In dynamical terms, such as in the study of chaos, a non-linear situtation is one where the result is not proportional to the cause. For instance "the straw that broke the camel's back" (eg. the elastic/plastic limit in building structures) introduces non-linearity. Up until that point, deformation had been proportional to load. Suddenly it loses all proportionality.
Read MoreFor Marc Augé, a non-place comes into existence when human beings do not recognise themselves in it. (see place / identity) Non-places begin with uprootedeness -- uprooted nineteenth century countrymen, migrants, refugees, etc. They provide the "passive joys of identity loss." While anthropological places create the organically social, so non-places create solitary contractuality. (p.94) Thus a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place, and these non-places are the real measure of our time. (pp.77-79)
Read More"Our march towards order " (Le Corbusier)
All great philosophical and theological systems have been built around the question of order and disorder, and they have all priveleged order over disorder.
For Claude Levi-Strauss, primitive thought is just as much based on the demand for order as is scientific thought, whose most basic postulate is that nature itself is orderly. For native thought, "all sacred things must have their place." Sacred objects contribute to the maintenance of order by occupying the places allocated to them. If they were taken out of their place, even in thought, the entire order of the universe would be destroyed. (The Savage Mind, p. 10) For Levi-Strauss, the aesthetic emotion is the result of a union "in miniature" in the work of art, between the structural order and the order of events.
"Science is any attempt to bring facts into logical order". B. Bavink
The Middle Ages, with its insistence on the rationality of God, formed one long training of the intellect of western Europe in the sense of order. (an order in which reason was inseparable from revelation) Thus faith in the possibility of science is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology. -- Alfred North Whitehead. (cf the role of monasteries in establishing social order.)
According to Kant, we make the principle of the unity of nature a regulative principle in order to judge nature to be so constructed that it corresponds to our needs for order. Thus the specific principle of Judgement is that "Nature specifies its universal laws into empirical laws in accordance with the form of a logical system on behalf of the faculty of Judgement." (see Critique of Judgement ) For Kant, form is "that which allows the manifold of appearance to be ordered in certain relations." (Critique of Pure Reason, section 1, 56)
The idea of space is an idea of order.
As we know it, dirt is essentially disorder. Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative moment, but a positive effort to organise the environment. Rituals of purity and impurity create unity in experience. (Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger)
"Order is a kind of compulsion to repeat which, when a regulation has been laid down once and for all, decides when, where and how a thing shall be done, so that in every similar circumstance one is spared hesitation and indecision. The benefits of order are incontestable. It enables men to use space and time to the best advantage, while conserving their psychical forces." (Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, p.40) "The anal eroticism of young human beings...is changed in the course of their growth into a group of traits which are familiar to us as parsimony, a sense of order and cleanliness." (pp 43-4)
For Kurt Goldstein, the drive to overcome anxiety by the conquest of a piece of the world is expressed in the tendency towards order, norms, continuity, and homogeneity. (Goldstein, p. 238) Nonetheless, he rejects the notion that the "ordered" world of culture is the product of anxiety or as the sublimation of repressed drives, seeing it instead as expressions of the creative power of man and of the tendency to realize his nature, as a result of a primal tendency towards actualization. It was this idea of a lawful order realizing itself in nature, not imposed upon it by an ordering mind, and the search for the lawlike (das Gesetzliche) in the phenomena, that provided a model for the Gestaltpsychologists of the 20th century. The gestalt theorists attempted to introduce an aesthetic dimension of inherent order, meaning, and simplicity into the evaluation of scientific theories, and into the fabric of experience and nature itself. (Mitchell G. Ash, Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 1890-1967, p.1)
It is important to distinguish between the order which is part of a project of control (what Lewis Mumford calls the 'will to order") and an " immanent," or " self-organizing" order, what Stuart Kaufman likes to call "order for free." In Chaos Bound, Katherine Hayles asserts that contemporary criticism sees order as potentially repressive and seeks to find its limits or to undermine it, whereas contemporary science is extending the concept of order to describe conditions that were previously understood as disordered (eg. chaos). In a cultural context, the concept of order has been increasingly identified with repression if not terror (eg. Foucault, Serres etc.) Yet for natural scientists the living world is characterized by overwhelming and beautiful order. To appeal to natural form is to change the valence of order, whether this is the emergent order of complex systems or the " phase beauty" of the lily-of-the-valley. Stuart Kaufman suggests that much of the order in organisms may not be the result of selection at all, but the spontaneous order of self-organized systems. "Order, vast and generative, arises naturally. ... not fought for against the entropictides, but freely available." (At Home in the Universe, p. 25)
see philosophy / chaos for some of the ambiguities of order and .
Natural processes always move towards an increase in disorder, which is measured by entropy. The second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy can never decrease, is thus an argument for the irreversibility of time. From the beginning, it was thought that living organisms were a possible exemption from the Second Law. Kelvin referred to the power of the will in his 1852 essay entitled "On the Power of Animated Creatures over Matter" and suggested that "the animal body does not act as a thermo-dynamic engine."
" Natural selection operating on gratuitous random mutations is the sieve that retains order and lets chaos pass into oblivion...No idea derivative from Darwin lies deeper in our minds than this." (see evolution)
For Robert Venturi, "a valid order accomodates the circumstantial contradictions of a complex reality....When circumstances defy order, order should bend or break: anomalies and uncertainties give validity to architecture." Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, pp 46-47.)
Order is not the law of things but their exception. To speak of disorder in a rigorously disordered manner: a journey among intersections, nodes, and regionalizations. To conceive of knowledge not in terms of order and mastery, but in terms of chance and invention.
Organicism may be defined as the philosophy whose major categories are derived metaphorically from the attributes of living and growing things.
Read More"Organism" is derived from the same word as organ: in Latin, organum ; in Greek, organon, which means tool, and was the title given to Aristotle's logical writings to emphasize the idea of logic as a tool helping the other sciences. The instrumental view lies to some degree within the word organism itself: a system of organs, a whole composed of parts, where each part is a functional tool related to the other parts and the whole.
Read More"Ornament shapes, straightens and stabilizes the bare arid field on which it is inscribed. Not only does it exist in and of itself, but it also shapes its own environment -- to which it imparts form." (Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, p. 66) For Heinrich Wölfflin, ornament is an epression of an excessive force of form. It is "the blossoming of a force that has nothing more to achieve." (p.181) Antoine Picon echoes this association of ornament with potency. "like orderand proportion, ornament expressed the fundamental regularity of the universe, and, above all, its fecundity. Ornament, in general, gave evidence to the creativity and the beauty of the cosmic order, just as the fruits and flowers that if often imitated were the products and finery of nature." ("Architecture, Science, Technology and the Virtual Realm" in Architecture and the Sciences, p. 298.)
Read MoreAn Orrery is a clocklike object which models the movements of the solar system. The orrery is often referred to as the paradigmatic embodiment of the Newtonian "clockwork"universe. Note that the orrery, like Newtonian time, could conceivably rotate in either direction. What was the origin of "clockwise" motion? Should we see it as one of those bifurcations that could equally have gone either way? Newton believed that from time to time the Creator had to interfere in the course of material processes in order to secure the normal progress against disturbances. Leibniz mocked this idea by asking him whether God had produced an imperfect mechanism.
Read More"Man walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going; he has made up his mind to reach some particular place and goes straight to it.The pack-donkey meanders along, meditates a little in his scatter-brained and distracted fashion, he zigzags in order to avoid the larger stones, or to ease the climb, or to gain a little shade; he takes the line of least resistance.
Read MoreFor Nietzche, "pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics." "Man could never do without blood, torture, and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself." "If something is to stay in the memory, it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory." (Genealogy of Morals, Ecce Homo)
On the other hand, ritual may be seen as a way to keep memory alive without the experience of pain. Bataille echoes Nietzche's description of the role of religious sacrifice. He describes sacredness as the revelation of continuity through the death of a discontinuous being to those who watch it as a solemn rite. (p.22)
"Those who do not feel pain seldom think that it is felt." Samuel Johnson. "To have pain is to have certainty , to hear about pain is to have doubt." (Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 13)
Like consciousness, pain as a philosophical issue raises the questions of subjectivity and of other minds. Wittgenstein rejected the classical status of pain as the paradigm of direct intuition. When one is in pain, he said in the Philosophical Investigations, one cannot say, except perhaps as a joke, that one knows one is in pain. Say that one cannot doubt it and leave it at that, he suggested.
Read MorePanic rapture, or Panolepsy (which is also related to nympholepsy-- but which entails disappearance) can be specified in Greek medical terms as a range of effects from epilepsy, which is a complete estrangement of the body, to melancholy, which is an estrangement of the mind.
Read MoreThe concept of scientific paradigms was given currency by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. (1962) Kuhn's concept of paradigm applies both to a body of ideas, theories, etc. -- a "worldview"-- and to the social organization of science in which it appears. There are two aspects to scientific paradigms. Paradigms are shared constellations of belief (a disciplinary matrix) and they are also models or examples.
Read MoreParapraxes are actions committed "not as planned."
In fact, the opposite is the case: the pattern characteristic of symptoms, parapraxes (Freudian slips) and dreams is that the repressed wish will come out, with poetic irony, in precisely the effort to control or avoid it. Unconscious hatred "kills with kindness." One is so busy suppressing a sexual thought that it slips out as an unconscious pun. (Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotions, p.85) (see return of repressed)
Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that the world would beat a path to the door of the maker of the better mousetrap, yet this is often not the case. Familiarity and custom make the accepted mousetrap seem "good enough," particularly if an effort is required to learn to use the new one. Group use accentuates individual acceptance. (cf. Rupert Sheldrakes concept of morphic fields)
Read MoreThe political representative of the Dalai Lama objected to the word "victory" in a UN resolution drafted by Dag Hammerskjold in support of the Tibetan struggle with the Chinese. When asked what they would call a state of affairs in which their side won, he answered, "We do have words for that. We call that very excellent best peace."
Read MoreIn the Aristotelian tradition of perception, inaugurated in De Anima , "sense is that which is receptive to the form of sensible objects without the matter, just as the wax receives the impression of the signet ring without the iron or the gold."
Read MoreHere is where I can write in the first person. So this discursive space, at least, can be thought of as personal, as a place of private defintion, grudgingly aware as I may be that my private sphere is socially formed.
Although Phenomenology holds little intellectual appeal these days (its point of view seems naive, its universalizing subjectivity too suspect) I still feel that there should be a place for reporting and sifting through one's own experience. (getting their feel?)
Conrad Fiedler's aesthetic of "visibility" is based on Kant's distinctions between two different modes by which we come to terms with reality: perceptual and conceptual cognition. Whereas the former is based mainly on visual experience, (even here the visual is given priority over the sensual -- see optic / haptic ) For Kant, conceptual cognition is arrived at through a process of abstraction, the conceptual ordering of perceptual data. Both are autonomous but at the same time equal processes.
Read MoreIn his study of the relation between the photographic frame and narrative in film, Steven Heath sees filmic narrative as the fulfilment of the Renaissance impetus for events to have their proper place. He quotes Rosalind Krauss' comments on perspective as "the visual correlate of causality that one thing follows the next in space according to rule...perspective space carried with it the meaning of narrative: a succession of events leading up to and away from this moment; and within that temporal succession--given as spatial analogue--was secreted the "meaning" of both that space and those events". (in "A View of Modernism", Artforum, Sept 1972.) cf. Alois Hildebrand, "The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts" with its stress on the coherence of spatial recession. (see vision)
Read MoreHerm at Getty MuseumIn classical antiquity, the phallus is the figurative representation of the male organ. It is the figure of hierarchy rather than reciprocity. For the classical Athenians, sex was not a private quest for mutual pleasure. It was rather a declaration of one's public status. Defined as the penetration of one body by the body (specifically by the phallos) of another, sex was conceived as an action performed by one person upon another. The elite corps of adult male citizens held to an aggressively phallic norm of sexual conduct, which lead to an ethic of sexual domination in their relations with males and females alike. (David M. Halperin, in Before Sexuality.) According to Michel Foucault, "The Greeks did not see love for one's own sex and love for the other sex as opposites, as two exclusive choices, two radically different types of behavior...Rather, they saw two ways of enjoying one's pleasure...They believed that the same desire attached to anything that was desirable -- boy or girl." (The Use of Pleasure, pp. 187 ff.) It is the persistence of this phallic model in psychoanalysis that feminists have come to resist (see below). It was the contribution of Christianity's radical ascetics to "strip the body of its ancient, civic associations...by means of an increased emphasis on its intrinsic sexuality...joined together in a somber democracy of sexual shame", and to "see the female body as the condensed essence of all human bondage and all human vulnerability. " (Peter Brown, "Bodies and Minds ," in Before Sexuality.)
Read MoreThe eminent Philadelphia physician Silas Weir Mitchell first coined the phrase "phantom limb" after the Civil War. In those preantibiotic days, gangrene was a common result of injuries, and surgeons sawed infected limbs off thousands of wounded soldiers. After amputation of movable, functional extremities, the phantom limb seems to be experienced in close to 100 per cent of cases. Oliver Sachs describes them as "fossil images" but explains them as the persistence of pathological excitation to the peripheral nerves, especially if there is formation of a neuroma in the stump. (see A Leg to Stand On, p.194,n.) (V. S. Ramachandran has convincingly shown that the locus of the phantom limb is in the brain, not near the hand or leg.
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