LP+Week+12

MATH.

I used to really love math - like really, really love math. It was the perfect ignorance of messiness:

__The Golden Ratio (from Wikipedia) - also known as The Divine Proportion__ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio

Two quantities //a// and //b// are said to be in the //golden ratio// //φ// if:

One method for finding the value of φ is to start with the left fraction. Through simplifying the fraction and substituting in b/a = 1/φ, By definition, it is shown that Multiplying by //φ// gives which can be rearranged to Using the [|quadratic formula], two solutions are obtained: and Because //φ// is the ratio between positive quantities //φ// is necessarily positive: .



http://www.thetanooki.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/100424goldenratio.jpg

The golden ratio is said to be seen throughout nature (in the same way that Fibonacci's sequence is): https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTQVBZBG8GeuZxo5IXWQe0EXHrT-whHHZxaqTkBy9pG38vjVAdJ

And even in the Mona Lisa:

http://wiki.ubc.ca/images/6/6e/Monalisa.jpg

What's interesting though is when you consider them with fractals. When segmenting lines to produce a fractal, the golden ratio is the exact fraction of the line required to ensure that the fractal segments will fill up the maximum space without ever overlapping. It is the ratio that ensures perfect boundaries - distinct and divine demarcations between space and content.

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Timothy Morton - Text as Ecology, Ecology as Text

One thing that modernity has damaged, along with the environment, has been thinking. To bring thinking to a point at which the damage can be assessed will require us to use the broken tools to hand. One damaged concept is ‘Nature’ — I capitalise it to denature it — damaged and damaging, almost useless for developing ecological culture. Of far greater benefit would be concepts that ruthlessly denature and de-essentialise: they are called deconstruction. (1)

The text- context distinction is only an interpretive convenience. It is not that texts refer to other texts, or coexist with them — rather, texts are other texts: texting is the differential process by which and as which texts exist as such, as strangers to themselves. (2)

Or, we find that the distinction is weirdly fractured and repeated at many levels, like looking at a fractal, say the coastline of Norway. The closer one looks, the more crinkly the boundary between Norway and the North Sea becomes. ‘Text’ is precisely the word for this fractal weaving of boundaries that open onto the unbounded: it is not the case that nothing at all exists. [...] T he boundary is not nonexistent but not thin—it is thick, permeable, folded into itself, fragile, teeming with parasites. Like skin. (2)

Texts have environments. These environments are made of signs, yet the matter-sign distinction breaks down at a certain point, because one of these environments is the environment. There is more than a neat chiasmic symmetry here, a strange entanglement in which we cannot distinguish between what counts as an entity ‘in’ an environment and an entity ‘in’ a text. For if we are to think text rigorously, we end up with Derrida’s famous formulation ‘Il n’ y a pas d’hors-texte,’ ‘There is no outside-text’.7 No textuality can rigorously distinguish between inside and outside, because that is precisely what textuality both broaches and breeches. (3)

The fractals touched upon just now provide a different way of thinking materialism. [...] The trouble with fractals, the trouble that hippie kitsch obscures, is that they elegantly show how nature is not natural, not outside artifice. (4)

Our prejudice about vegetables is that they’re beings that only do one thing — grow.9 The trouble with vegetable growth is that it consists of sets of algorithms—iterated functions, often producing fractal shapes.10 (4)

Fractals are simply the cheapest way of producing structure, and evolution always takes the cheapest possible route. Thus blood vessels, leaves, branches, forests and cancer cells have a fractal dimensionality. Far from being a holistic New Age trip, fractals open up a traumatic dimension of what we cannot call Nature any more, a dimension that is not holistic, but open and strange. (4)

An algorithm is a script — a text — that automates a function, or functions, and in this case the script is encoded directly into matter. The matter–information boundary is permeable. (4)

The base of the flower where it meets the stem is a snapshot of the past of the algorithm, while the crinkly edges of the petals show what the algorithm was up to yesterday. Looking at life forms is never looking at the here and now, and never looking in one place; they are palimpsests of displacements and rewritings and iterations. ‘Nature’, that sign of the extra-textual, does not strictly exist, even in biological terms. Think of the rings of a tree. One’s face is a map of everything that happened to it. (5)

Moreover, the globally warming Earth is similarly disturbing: there is no longer any background (‘environment’, ‘weather,’ Nature and so on) against which human activity may differentiate itself. Deconstruction that precisely articulates how distinctions along such lines are metaphysical will prove beneficial in navigating our way through the madness that is the recognition that there is no ‘Big Other’ — no world as such. (5)

Life forms consist of all kinds of structures that are not very organic, just as there are strange textual forms that do not fit the Procrustean bed of organicism. [...] Darwinism and genomics are very bad news for this anxiety, since they show that not only is the distinction untenable, but life as such is a machinic, algorithmic functioning, and that what we call ‘life’ and ‘consciousness’ are emergent effects of more fundamental machine-like processes. (7)

Just as textuality smears the text–context boundary into aporia, if not oblivion, so the genomics version of ecological interrelatedness requires us to drop the organism–environment duality. (8)

The environment is just a name for a flickering, shimmering field of forces without independent existence and in constant flux. Yet life forms are also made from their environments, including sunshine and chemicals from exploding stars. (9)

Just as writing, when it gets going, includes everything around it too, as if things were always already ‘written’ before people started doing things with pens: dispersed, displaced, never self-identical, infinite like a Menger Sponge or a Cantor Set, full of absence and space. Moreover, just as text is texting, space is spacing, absence is absence-ing — endless unfoldings, translations, distortions, misreadings, mutations. (9)

The gratifying illusion of immersion in a lifeworld provides yet another way to hold out against the truth of global warming: it has been put to me on more than one occasion that only internally poor white Westerners, lacking a lifeworld, could think such a thing as global warming, whereas the Third World peasant, immersed in her lifeworld like a pair of Van Gogh shoes, has no need for such concepts. As the recent actions to mark the surpassing of a human-friendly limit of atmospheric CO2 have suggested, however, peasants are far from incapable of holding more than one idea and one place in mind at a time.25 In contrast, the view that starts from the fact of intimacy with coexisting strangers compels us to assume responsibility for global warming, a direct cause of the ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction Event. (10)

All poems are environmental, because they include the spaces in which they are written and read — blank space around and between words, silence within the sound. (11)

We are familiar with closure: loose ends being tied up, plot lines converging, a sense of simplicity and death. So what is aperture? Precisely. ‘What is it?’ is aperture. How can we know when we have begun? (11)

Ecology makes us contemplate these profound issues: abandon the old idea of Nature; forget about worlds and surroundings—this language forces false distinctions between inside and outside; rethink ‘life’; question ‘intelligence’ and ‘consciousness’. All these demands emerge from Bernstein’s deceptively simple poem, which makes a slit in our complacency, so beautifully placed, so gentle, that everything comes pouring out of it. (12)

Does ‘intentionally’ leaving something blank leave space as it is, or introduce blankness into it? Strangely, according to the second possibility, we can introduce blank space into blank space. The ‘blank’ itself — is it transparent or is it opaque? A blankness that lets things be, or something like whitewash? If it ever existed ‘before’ the poem pointed it out, the blank page is never totally blank. Space is already distorted. Significance is already taking place. (12)

This ‘Hey!’ is what in Internet vocabulary is called a ping, a signal to a remote server to ascertain whether or not the server is functioning. The term is derived from echolocation (sonar). There is an infinite regress potential here, since a minimal mark that ‘pings’ to echo the functionality of a system depends upon an already functioning system of meaning, an already inscribed surface. This risk of infinite regress plagues systems-theoretical accounts of life and consciousness, accounts that bypass deconstruction. (13)

The systems-theoretical approach, embraced too swiftly by posthumanism, cannot account for the infinite regress of writing and writable surface. Bedazzled by the possibility of autotelic systems, posthumanism forgets that what makes a system systematic is its irreducible inconsistency. (13)

We cannot tell whether Bernstein’s is a poem until after we read ‘this...’. We are unable to tell whether there is a life form until after it has mutated. We cannot call it a species until it looks like one. To be aware of the trace as such is to coexist with the radically unknowable: Derrida’s arrivant, opening a realm of the infinitely other, an otherness that is intimately ‘here’, under our skin — it is our skin, teeming with symbionts — even as it evaporates ‘here’ into an infinite network of traces. (14-15)

When life, when writing, has begun, we find ourselves unable to draw a thin, rigid line around it. Ecology thinks a limitless system with no center or edge, devoid of intrinsic essence (no ‘Nature’): calligraphy as biology. So does poetry. This is not here. (15)