File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1998/lyotard.9812, message 103


Date: Sat, 19 Dec 1998 17:24:48 -0800
Subject: Perspectives on Events


Ari, et.al.

Some thoughts on recent postings:

Thinking of paralogy and Ashbery's poetry, and remembering Nietzsches
comment on the "thing-in-itself", which reminds us that taking away
relations of a "thing" to other things leaves a that "thing" without
description, we realize that "events" are all that can "be the case".

The level of events and the combination of events combine into
"brain-states".  Pre-natal brain states may have permanent (though
unconscious) effects on newborns, just as physical imperfections may
affect heart, lungs, or other organs.

Language, presumably, is not a pre-natal experience.  For the infant,
sight, sound, touch, taste and smell, accompany experience of other
living beings, and other objects.  Such experience includes visual and
audio patterns, tastes, and odors.

Conscious and unconscious perceptions are apparently continuosly stored
in infant memories, forming a data base of learning.

Lyotard writes much of messages, addressor, addressee, referent etc.
Such concepts express the "transactional" nature of human communication
in speech and body language, and other languages of the senses and the 
arts.

The infant is a receiver of sensations and a sender of sound and body
language; a new and imperfect instrument to be sure.  

Normal growth and development adds capability to both receiving and
sending faculties.

And, in only two or three years, the child will respond to fairly
complex events:  For example, rhythm, the immemorial beats of nursery
rimes, tunes, hand-clapping.

Such "events" are witnessed, understood, interpreted.  The instruments
of
receiving and transmission are progressively upgraded.

Parents want the child to develop and be able to integrate syllables,
words, sentences, meaning.

However, paralogicaly, adults sometimes wish to deconstruct rather than
integrate.

Thus it is possible to read a poem treating each syllable as an event.

One reading or one syllable is one event.  

Pitch, decibel count, and the voice quality, with which each syllable is
delivered make it a unique event with or without the presence and body
language of the reader.  

The "order" of syllables in reading a poem may be varied for
experimental
purposes.  

Rapid speech, say 250 to 300 words per minute, would perhaps
deliver a thousand separate syllables, each one a separate event.

Experimenting with this poetic minute could yield a million
combinations.

Compared to possible brain-states of a mature adult, a million a very 
small quantity.

As Carl Sagan observed, the number of possible brain states is so
very large that human beings can only realize a small portion of their
potential; that identical twins have quite different brain states, and
that those of us who think we understand our "selves" are sometimes
surprised at our own actions.


   

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