Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 62.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2002 07:46:22 +0100
From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
Subject: the dead heats of haste
Willard,
In a recent missive to Humanist you inquired about the status of "dead
certainty". It is very much alive for the pragmatist, especially the
pragmatist enlivened by the many variations of the trope of Cretan
paradox including this one:
it is certainty that there is no certainty.
Some variations are more enabling than others. I am particular struck by
the one the involves the two sides of a sheet of paper. The one side
reads: "the statement on the other side of the sheet is false" which by a
trick of diectics remains true because the "other side" is always "other"
even when one side reads "This statement is false." I raise this example
because it seems to me that the ontological and epistemological issues you
raise deserve some triangulation.
Some of the paradoxes disappear when one considers the relations between
mapping and memory. The "other side" is like a variable held in memory
whose value can be flushed. The use of computing machines acquaints us
with the distinction between a variable and its value. The "other side"
need not be the recto of a verso nor a position in a numbered sequence.
The computing model here helps us understand, I hope, that codex reading
induces a form of memory and recall that is prone not necessarily to
paradox generation but to loops. The wish to have "The Book" and the "Book
of the World" in alignment is perhaps a desire to avoid delicate etiquette
questions. For "The Book" read cultural artefact. For "World" read the
wonderful playground where the actual and the possible intertwine and the
place where cultural artefacts are both repositories of the traces of
actual processes and recipes for possible experience. Or to borrow
Turing's famous words about computing machines: both states and
instructions.
I wonder if the preoccupation with "dead certainity" could not be slightly
shifted to a bemusement with "dead centredness". Could we not dawdle over
a "hasty pudding"? I offer the following conceit:
<cite>
The hasty-pudding being spread out equally on a plate, while hot, an
_excavation_ is made in the middle of it with a _spoon_, into which
_excavation_ a piece of butter as large as a nutmeg is put, and upon it a
spoonful of brown sugar, etc. The butter, being soon heated by the heat of
the pudding, mixes with the sugar and forms a sauce, which, _being
confined in the excavation_, occupies the _middle of the plate!_
Thus for the array -- now for the battle! Dip each _spoonful_ in the
_sauce, before it is carried to the mouth_, care being had in taking it up
to begin on the outside and near the brim of the plate, and to approach
the centre by gradual advances, in order not to demolish too soon the
_excavation_ which forms the reservoir of _sauce_.
Source: Marie Kimball _The Martha Washington Cook Book_ New York:
Coward-McCann, 1940.
</cite>
I leave it to braver and more patient souls to digest the possible
analogies between the methods and practices of humanities computing and
the preparation and delectation of hasty puddings. I have misplaced my
spoon and an Ethiopian stew awaits to be sopped up with a spongy piece of
injera.
For those interested in adopting a different culinary conciet:
<cite>
Injera is described as a soft, porous,
thin pancake, which has a sour taste. Teff is low in gluten and
therefore, the bread remains quite flat. When eaten in Ethiopia, teff
flour is often mixed with other cereal flours, but the flavor and
quality of injera made from mixtures is considered less tasty. Injera
made entirely from barley, wheat, maize or millet flours is said to
have a bitter taste. The degree of sour taste is imparted by the
length of the fermentation process. If the dough is fermented for only
a short period of time, injera has a tasty sweet flavor. Research
studies on the techniques used to make injera have indicated that a
yeast, Candida guilliermondii [...]
http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/proceedings1993/v2-231.html
</cite>
Before I branch out further into botany, let me conclude with an appeal to
temporality in order to avoid the category mistake of attributing
"deadness" to certainty. In my limited experience "deadness" is a
possible attribute of beings (as in lively dead poets). The category of
"certainty" is not a being --- at least not for the algorithms of this
computing machine.
--
Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/ivt.htm
per Interactivity ad Virtuality via Textuality
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