Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 202.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
www.princeton.edu/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2003 09:33:38 +0100
From: lachance@origin.chass.utoronto.ca
Subject: re 17.179 nesting and the symposium
Willard
The recent discussion of the Symposium and the levels of narrative nesting
has if I recollect correctly turned around the question of truth value and
irony. There is an interesting set of sexual politics involved in a
hermenutical move that would place a [fictional?] female figure at the
kernel point of a series of nested narratives focalized through masculine
perspectives. One could be tempted in an move imitative of a 1980s
feminist discourse to query the penetrative focus of "nesting" and wonder
about the possibilities of imaging such texts as accretions. Or
agglutinative alternatives. In picking up the fine distinction introduced
by Wendell Piez, one could think in proleptic terms and imagine such texts
are open at both ends: a future author could have Diotima tell a story and
another or the same author could take up the story of Plato writing The
Symposium.
Markup may be about thinking about hooks: the places where the products of
interpretation may be attached to a textual representation. At least that
is where I think reflection is tending to go (witness the recent [text,
group] | [body, div] thread on the TEI discussion list). I am also aware
of some other venues where the discussion has been taken up. For example,
Vika Zafrin in a July Wordsend entry has recorded an interesting set of
notes on Marie-Laure Ryan's May plenary talk at the ACH/ALLC meeting (See
http://www.wordsend.org.log/archives/2003_07.html ). Particularly
suggestive is the vocabulary of deep versus sprawling markup which with a
tilt of the head look like different takes on granularity.
This question regarding the place of sprawl and depth derives its
particular suggestiveness when it is coupled with the report of Ryan's key
term: stack. To understand narrative in terms of stacks of course betokens
a computer term. A quick trip to the Maclopedia refreshes my memory and
indeed like narratives stacks are dynamic data spaces.
The stack metaphor and the computing model helps refigure the geometry of
the loop (infinite nesting) in terms of variation on Turings Halting
Problem. The halting problem is an example of the application of recursive
function theory to problems of computability. In its classic form the
problem is unsolvable. It is impossible to determine with a finite
procedure if for an aribitray input a machine will halt. The problem may
help encoders redescribe certain inputs. For example the infinitely
nesting loop.... a woman is telling a story of a woman telling a story...
may not be a "loop" but a long long long long strand with insufficiant
differentiation to provide a shift in depth and trigger a halt (pause). A
variation on the halting problem can then be expressed: will the machine
come to a stop if fed another input? Vika Zafrin's juxtaposition of sprawl
and depth is just the ticket. To produce depth, initiate sprawl.
a {insert: adjective} woman is telling {insert: adverb} a story of a woman
telling a story...
{tempo: slow} a woman {insert: coma} is telling {tempo: more rapid} a
story of a woman telling a story...
Encoding, however descriptive it may be, is indeed a prescripting
activity. It is also a comparative exercise. It relies on two inputs:
first reading and subsequent reading. And as both Wendell and Vika in
their contributions to the nesting thread attest processing, and in
particular rendition, are not far from the encoders mindset. It is a
variation on the old old task of parsing in to order to appropriately
reading aloud. See M.B. Parkes _Pause and Effect: Punctuation in the West_
(1993).
Markup in a sense invites the machine/human to treat an instance as a
representation of a model. A stream is marked. A before and after emerge.
Another mark is made. A between emerges. Now a hierarchy can be
established: before, between, after (or some other ordering of the
triplet).
There is also a fourth space -- the not between -- which may or may not
be discontinuous depending upon the relation between before and after.
Nesting, it appears would depend upon a relation of continuity of the
before and after space. Metalepsis does not necessarily require such
continuity.
Genette's use of the term "metalepsis" signals a phenomenon that Gerald
Prince characterizes as an intrusion: the intrusion of a being from one
diegesis into another diegesis. I've played with the directionality of
Prince's description. His syntagm moves from the "intrusion into one
diegesis" to the provenance "from another diegesis". Let me quote him:
"metalepsis. the intrusion into one DIEGESIS (diegese) of a being from
another diegesis; the mingling of two distinct DIEGETIC LEVELS." Instead
of metalepsis being an exception that needs to be explained by a tale of a
collapse of levels or the transgressive passage of a being from one space
to another, could not the problem be rephrased as the emergence of local
ontologies? How does difference arise out of the pre-mingled?
Enter the heap. Maclopedia: "If your application makes unusual demands on
the stack, the stack can grow down in memory to collide with the heap.
This can cause disaster as the stack frames stomp all over your
application's heap."
Return to the Symposium.
Just how does Aristophanes's story of the origin of three sexes affect the
interpretation of Socrates's story? Or Aristophanes's hiccough? Or even
the intervention of Phaedrus asking Agathon not to answer the questions of
Socrates (their talk threatens to derail the turn-taking speaches)? And
what of the moment where Aristophanes is silenced by the arrival of
Alcibiades? Is the waking of Aristodemus necessary to inscribe a witness
to Socrates outlasting Aristophanes and Agathon in the drinking bout as he
gets them to agree to that the genius of tragedy and comedy is the same?
A hiccough, a band of revellers, a spoiled order, great quantities of
wine, a collapse of distinctions, a bath.
Plato is silent on the reaction of the interlocutor who asked Apollodorus
to recount Socrates's speech at the banquet. But there is a magnificent
LIFO (last in first out) form to the entrances and exits of characters in
the dialogue -- exactly how a stack operates. But Diotima is a creature of
the heap. She is a sort of memory manager relocating the beautiful blocks
each in their own way. From the heap, Diotima can look past the stack to
the globals and draw upon the generative power of the loop that endless
strand of tape to halt and continue at will. Diotima's beauty is sublime.
Infinity crashes the machine and calls upon the human to add the
granularity to make the eternal manageable.
-- Francois
Lachance, Scholar-at-large http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance
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