August 3rd, 2006 Fred McVittie
There is a pot,
Performing all the offices of a pot.
And here is myself
With unexeptional adequacy
Looking at the pot.
The pot is my pot
And the self is my self.
My self has eyes and I can see out of myself.
The pot has no eyes and I cannot see out of the pot.
(With apologies to S. Beckett)
Posted in Beckett, Samuel, Object, Seeing, Self | No Comments »
September 12th, 2006 Fred McVittie
Posted in Claxton, Guy, Cognition, Metaphor, Mind, Object, Space, Substance | No Comments »
September 18th, 2006 Fred McVittie
The use of metaphor to describe and conceptualise mind is inevitable because of its inherently abstract nature. As Guy Claxton puts it (referring specifically to the unconscious), ‘you can’t put it up against the wall and photograph it.” This use of metaphor in cognition and in natural language is not only a feature of ‘commonsense’ descriptions of the mind (Barnden), but also structures academic and scientific thought on this subject. As has been noted by Barnden, Pasanek, Lakoff, and others, there are a large number of metaphors for mind and mental processes including, animals, architecture, garden features, war, weather, and writing. (Pasanek); for the purposes of this writing, this list will be collated into three key groups; objects, substances, and spatial metaphors. It can be demonstrated that all of the metaphors listed can be allocated to one or more of these three groups, or derived from combinations of the groups.
Posted in Barnden, J. A., S. O’Nuallain, et al, Claxton, Guy, Lakoff, George, Metaphor, Object, Panasek, Brad, Space, Substance | No Comments »
September 24th, 2006 Fred McVittie
Within the range of metaphors for mind there are a significant number which are sourced from conrete experiences with objects. (As noted elsewhere, the other key metaphor groups are substances and spaces.) Of the object metaphors, one which a lengthy history and considerable contemporary application and significance is the MIND IS A BOOK metaphor. This usage is found in the writings of Thomas Aquinas and, also in the modern theoretical concept of the ‘Narrative Self’. The power of the book metaphor is that it allows for the generation of numerous entailments which organise the complex, and in many ways inconceivable, abstraction that we refer to as mind. These entailments include such elements as narrative, character, author, ending, closure, etc.
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October 8th, 2006 Fred McVittie
The language that we use to articulate different ways of knowing, and to talk about different types of knowledge, varies according to those ways and types. Our way of speaking about ‘emotional’ content is very dissimilar to our way of speaking about ideas we consider to be ‘rational’. One of the key ways in which the difference is revealed is in the use of terms which refer to the various sensory modes through which we access the world. When we talk about things ‘objectively’, trying to discuss topics rationally, (or at least when we want to appear as if that is what we are doing), we use the language of sight and vision. We ask ‘Do you see?’ when we mean ‘Do you think?”. This use of visual metaphor to organise our relationship to ideas treats those ideas as if they were solid objects somehow located outside of ourselves. This objectification of ideas and their putative location in the shared space beyond ourselves not only figuratively distances them, but also locates them in an imaginary shared space of intersubjective knowledge and experience. By locating my idea ‘out there’ in the world through the use of visual metaphor I am trying to give it the status of a physical fact, as solid and undeniable as an elephant.
Posted in Elephant, Knowledge, Language, Object, Objectivity, Seeing | No Comments »
October 17th, 2006 Fred McVittie
We tend to use different forms of speech to articulate different types of knowledge, and an observable regularity in these differences is the sensory mode that is referred to within this articulation. As has been noted, objective knowledge (or facts that we wish to express as if they were objective) tend to expressed using the language of vision; we say ‘I see’ to indicate this kind of interpersonal objective understanding. Knowledge or facts that we wish to express as more personal to us tend to be articulated by referring to other sensory modes, particularly the sense of touch. When we want to describe our experience ’subjectively’, without making any claims to shared experience, we say ‘I feel’, or we refer more generally to our ‘feelings’. If some experience has an emotional impact upon us we may say that we have been ‘touched’. This distinction between an objectification of knowledge using visual metaphors and a ’subjectification’ of knowledge using tactile metaphors suggests that three cognitive strategies are at work in the organisation of experience.
Posted in Conference Abstract, Johnson, Mark, Lakoff, George, Object | No Comments »
June 26th, 2007 Fred McVittie
When we stand at the centre of our world we experience a few objects up close and personal: our loved ones, the walls and furniture our our houses, parts of our body, and these proximal objects, looming near to us, are large and significant, dwarfing those objects which recede into the distance. The hand in front of my face is larger than the tree at the bottom of the garden; the nail on my little finger can easily cover the moon.(As a child we may have played games of proximity and significance with our parents and teachers.Who among us hasn’t held up their thumb and forefinger and, squinting through the gap, said “Your head is this big!”).
What distant objects lose in size however, they make up in number. That book, held close to the face, is all you can see.In a forest you may be able to see more, but the trees are close together and therefore close by, those that you see may be large but they will be countable. On the savannah, or on the beach, as objects recede into the far distance, they rapidly exceed in quantity our ability to count them, and the further away they are the more numerous and indistinct they become, until at the absolute limit of our experience, at the furthest edge of the circle which surrounds us, the edge of the world, the number of objects approaches infinity and simultaneously blends into one.
You are back in your own garden looking at the tree. You move to the tree and put your hand on its bark but you find that its entirety is lost to you and you find you cannot see the tree for the wood. The moon is even more removed from your experiencing of it. You can see the moon, but only one side of it, and that only once every 28 days or so. Close your eyes and it might never have existed at all. (I wonder how a blind species of human might explain the tides?)
Posted in Centre, Object, Seeing | No Comments »
August 20th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Visual objects are distant from us and are located in external space. Felt objects are so close to us as to barely have ‘location’ at all.
Different visual objects (or concepts imagined metaphorically as objects) occupy different spatial locations, and changes in these objects are conceived as changes in location. Different ‘feeling objects’ or simply ‘feelings’ are difficult to dimensionalise spatially and changes in feelings are not conceived as changes in location but as changes in intensity or some other property which is not spatial (colour, temperature, size, luminance etc).
Between feeling and seeing the senses of hearing and olfaction are nested with intermediate orders of spatial extension and specificity. When we hear a sound we can turn in that direction, or point at it with a fair degree of accuracy, but it is likely that there also be a large amount of fuzziness in our pointing. We may know intellectually that sound may be emitted from a point, but our hearing of that sound is more smudged. It is an entity which has blurred boundaries, which does not exist in a single region of space but seems to flow from a region. The main direction of that flowing is toward the listener and the sound fills the space between this loosely defined region over there (and here the listener makes a vague hand-waving gesture indicating the space outside of their body that is particularly full of the sound) and the sound in here (and here the same listener makes a very precise pointing gesture toward the inside of their skull). The sound out there falls away from its source in some event and loses whatever singular identity it ever had (if it ever had any identity at all) forming chords with all the other sounds of the world. With eyes closed I (and you) can hear these chords, and while I can separate them in space I usually don’t. If I separate them at all, and again I usually don’t, I separate them in time, with one chord following another in a neverending sequence of conscious being-in-sound. The spacetime of sound is not the empty, crystal clear space of objectifying vision, but the fullness and vibratory connectedness of a single piano string.
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September 16th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Even though a concept like consciousness has no location or extension in space (as Descartes famously noted) we nevertheless feel an almost irresistable urge to provide it with one. Just as the description of a solid object feels incomplete without a location for that object, and just as part of the ontology of a person’s body is whereabouts that body happens to be standing (hence the ASL convention in online communication), so the description of an abstract entity feels similarly incomplete until we can conceive of a location for it. This tendency to locate abstract entities in space usually happens non-consciously, but the fact that it is taking place is revealed in our language and gesture.
In filling in the location attribute for the particular ‘-ness’ of consciousness we adopt a number of strategies. We might point to the skull of people around us and say, perhaps a little unconvincingly, that it is in those bone boxes: unconvincing because we can never really know and have no sensory evidence that it exists in those places. Alternatively we might point to our own meat head, which feels more intuitively valid since there does seem to be a kind of ‘feeling of being’ at the end of our pointing finger. However, this can feel unsatisying in another way since we cannot help but notice that everyone around is pointing to totally different places, their own heads, and since they are clearly wrong, then maybe I am similarly deluded. If we are spiritually inclined, or if we are familiar with the reflexive monism of Max Velmans for example, we might make vague, hand-waving gestures in the air around us and make noise about consciousness ‘emerging’ in the interplay between subject and object, as if consciousness were a kind of invisible gas leaking from our sense organs and permeating the space around us. The really ambitious amongst us might even throw open their arms to their fullest extent, claiming that consciousness is everywhere and in everything within and without that embrace.
Usually we adopt a mixed strategy for the location of the weird ‘-ness’ of aware being, expanding and contracting it pretty much at will and as circumstances dictate. Sometimes it is contained within as the ‘I’ inside, and sometimes it is shared among family and friends as the royal ‘we’ of our interpersonal kingdom. Sometimes it is all there is. And at this ultimate point of extension, where, as Pascal said, the location of the centre is everywhere and periphery is nowhere, I personally would not be speaking of I personally at all. Here is the ground. Here is being.
Posted in Consciousness, Descartes, Rene, Language, Object, Velmans, Max | No Comments »
September 17th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Or ability to give names to the objects, events, actions, and properties of the world may have had some odd and unpredictable effects on the development of consciousness. It seems likely that, in the historical narrative of language development, the first fully established and culturally shared language elements or words were those for concrete objects and entities: man, tree, mountain. And even is this word/object connection was not primary in the development of the species, it is certainly our first introduction to formal language acquisition as children. Our story books and primers and full of brightly coloured pictures of apples and zebras with the corresponding label firmly attached alongside. This building of language on a foundation consisting of the naming of things has the inevitable effect of forming a very close association between the ontology of words and the ontology of things. Words, and more critically the concepts which those words exemplify, only feel ‘real’ when they have the properties of identifiable objects.
One significant property that is possessed by all objects is that they each have a location in space. Every entity we give the word ‘tree’ to is found at a particular location; ‘There is a tree’ we might say, indicating that location. The attachment of words to things means that when we point to these things we seem also to be pointing to the place where the word and the concept is. We know intellectually (even if we are wrong) that the conceptualisation is taking place in our brain, but it feels like the tree, and the concept of the tree, are over there.
This also applies (although perhaps less so) to actions and attributes: concepts which are realised linguistically not as nouns but as verbs and adjectives. We can easily point to (something) red or (someone) running and the end point of this pointing is a particular location in space. Again, we do not feel that the object and the concept are separate, the action or attribute somehow out there while the concept is ‘in here’. We experience both concept and ‘object’ simultaneously and holistically as existing at that location.
There are some concepts however which do not, and possibly cannot, be easily conceived of as occupying a particular spatial location. Many of the concepts we have words for simply cannot be pointed at (or more accurately, cannot be pointed at easily. I may argue that we often modify our concepts to allow some form of pointing to be possible). Such unlocatables include emotions (which we might try to locate in the body, but are never entirely satisfied when X marks that particular spot), interpersonal, political, and institutional structures such as ‘the law’, ‘art’, and ‘nationality’, and pretty much any word/concept ending in ‘-ness’: happiness, consciousness, etc. Obviously these ideas, whilst they may be attributed to particular classes of entity or behaviour, do not have concrete referents and cannot be pointed at. We might point at a person who seems to exhibiting consciousness, or at a painting on the wall of a gallery, or at a policeman that we know is involved is somehow ‘upholding the law’, or at a nationalist symbol such as a flag, but we cannot point to the thing itself. Moreover, when we point at these things, we do not feel entirely sure that we have identified the place where the concept is really happening. ‘The Law’ is not part of the adjectival property of a policeman in the way that ‘red’ is a property of a pillar box, ‘art’ seems to be somehow larger or more variable than its single instantiation may suggest, and the design of flags may change without that affecting the concept. When we try to point to such concepts we feel as if we are constantly missing, when we point we miss the point one might say.
Regardless of the inherent impossibility of attributing such abstract concepts with a specific location in space, the unconscious tendency we have to attempt such attribution, a tendency built on the foundations of an early association of concepts with concrete objects, means that we nevertheless often make the attempt. A concept without a location is felt as less real than one with such a location. Abstract concepts have no location in space. To make our abstract concepts seem real we give them a location artificially. Intuitively real concepts involve the marriage of the conceptual and the perceptual, and sometimes, in order to keep it real, such marriages are not made in the Heaven of material objects but are arranged on the Earth of abstract ideas.
Posted in Abstract, Language, Object, Space | No Comments »
October 4th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Here is a paradoxical object. We can stand at the centre of this object, such that its centre is our centre, and when looked at from within it has a solid, resilient, immovable core, and an increasing evanescent exterior. From this viewpoint it has something of the quality of a Gas Giant, the core of which is frozen with the dazzling weight of compressed energy. There is no surface to such a planet, but rather its substance becomes more and more rarified as we move away from the core into the reaches of space.
Let us imagine that by an act of imaginative will we can move ourselves away from the centre of this object and take a place at some remove, in the immensity of outer space. Here where we now stand, weightless and vacuous, the substantiality of this object is reversed. When seen from the outside it appears solid, its outermost regions forming a solid carapace around contents which constantly threaten to boil off into the vacuum. From this view point its core is invisible, transcendent, eldritch, the subject of speculation and disbelief. Its outer skin, on the other hand, is comfortingly visible, presenting itself to the touch of the eye like the knee of a lover, or the cheek of one’s own face.
Posted in Art, Boundary, Centre, Object | No Comments »
November 3rd, 2007 Fred McVittie
The traditions of objectivity place the material of that objectivity in a shared interpersonal space in front of each and all possible viewers. The (arte)facts of such objectivity are rendered as knowledge objects in this imaginal conceptual space. There is a fact that both you and I can agree upon, and if put in the right light is self-evident to everyone else also, (the Earth is round, parallel lines never meet, all things must pass). The fact is an objective fact and has the same status as any other object.
The question then becomes, what is an appropriate relationship for me to have with that object? What is your relationship? Is yours the same as mine? A number of options are possible; if we are fresh from reading Martin Buber we might have a choice of striking up a relation of I-it, in which we preserve the object’s inanimate sovereignty, but at the cost of rendering ourselves similarly lifeless and regally removed from the situation. Or we might try to establish an I-Thou relationship in which both the object and ourselves are mutually potentiated by contact.
Alternatively, we may have come to the question after reading Polanyi, and recognise in our apprehension of the object a certain direction, a kind of vectorial aspect to our relationship. We may feel that the object over these in shared conceptual space lies at the end of a line of intentionality that begins at the source of our own self. We may sense the ‘from-to’ nature of this intentionality; here I am and there is the object, and what I know of it is the result of the pouring of perception from here to there, an outpouring which oddly leaves my own body in its wake so that I feel myself not located entirely at the source but eccentrically and ecstatically projected forward toward the object. In the from-to relationship this projection is welcomed and a sense of rapport, compassion, empathy, and fellow-feeling may be invoked. The from-to light does not simply stop at the surface of the object but penetrates, connects, warms, and co-illuminates. It has a place to go to and it feels like home. Or, to stay with Polanyi, our relationship of projected intention may be less ‘from-to’ and more ‘from-at’, in which the object is given no power to receive our transmissions, and while the gaze may originate here, with the self, there is no end to the journey of our perception. The view into the shared space does not resolve onto an object of (comm)union but is interrupted by an object of the imperial empirical state.
Posted in Buber, Martin, Dualism, Object, Objectivity, Perception, Polanyi, Michael | No Comments »
December 30th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Items of knowing are often awarded the metaphorical status of ‘objects’ and have a schematic ontology mapped from the concrete ontology of objects in the real world of embodied experience. One aspect of real world objects which may feature as an entailment within an understanding of knowledge objects is that different objects are made of different ’stuff’. These differences, and the ways these differences in materiality affect the functioning of the object, are metaphorically mapped as structure.
The first of these properties of stuff is the weight that objects seem to have. Weight is experienced as a resistance to being lifted, or alternatively (niavely) as a ‘desire’ or tendency for the object to move downwards. Whilst we know (after Galileo) that all objects of whatever weight all have this tendency in equal amounts, this is not the intuitive impression one has when holding objects of different weights; it is usually felt that the heavier object ‘wants’ to get to the ground first. Whilst this impression is demonstrably wrong, it is still a compelling illusion and feeds into our intuitive understanding of objects. The apparent correspondence between weight and the tendency to move to a low point in the vertical dimension suggests that there will be a similar correspondence in the use of weight and height metaphors. When we look at the use of these metaphors in action we find that this relationship is indeed suggested. As noted elsewhere, high points in the vertical dimension are associated with knowledge, omniscience, enlightenment, ‘raised’ consciousness etc. and these phenomena are usually also associated with condition of lightness in weight. Chesterton is attributed with saying that ‘angels can fly because they take themselves lightly’. Conversely, low points are associated with heaviness, immovability, and the inertia that comes with weight.
The second property of objects that may serve as a structuring entailment of the use of objects as metaphors for knowing is the substance quality of different object; to what extent an object is solid, hard, soft, liquid, or gaseous. These different substantive qualities allow different affordance relationships to be established; hard objects can be grasped, held, built upon, stacked, used as foundations, treated as permanent etc. whereas softer objects are malleable, change their shape with contact, and can be smushed together. Liquid objects can be felt but not held, adopt the shape of the container in which they are placed, and disappear when they are not contained. Gaseous objects, clouds for example, barely exist as ‘objects’ at all, they disappear on close scrutiny, make no impact on the body, are often co-terminous with the space in which they appear, and may move inside the body unseen at every breath. These differences in substance that objects have are available as entailments of the knowledge object metaphor. Like real substances, knowledge might be hard or soft, it may be regarded as foundational and permanent or more socially malleable, it may only appear solid and bounded when placed at a distance (like a cloud) but disappear into evanescence when approached, it may seep into the body and become part of the chemistry of being.
Posted in Knowledge, Metaphor, Object, Substance | No Comments »
April 9th, 2008 Fred McVittie
When David Perkins identifies three different types of knowing; what he refers to as ‘possessive, ‘performative’, and ‘pro-active’, what he is effectively doing is mapping different types of knowledge across an expanse of metaphorical, phenomenal space. His ‘possessive’ knowledge is that which appears to have something of the quality of a object, placed at some distance but clearly within the line of sight. Like other ‘visual’ objects it can be ’seen’ simultaneously by a number of different observers and has something of the permanence, fixity, and unchanging nature of prototypical objects in lived experience. In this schema the ideal object of possessive knowledge may be the empirical fact, established through deduction, built on firm foundations of scientific research, and unwavering in its resistance to the attacks of falsification. It is a noun in the sentences of meaningful discourse.
Performative knowledge does not have this object status but, as the term implies, rather adopts the position of an action, and that position is always changing. Here is knowledge, or perhaps ‘knowing’, which engages as physical action, which has a changing profile over the course of time, and which moves nomadically through space. Performative knowledge functions as a verb, or as many verbs, and its role is to pick, to pack, to grasp, to fold, to tear, to chop, to walk, to talk, to write, to run, and to never set itself into stone and never to stand still. Its space of operation is not out in the open where it can be skewered in the triangulating gaze of multiple I’s, but at the limin between body and world. It lives in the interstices between the muscles of the arm and the bark of the tree, and it is also in the swing of the axe. It is motile, ductile, flowing, flowering, and possibly shimmering but it is never caught motionless between the pages of a book.
Proactive knowledge is closer yet. As Perkins says, it is ultimately dispositional, and has none of the qualities of an object or of an action. This is the knowledge or the knowing which is inseperable from ‘being’ and therefore is the subject of the sentence. Proactive knowledge swings the axe.
Posted in Grasp, Knowledge, Object, Objectivity | No Comments »
April 13th, 2008 Fred McVittie
Given that we routinely assign certain structures of perception and cognition to a category we refer to as ‘objective knowledge’ is may be worthwhile considering what processes are at work in this assignation. As we have already claimed, since the concept of ‘knowledge’, the subject of epistemology, is inherently abstract then according to the theories of embodied cognition, and specifically conceptual metaphor, we can only make sense of it through the application of metaphorical mapping processes. Samuel Beckett once stated that ‘We can only talk about nothing as if it were something, in the same way we can only talk about God as if he was a man’. He might have added that we can only talk, or indeed think, about the abstract as if it was concrete. What kind of concrete experience we tend to use to provide analogical structure to the concept of knowledge is revealing. The various metaphors for knowledge used within Knowledge Management have shown that the dominant images are based upon the mapping that suggests that KNOWLEDGE IS STUFF. This stuff includes assets, resources, capital, substances and constructed entities (machines, ships, etc.), but by far the most common subdivision of the overall metaphor is that KNOWLEDGE IS OBJECTS. (Andriessen, 2008).
If we concede that the concept of ‘knowledge’ refers to a category of experience and cognition (and possibly imagination) that is distinguishable from categories such as ‘belief’, ‘phantasy’, ‘hallucination’, etc., which intuition seems to demand that it does, then it is worth considering what kind of a category this might be, and what metaphorical ‘objects’ are confined within the limits of that category or are excluded from it.
Knowledge Management Research & Practice (2008) 6, 5–12. doi:10.1057/palgrave.kmrp.8500169
Stuff or love? How metaphors direct our efforts to manage knowledge in organisations
Daniel G Andriessen
Posted in Knowledge, Object, Objectivity, Substance | 3 Comments »
April 29th, 2008 Fred McVittie
There is a book on the table in front of me right now (The Craft of Thought by Mary Carruthers) and it seems to be a solid object. I know it is mostly composed of space, but that isn’t really important since it doesn’t change my experience of it. The knowledge that the book ‘contains’ is something different though.
There must have been a time when knowledge didn’t live inside books, but inside the fragile containers of human bodies. If you wanted to know something you would travel to the point in space where that human body was located and if you were lucky they would convey the knowledge that they contained to you somehow. It would be important, needless to say, to travel to that point in space during the short window of time that the person was alive, awake, conscious, and compos mentis.
Sometime after that time someone must have got the idea of recording the knowledge that they had in some way; maybe by carving it on a stone or writing in on a scroll of some sort. If you wanted access to the knowledge then you would still have to travel to the point in space where the scroll was but the window of time would be potentially larger. In some ways though, the scroll would have to be given the same special treatment as a human possessor of knowledge; it would have to be protected from harm, safeguarded against fire and the ravages of time etc. It would be a pretty special kind of object.
Maybe then someone got the idea of making copies of the scroll so that the knowledge could exist in more than one place at the same time. That would be quite a leap forward. The same knowledge would now exist in more than one point in space, and the destruction of one of these instantiations would not mean the total loss of knowledge from the world.
Print publication would extend this process even further, such that every time knowledge is put into book form it would, to all intents and purposes, become immortal. All publications (with ISBN numbers) are archived in the British Library, with the security which that implies, as well as appearing in book shops and the shelves of readers. The immortality of the knowledge is ensured partly by the treatment accorded to individual copies of the book but more significantly by its distribution. When knowledge is repeated across thousands of instantiations across the world it is extremely difficult to destroy.
It has been said (although I don’t know by whom, or whether it is true), that if you are in a city you are probably no further than eight feet away from a rat at all times. In a book culture it is likely that you are similarly no further than, say, thirty feet away from some books. Not all books obviously, but I would be surprised if there was not a bible within that kind of radius most of the time, and possibly a dictionary or other reference book of some kind. Some knowledge, even though it appears in books, seems to exist almost as a field, distributed across populated space, with the individual books that instantiate it being simply temporary devices which allow it to appear. When one book, or a thousand books, fall apart or are destroyed, the knowledge is still instantly accessible through the medium of all the other books which contain it.
Thanks to Project Gutenberg and similar endeavours it is now possible to access almost the entire history of the world’s writing through screens. Knowledge that lived in books, and across the field of books, now exists across the field of space and ubiquity is almost total. As I sit here typing I am within inches of all the knowledge that has been inscribed and digitised and can access it instantly. Truly ubiquitous, this knowledge is everywhere available. In fact, I am not even inches away from that knowledge; the wireless network that links this laptop to the access point on the wall is radiating that knowledge through space and through me as I type these words. When I summon up a page of the Gutenberg Bible, that information is in the room and is inside my body and the walls of the room and in my coffee cup and everywhere within the 20feet radius covered by my local network.
Changes in technology, social organisation, and epistemology itself mean that knowledge has changed its spots. Whereas once it was uniquely located at a particularly point in space for a very limited period of time, now it is everywhere and forever. From being identifiable as a distinct and temporal object is has transformed into a distributed and atemporal field. Nothing is lost, nothing is forgotten, nothing is burnt, silenced, made mute by dementia or death. The evolution of publication is almost complete and the pages of the book spread holographically across the space between atoms and stars. This blog is more permanent and more ubiquitous than any work of print.
This does not mean that the book itself ceases to be important as an idea; it still carries the symbolic significance it inherited from its history in the individual scroll, and ultimately the individual body of fragile human beings. This symbolic significance is evidenced by the continued popularity of book-burning; no knowledge has ever been lost by the burning of a book, but since as an action it represents the destruction of a speaking position and a human speaker, the symbolic value of the action is maintained.
Posted in Blog, Carruthers, Mary, History, Knowledge, Object, Space, Time, Writing | No Comments »