazingly–
unlike my peers–who were fond of adventures–
I didn't expect much–didn't look out the window
At school more diligent than able–docile stable

For the rest of the poem, click here.

From the Wikipedia article on Zbigniew Herbert:

"In modern poetry, Herbert advocated semantic transparence. In a talk given at a conference organized by the journal Odra he said: 'So not having pretensions to infallibility, but stating only my predilections, I would like to say that in contemporary poetry the poems that appeal to me the most are those in which I discern something I would call a quality of semantic transparency (a term borrowed from Husserl's logic). This semantic transparency is the characteristic of a sign consisting in this: that during the time when the sign is used, attention is directed towards the object denoted, and the sign itself does not hold the attention. The word is a window onto reality.'"

(Wikipedia cites as the source–
Herbert's talk at the meeting "Poet in face of the present day," organized by the "Odra" journal. Print version: Preface to: Zbigniew Herbert "Poezje," Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, Warszawa 1998, ISBN 83-06-02667-5.)

Fom Nabokov's Transparent Things (pdf):

"Its ultimate vision was the incandescence of a book or a box grown completely transparent and hollow.  This is, I believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another.  Easy, you know, does it, son."

Related material:

Confession