From: lichter@maui.cs.ucla.edu (Michael I. Lichter)
Subject: Re:  Technology was "linear thought"
Organization: UCLA, Computer Science Department
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 92 21:49:48 GMT


	I wrote earlier:
	"associational leaps far beyond the capabilities of 
	present-day technology"

	Sheila (sheilah@wam.umd.edu aka Danny-Boy and Lily O'Toole) 
	(edited somewhat by me) writes:
	But this brings up a fasignating concept of technology that I
	usually ignore, because when tech comes up I fixate on
	mechanical things.

	A test can be a technological advancment.

	Grammer is a technology.

	Although, I disagree that association is a new grammer or new
	technology, because it is nothing new.  Although, it could be a
	new idea, _Occasionaly_ to use association in places you don't
	expect. But this _technique_ is not knew.

	I guess a new technique would be a new grammer would be a new
	technology.

I'm leaving on a short vacation real soon and don't have time to do this
in much detail, but ...

I got here because I was thinking about some of the juxtapositions that
Sheila makes in her writing.  I see myself joining together meanings
which, however distant in absolute terms, are relatively close (in
conventional space) on the scale of the whole linguistic universe.
Sheila seems, sometimes, to come at hers via a trip through linguistic
hyperspace, which is beyond my capability.  Perhaps if I had the right
tools, if I knew the paths (or paths similar to those) that she travels
I could make those associations.  So I was thinking roughly along these
lines when talking about "present technology".  You *can* see ways of
constructing meaning as (metaphorical) technologies.

Daniel Bell, in _The Coming of Post-Industrial Society_ (1976), talks
extensively about different sorts of technologies.  To start, he says
that "Technology, as Harvey Brooks defines it, 'is the use of
scientific knowledge to specify ways of doing things in a
*reproducible* manner.' In this sense, the organization of a hospital
or an international trade system is a *social* technology, as the
automobile or a numerically controlled tool is a *machine* technology.
An *intellectual* technology is the substitution of algorithms
(problem-solving rules) for intuitive judgements... [which] are
possible only with a tool of intellectual *technlogy*, the computer"
(28).  Bell argues that intellectual technologies are indispensible for
the management of complexity, the supreme problem of post-industrial
society, and that the locus of social power will inevitably shift from
capital to the universities, the birthplaces of these new technologies
(don't count on it!).

On the topic of power...  Michel Foucault (_Discipline and Punish_,
_The History of Sexuality_) talks about "technologies of power", which
are more structures in social discourse than physical objects.  I'd
like to talk more about Foucault, but as Mark Poster says (_Foucault,
Marxism & History: Mode of Production versus Mode of Information_),
"[an] objection often raised to Foucault's writing is that it is
difficult, mannered, and finally incomprehensible."  I am somewhat
fuzzy on this and may mix in a little Derrida, etc., but what I think
is relevant here is the idea that the ways we think about ourselves,
the ways we do things, the ways we relate to others are embedded in
"discourses" which are stories and sets of "truths" about these
things.  Discourses have real power over us, and in fact constitute us
as what we are.  Foucault particularly talks about the discourse of
sexuality and how it has changed over time, and what those changes have
meant as changes in power relations and domination.

OK.  If there is a discourse on poetry or poetics (and the latter, I'm
told, refers to fiction at least as much as to poetry) then this
discourse defines our poetic technologies.  We can think of new poetic
technologies, such as "free verse" and the novel, which are relatively
recent inventions (at least in geological time ;-)).  The visual arts
seem to give rise to new technologies more quickly than those dealing
directly with language, but the method for their increasing fusion
through the development of new media, new tools, may end that.  When the
machine technology of bitmapped screens and embedded sound and graphics
becomes the mode of transport for RAP, etc., we will be forced to develop
new poetic technologies (or, at least, we'd be stupid not to :-)).

I'm not saying that all new styles are new technologies.  Cyberpunk,
which on its Gibson-ite fringe is a hyped-up retooling of the hardboiled
detective novels of the 1930s and 1940s and the movies that went with
them, is not a new technology (which is not to put it down).  I'd say
rather that Marek and Marie with their rampant punctuation and all are
trying to develop a new poetic technology (though that may require
subduing the ghost of e.e.).

This is a rambling mess, isn't it :-(.  

To get back to Sheila, yes I think that grammar is (or constitutes) a
technology (or a set of technologies).  I also think that *methods* of
association are technologies.  We know how to make linear associations
between words, we each have our internal Roget's.  We don't have the
"technology" which will allow us to (repeatably or not - though
repitition is a major criterion for Bell) draw together wildly diverse
meanings and fuse them in a way that "works".

Michael


P.S. Isn't it interesting how meta-poetical discussions in RAP so often
wind up in the language of physics or in other physical metaphors, and
rarely in the language of language or language-based philosophy?

[I'll keep the crosspostings in for now but any future posters 
should beware]