----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- Dear Sally Jane, et al
At the risk of responding so quickly, turning a cocktail party into a hushed dialog over in the corner of the room, I simply can’t contain myself! It is like you have read my mind! Although I have only read Auroux’s English work (a few articles, here and there), I think the reference is absolutely spot on. And, as you reference, Auroux and his concept of grammatization is critical to Stiegler, who I think is very much part of this discussion (and, for the week on MEMORY, I hope becomes part of our dialog). Especially in Stiegler’s *Decadence of Industrial Democracies* this process of grammatization comes through epochal shifts, from orality to writing (yes, Ong!), from writing to printing, and… to the contemporary computer? (for my own research, this is the coming epoch of ubiquitous cryptography: digital objects so tightly wrapped we’ve excluded, perhaps, even the trace of the voice?) There is a short passage in Derrida’s Of Grammatology (which lies behind Stiegler and Auroux) where he claims to be enraptured by “cybernetics” and DNA (the “writing” of life). I’m far from a Derridian, but I can’t help but think that Derrida was foreshadowing the grammatization process, which I see as a technicized version of the ideality of Goodman’s notation. I’ll return the favour of citations with another: Friedrich Kittler’s splendid analysis of “The Mother’s Mouth” as an important technology for forming the “discourse network” 1800 (Discourse Networks 1800/1900, 1990). Van Helmont’s 1667 “Short Sketch of the Truly Natural Alphabet” offers, I think, an interesting attempt at discretizing the voice by literally fitting the Hebrew letterforms into the mouth apparatus (here’s an image: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s1/sh/62c84c30-49e0-4f95-9cc2-f7e79b548c36/d3de9ea5dfbf58e4d31e333d2abbef28) ~ Quinn DuPont On October 8, 2014 at 12:41:08 PM, sally jane norman (normansallyj...@googlemail.com(mailto:normansallyj...@googlemail.com)) wrote: > I like the fact/ way you're seeking to develop connections across the > discretisation of architectural/ algorithmic systems and of language/ > linguistic systems, as per Kramer's argument. Am wondering how this / > Kramer's work (which I don't know, other than that she's an architect) fits > in with that of language specialists (more names, can't help it) like Sylvain > Auroux (La Révolution technologique de la grammatisation), for whom grammar > emerges as a cognitive tool that modifies modes of communication, more or > rather than as a describer of natural spoken language. His focus is thus not > on the "notational" breakdown of orality to the visual (cf. also Walter > Ong?), but instead on the advent of mechanisation and automatised language > processing through tools that extend from historical construals of "grammar" > to computational "expert" systems. I get a little nervous when orality and > musicality are too categorically opposed to visuality and calculability, even > though I realise we must sometimes resort to cut-and-dried conjectures to get > thoughts moving. Auroux's thinking is no doubt anchored in a (French?) > tendency - I'd say gift, in his case - for trying to freely span and bridge > pre- and post-digital cultures, whilst mobilising an extremely robust set of > disciplinary perspectives. _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
