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102 KiB
102 KiB
Patterns (part 2)¶
Searching for patterns¶
For this Notebook, we will use snippets from Language and Software Studies: https://monoskop.org/images/f/f9/Cramer_Florian_Anti-Media_Ephemera_on_Speculative_Arts_2013.pdf#142, a text by Florian Cramer written in 2005.
Published in the book Anti Media (2013): https://monoskop.org/log/?p=20259
In [14]:
lines = [ 'Software and language are intrinsically related, since software may process language, and is constructed in language.', 'Yet language means different things in the context of computing: formal languages in which algorithms are expressed and software is implemented, and in so-called “natural” spoken languages.', 'There are at least two layers of formal language in software: programming language in which the software is written, and the language implemented within the software as its symbolic controls.', 'In the case of compilers, shells, and macro languages, for example, these layers can overlap.', '“Natural” language is what can be processed as data by software; since this processing is formal, however, it is restricted to syntactical operations.' ]
In [15]:
for line in lines: if 'software' in line: print('-----') print(line)
----- Software and language are intrinsically related, since software may process language, and is constructed in language. ----- Yet language means different things in the context of computing: formal languages in which algorithms are expressed and software is implemented, and in so-called “natural” spoken languages. ----- There are at least two layers of formal language in software: programming language in which the software is written, and the language implemented within the software as its symbolic controls. ----- “Natural” language is what can be processed as data by software; since this processing is formal, however, it is restricted to syntactical operations.
In [ ]:
In [16]:
lines = [ 'Software and language are intrinsically related.', 'Yet language means different things in the context of computing.', 'There are at least two layers of formal language in software.', 'These layers can overlap.', '“Natural” language is what can be processed as data by software..' ]
In [17]:
for line in lines: if 'software' in line: print('-----') print(line)
----- There are at least two layers of formal language in software. ----- “Natural” language is what can be processed as data by software..
In [ ]:
In [20]:
# Software != software for line in lines: if 'software' in line.lower(): print('-----') print(line)
----- Software and language are intrinsically related. ----- There are at least two layers of formal language in software. ----- “Natural” language is what can be processed as data by software..
In [ ]:
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Software != software¶
In [27]:
a = 'software' b = 'Software' if a == b: print('They are the same!') else: print('Nope, not the same...')
Nope, not the same...
In [28]:
a.upper()
Out[28]:
'SOFTWARE'
In [70]:
b.lower()
Out[70]:
'software'
In [29]:
a.capitalize()
Out[29]:
'Software'
In [31]:
lines[0].title()
Out[31]:
'Software And Language Are Intrinsically Related.'
In [33]:
b.swapcase()
Out[33]:
'sOFTWARE'
In [ ]:
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From string to lines: split()¶
In [119]:
txt = 'Software and language are intrinsically related, since software may process language, and is constructed in language. Yet language means different things in the context of computing: formal languages in which algorithms are expressed and software is implemented, and in so-called “natural” spoken languages. There are at least two layers of formal language in software: programming language in which the software is written, and the language implemented within the software as its symbolic controls. In the case of compilers, shells, and macro languages, for example, these layers can overlap. “Natural” language is what can be processed as data by software; since this processing is formal, however, it is restricted to syntactical operations.' print(txt)
Software and language are intrinsically related, since software may process language, and is constructed in language. Yet language means different things in the context of computing: formal languages in which algorithms are expressed and software is implemented, and in so-called “natural” spoken languages. There are at least two layers of formal language in software: programming language in which the software is written, and the language implemented within the software as its symbolic controls. In the case of compilers, shells, and macro languages, for example, these layers can overlap. “Natural” language is what can be processed as data by software; since this processing is formal, however, it is restricted to syntactical operations.
In [126]:
lines = txt.split('. ') for line in lines: print('---') print(line)
--- Software and language are intrinsically related, since software may process language, and is constructed in language --- Yet language means different things in the context of computing: formal languages in which algorithms are expressed and software is implemented, and in so-called “natural” spoken languages --- There are at least two layers of formal language in software: programming language in which the software is written, and the language implemented within the software as its symbolic controls --- In the case of compilers, shells, and macro languages, for example, these layers can overlap --- “Natural” language is what can be processed as data by software; since this processing is formal, however, it is restricted to syntactical operations.
In [ ]:
From lines to string: ' '.join()¶
In [ ]:
lines = [ 'Software and language are intrinsically related.', 'Yet language means different things in the context of computing.', 'There are at least two layers of formal language in software.', 'These layers can overlap.', '“Natural” language is what can be processed as data by software..' ]
In [130]:
txt = ' ----- '.join(lines) print(txt)
Software and language are intrinsically related, since software may process language, and is constructed in language ----- Yet language means different things in the context of computing: formal languages in which algorithms are expressed and software is implemented, and in so-called “natural” spoken languages ----- There are at least two layers of formal language in software: programming language in which the software is written, and the language implemented within the software as its symbolic controls ----- In the case of compilers, shells, and macro languages, for example, these layers can overlap ----- “Natural” language is what can be processed as data by software; since this processing is formal, however, it is restricted to syntactical operations.
In [ ]:
In [ ]:
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In [ ]:
From string to words: split(), strip()¶
In [55]:
lines = [ 'Software and language are intrinsically related, since software may process language, and is constructed in language.', 'Yet language means different things in the context of computing: formal languages in which algorithms are expressed and software is implemented, and in so-called “natural” spoken languages.', 'There are at least two layers of formal language in software: programming language in which the software is written, and the language implemented within the software as its symbolic controls.', 'In the case of compilers, shells, and macro languages, for example, these layers can overlap.', '“Natural” language is what can be processed as data by software; since this processing is formal, however, it is restricted to syntactical operations.' ] storage = [] for line in lines: words = line.split() for word in words: #word = word.strip('.,:;') print(word) storage.append(word)
Software and language are intrinsically related, since software may process language, and is constructed in language. Yet language means different things in the context of computing: formal languages in which algorithms are expressed and software is implemented, and in so-called “natural” spoken languages. There are at least two layers of formal language in software: programming language in which the software is written, and the language implemented within the software as its symbolic controls. In the case of compilers, shells, and macro languages, for example, these layers can overlap. “Natural” language is what can be processed as data by software; since this processing is formal, however, it is restricted to syntactical operations.
In [69]:
# Bag of words print(storage)
['Software', 'and', 'language', 'are', 'intrinsically', 'related,', 'since', 'software', 'may', 'process', 'language,', 'and', 'is', 'constructed', 'in', 'language.', 'Yet', 'language', 'means', 'different', 'things', 'in', 'the', 'context', 'of', 'computing:', 'formal', 'languages', 'in', 'which', 'algorithms', 'are', 'expressed', 'and', 'software', 'is', 'implemented,', 'and', 'in', 'so-called', '“natural”', 'spoken', 'languages.', 'There', 'are', 'at', 'least', 'two', 'layers', 'of', 'formal', 'language', 'in', 'software:', 'programming', 'language', 'in', 'which', 'the', 'software', 'is', 'written,', 'and', 'the', 'language', 'implemented', 'within', 'the', 'software', 'as', 'its', 'symbolic', 'controls.', 'In', 'the', 'case', 'of', 'compilers,', 'shells,', 'and', 'macro', 'languages,', 'for', 'example,', 'these', 'layers', 'can', 'overlap.', '“Natural”', 'language', 'is', 'what', 'can', 'be', 'processed', 'as', 'data', 'by', 'software;', 'since', 'this', 'processing', 'is', 'formal,', 'however,', 'it', 'is', 'restricted', 'to', 'syntactical', 'operations.']
In [57]:
storage.count('language')
Out[57]:
6
In [59]:
for word in storage: if 'language' in word: print(word)
language language, language. language languages languages. language language language languages, language
In [64]:
for word in storage: if word.endswith('ing'): print(word)
programming processing
In [67]:
for word in storage: if len(word) < 3: print(word)
is in in of in is in at of in in is as In of is be as by is it is to
In [ ]:
In [ ]:
In [66]:
# Extra: print previous or next words in the storage list count = 0 for word in storage: if 'language' in word: type_of_language = storage[count - 1] print(type_of_language, word) count += 1
operations. language Software language, and language. language language are languages intrinsically languages. related, language since language software language may languages, process language
In [ ]:
In [ ]:
In [ ]:
open(), read(), readlines()¶
Let's work with some more lines.
We will use the plain text version of this text for it.
In [72]:
# read() filename = 'txt/language.txt' txt = open(filename, 'r').read() print(txt)
Language Florian Cramer Software and language are intrinsically related, since software may process language, and is constructed in language. Yet language means different things in the context of computing: formal languages in which algorithms are expressed and software is implemented, and in so-called “natural” spoken languages. There are at least two layers of formal language in software: programming language in which the software is written, and the language implemented within the software as its symbolic controls. In the case of compilers, shells, and macro languages, for example, these layers can overlap. “Natural” language is what can be processed as data by software; since this processing is formal, however, it is restricted to syntactical operations. While differentiation of computer programming languages as “artificial languages” from languages like English as “natural languages” is conceptually important and undisputed, it remains problematic in its pure terminology: There is nothing “natural” about spoken language; it is a cultural construct and thus just as “artificial” as any formal machine control language. To call programming languages “machine languages” doesn’t solve the problem either, as it obscures that “machine languages” are human creations. High-level machine-independent programming languages such as Fortran, C, Java, and Basic are not even direct mappings of machine logic. If programming languages are human languages for machine control, they could be called cybernetic languages. But these languages can also be used outside machines—in programming handbooks, for example, in programmer’s dinner table jokes, or as abstract formal languages for expressing logical constructs, such as in Hugh Kenner’s use of the Pascal programming language to explain aspects of the structure of Samuel Beckett’s writing.1 In this sense, computer control languages could be more broadly defined as syntactical languages as opposed to semantic languages. But this terminology is not without its problems either. Common languages like English are both formal and semantic; although their scope extends beyond the formal, anything that can be expressed in a computer control language can also be expressed in common language. It follows that computer control languages are a formal (and as such rather primitive) subset of common human languages. To complicate things even further, computer science has its own understanding of “operational semantics” in programming languages, for example in the construction of a programming language interpreter or compiler. Just as this interpreter doesn’t perform “interpretations” in a hermeneutic sense of semantic text explication, the computer science notion of “semantics” defies linguistic and common sense understanding of the word, since compiler construction is purely syntactical, and programming languages denote nothing but syntactical manipulations of symbols. What might more suitably be called the semantics of computer control languages resides in the symbols with which those operations are denoted in most programming languages: English words like “if,” “then,” “else,” “for,” “while,” “goto,” and “print,” in conjunction with arithmetical and punctuation symbols; in alphabetic software controls, words like “list,” “move,” “copy,” and “paste”; in graphical software controls, such as symbols like the trash can. Ferdinand de Saussure states that the signs of common human language are arbitrary2 because it’s purely a cultural-social convention that assigns phonemes to concepts. Likewise, it’s purely a cultural convention to assign symbols to machine operations. But just as the cultural choice of phonemes in spoken language is restrained by what the human voice can pronounce, the assignment of symbols to machine operations is limited to what can be efficiently processed by the machine and of good use to humans.3 This compromise between operability and usability is obvious in, for example, Unix commands. Originally used on teletype terminals, the operation “copy” was abbreviated to the command “cp,” “move” to “mv,” “list” to “ls,” etc., in order to cut down machine memory use, teletype paper consumption, and human typing effort at the same time. Any computer control language is thus a cultural compromise between the constraints of machine design—which is far from objective, but based on human choices, culture, and thinking style itself 4—and the equally subjective user preferences, involving fuzzy factors like readability, elegance, and usage efficiency. The symbols of computer control languages inevitably do have semantic connotations simply because there exist no symbols with which humans would not associate some meaning. But symbols can’t denote any semantic statements, that is, they do not express meaning in their own terms; humans metaphorically read meaning into them through associations they make. Languages without semantic denotation are not historically new phenomena; mathematical formulas are their oldest example. In comparison to common human languages, the multitude of programming languages is of lesser significance. The criterion of Turing completeness of a programming language, that is, that any computation can be expressed in it, means that every programming language is, formally speaking, just a riff on every other programming language. Nothing can be expressed in a Turingcomplete language such as C that couldn’t also be expressed in another Turingcomplete language such as Lisp (or Fortran, Smalltalk, Java ...) and vice versa. This ultimately proves the importance of human and cultural factors in programming languages: while they are interchangeable in regard to their control of machine functions, their different structures—semantic descriptors, grammar and style in which algorithms can be expressed—lend themselves not only to different problem sets, but also to different styles of thinking. Just as programming languages are a subset of common languages, Turingincomplete computer control languages are a constrained subset of Turingcomplete languages. This prominently includes markup languages (such as HTML), file formats, network protocols, and most user controls (see the entry “Interface”) of computer programs. In most cases, languages of this type are restrained from denoting algorithmic operations for computer security reasons—to prevent virus infection and remote takeover. This shows how the very design of a formal language is a design for machine control. Access to hardware functions is limited not only through the software application, but through the syntax the software application may use for storing and transmitting the information it processes. To name one computer control language a “programming language,” another a “protocol,” and yet another a “file format” is merely a convention, a nomenclature indicating different degrees of syntactic restraint built into the very design of a computer control language. In its most powerful Turing-complete superset, computer control language is language that executes. As with magical and speculative concepts of language, the word automatically performs the operation. Yet this is not to be confused with what linguistics calls a “performative” or “illocutionary” speech act, for example, the words of a judge who pronounces a verdict, a leader giving a command, or a legislator passing a law. The execution of computer control languages is purely formal; it is the manipulation of a machine, not a social performance based on human conventions such as accepting a verdict. Computer languages become performative only through the social impact of the processes they trigger, especially when their outputs aren’t critically checked. Joseph Weizenbaum’s software psychotherapist Eliza, a simple program that syntactically transforms input phrases, is a classical example,5 as is the 1987 New York Stock Exchange crash that involved a chain reaction of “sell” recommendations by day trading software.6 Writing in a computer programming language is phrasing instructions for an utter idiot. The project of Artificial Intelligence is to prove that intelligence is just a matter of a sufficiently massive layering of foolproof recipes—in linguistic terms, that semantics is nothing else but (more elaborate) syntax. As long as A.I. fails to deliver this proof, the difference between common languages and computer control languages continues to exist, and language processing through computers remains restrained to formal string manipulations, a fact that after initial enthusiasm has made many experimental poets since the 1950s abandon their experiments with computer-generated texts.7 The history of computing is rich with confusions of formal with common human languages, and false hopes and promises that formal languages would become more like common human languages. Among the unrealized hopes are artificial intelligence, graphical user interface design with its promise of an “intuitive” or, to use Jef Raskin’s term, “humane interface,”8 and major currents of digital art. Digital installation art typically misperceives its programmed behaviorist black boxes as “interactive,” and some digital artists are caught in the misconception that they can overcome what they see as the Western male binarism of computer languages by reshaping them after romanticized images of indigenous human languages. The digital computer is a symbolic machine that computes syntactical language and processes alphanumerical symbols; it treats all data—including images and sounds—as textual, that is, as chunks of coded symbols. Nelson Goodman’s criteria of writing as “disjunct” and “discrete,” or consisting of separate single entities that differ from other separate single entities, also applies to digital files.9 The very meaning of “digitization” is to structure analog data as numbers and store them as numerical texts composed of discrete parts. All computer software controls are linguistic regardless of their perceivable shape, alphanumerical writing, graphics, sound signals, or whatever else. The Unix command “rm file” is operationally identical to dragging the file into the trashcan on a desktop. Both are just different encodings for the same operation, just as alphabetic language and morse beeps are different encodings for the same characters. As a symbolic handle, this encoding may enable or restrain certain uses of the language. In this respect, the differences between ideographic-pictorial and abstract-symbolic common languages also apply to computer control languages. Pictorial symbols simplify control languages through predefined objects and operations, but make it more difficult to link them through a grammar and thus express custom operations. Just as a pictogram of a house is easier to understand than the letters h-o-u-s-e, the same is true for the trashcan icon in comparison to the “rm” command. But it is difficult to precisely express the operation “If I am home tomorrow at six, I will clean up every second room in the house” through a series of pictograms. Abstract, grammatical alphanumeric languages are more suitable for complex computational instructions.10 The utopia of a universal pictorial computer control language (with icons, windows, and pointer operations) is a reenactment of the rise and eventual fall of universal pictorial language utopias in the Renaissance, from Tommaso Campanella’s “Città del sole” to Comenius’ “Orbis pictus”—although the modern project of expressing only machine operations in pictograms was less ambitious. The converse to utopian language designs occurs when computer control languages get appropriated and used informally in everyday culture. Jonathan Swift tells how scientists on the flying island of Lagado “would, for example, praise the beauty of a woman, or any other animal ... by rhombs, circles, parallelograms, ellipses, and other “geometrical terms.” 11 Likewise, there is programming language poetry which, unlike most algorithmic poetry, writes its program source as the poetical work, or crossbreeds cybernetic with common human languages. These “code poems” or “codeworks” often play with the interference between human agency and programmed processes in computer networks. In computer programming and computer science, “code” is often understood either as a synonym of computer programming language or as a text written in such a language. This modern usage of the term “code” differs from the traditional mathematical and cryptographic notion of code as a set of formal transformation rules that transcribe one group of symbols to another group of symbols, for example, written letters into morse beeps. The translation that occurs when a text in a programming language gets compiled into machine instructions is not an encoding in this sense because the process is not oneto-one reversible. This is why proprietary software companies can keep their source “code” secret. It is likely that the computer cultural understanding of “code” is historically derived from the name of the first high-level computer programming language, “Short Code” from 1950.12 The only programming language that is a code in the original sense is assembly language, the human- readable mnemonic one-to-one representation of processor instructions. Conversely, those instructions can be coded back, or “disassembled,” into assembly language. Software as a whole is not only “code” but a symbolic form involving cultural practices of its employment and appropriation. But since writing in a computer control language is what materially makes up software, critical thinking about computers is not possible without an informed understanding of the structural formalism of its control languages. Artists and activists since the French Oulipo poets and the MIT hackers in the 1960s have shown how their limitations can be embraced as creative challenges. Likewise, it is incumbent upon critics to reflect the sometimes more and sometimes less amusing constraints and game rules computer control languages write into culture. Notes 1. Hugh Kenner, “Beckett Thinking,” in Hugh Kenner, The Mechanic Muse, 83–107. 2. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ”Chapter I: Nature of the Linguistic Sign.” 3. See the section, “Saussurean Signs and Material Matters,” in N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 42–45. 4. For example, Steve Wozniak’s design of the Apple I mainboard was consijdered “a beautiful work of art” in its time according to Steven Levy, Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, 81. 5. Joseph Weizenbaum, “ELIZA—A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine.” 6. Marsha Pascual, “Black Monday, Causes and Effects.” 7. Among them concrete poetry writers, French Oulipo poets, the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and the Austrian poets Ferdinand Schmatz and Franz Josef Czernin. 8. Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems. 9. According to Nelson Goodman’s definition of writing in The Languages of Art, 143. 10. Alan Kay, an inventor of the graphical user interface, conceded in 1990 that “it would not be surprising if the visual system were less able in this area than the mechanism that solve noun phrases for natural language. Although it is not fair to say that ‘iconic languages can’t work’ just because no one has been able to design a good one, it is likely that the above explanation is close to truth.” This status quo hasn’t changed since. Alan Kay, “User Interface: A Personal View,” in, Brenda Laurel ed. The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, Reading: Addison Wesley, 1989, 203. 11. Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver’s Travels, Project Gutenberg Ebook, available at http:// www.gutenberg.org / dirs / extext197 / gltrv10.txt / . 12. See Wolfgang Hagen, “The Style of Source Codes.”
In [2]:
# readlines() filename = 'txt/language.txt' lines = open(filename, 'r').readlines() print(lines)
['Language\n', '\n', 'Florian Cramer \n', '\n', 'Software and language are intrinsically related, since software may process language, and is constructed in language.\n', 'Yet language means different things in the context of computing: formal languages in which algorithms are expressed and software is implemented, and in so-called “natural” spoken languages.\n', 'There are at least two layers of formal language in software: programming language in which the software is written, and the language implemented within the software as its symbolic controls.\n', 'In the case of compilers, shells, and macro languages, for example, these layers can overlap.\n', '“Natural” language is what can be processed as data by software; since this processing is formal, however, it is restricted to syntactical operations.\n', 'While differentiation of computer programming languages as “artificial languages” from languages like English as “natural languages” is conceptually important and undisputed, it remains problematic in its pure terminology: There is nothing “natural” about spoken language; it is a cultural construct and thus just as “artificial” as any formal machine control language.\n', 'To call programming languages “machine languages” doesn’t solve the problem either, as it obscures that “machine languages” are human creations.\n', 'High-level machine-independent programming languages such as Fortran, C, Java, and Basic are not even direct mappings of machine logic.\n', 'If programming languages are human languages for machine control, they could be called cybernetic languages.\n', 'But these languages can also be used outside machines—in programming handbooks, for example, in programmer’s dinner table jokes, or as abstract formal languages for expressing logical constructs, such as in Hugh Kenner’s use of the Pascal programming language to explain aspects of the structure of Samuel Beckett’s writing.1 In this sense, computer control languages could be more broadly defined as syntactical languages as opposed to semantic languages.\n', 'But this terminology is not without its problems either.\n', 'Common languages like English are both formal and semantic; although their scope extends beyond the formal, anything that can be expressed in a computer control language can also be expressed in common language.\n', 'It follows that computer control languages are a formal (and as such rather primitive) subset of common human languages.\n', 'To complicate things even further, computer science has its own understanding of “operational semantics” in programming languages, for example in the construction of a programming language interpreter or compiler.\n', 'Just as this interpreter doesn’t perform “interpretations” in a hermeneutic sense of semantic text explication, the computer science notion of “semantics” defies linguistic and common sense understanding of the word, since compiler construction is purely syntactical, and programming languages denote nothing but syntactical manipulations of symbols.\n', 'What might more suitably be called the semantics of computer control languages resides in the symbols with which those operations are denoted in most programming languages: English words like “if,” “then,” “else,” “for,” “while,” “goto,” and “print,” in conjunction with arithmetical and punctuation symbols; in alphabetic software controls, words like “list,” “move,” “copy,” and “paste”; in graphical software controls, such as symbols like the trash can.\n', 'Ferdinand de Saussure states that the signs of common human language are arbitrary2 because it’s purely a cultural-social convention that assigns phonemes to concepts.\n', 'Likewise, it’s purely a cultural convention to assign symbols to machine operations.\n', 'But just as the cultural choice of phonemes in spoken language is restrained by what the human voice can pronounce, the assignment of symbols to machine operations is limited to what can be efficiently processed by the machine and of good use to humans.3 This compromise between operability and usability is obvious in, for example, Unix commands.\n', 'Originally used on teletype terminals, the operation “copy” was abbreviated to the command “cp,” “move” to “mv,” “list” to “ls,” etc., in order to cut down machine memory use, teletype paper consumption, and human typing effort at the same time.\n', 'Any computer control language is thus a cultural compromise between the constraints of machine design—which is far from objective, but based on human choices, culture, and thinking style itself 4—and the equally subjective user preferences, involving fuzzy factors like readability, elegance, and usage efficiency.\n', 'The symbols of computer control languages inevitably do have semantic connotations simply because there exist no symbols with which humans would not associate some meaning.\n', 'But symbols can’t denote any semantic statements, that is, they do not express meaning in their own terms; humans metaphorically read meaning into them through associations they make.\n', 'Languages without semantic denotation are not historically new phenomena; mathematical formulas are their oldest example.\n', 'In comparison to common human languages, the multitude of programming languages is of lesser significance.\n', 'The criterion of Turing completeness of a programming language, that is, that any computation can be expressed in it, means that every programming language is, formally speaking, just a riff on every other programming language.\n', 'Nothing can be expressed in a Turingcomplete language such as C that couldn’t also be expressed in another Turingcomplete language such as Lisp (or Fortran, Smalltalk, Java ...) and vice versa.\n', 'This ultimately proves the importance of human and cultural factors in programming languages: while they are interchangeable in regard to their control of machine functions, their different structures—semantic descriptors, grammar and style in which algorithms can be expressed—lend themselves not only to different problem sets, but also to different styles of thinking.\n', 'Just as programming languages are a subset of common languages, Turingincomplete computer control languages are a constrained subset of Turingcomplete languages.\n', 'This prominently includes markup languages (such as HTML), file formats, network protocols, and most user controls (see the entry “Interface”) of computer programs.\n', 'In most cases, languages of this type are restrained from denoting algorithmic operations for computer security reasons—to prevent virus infection and remote takeover.\n', 'This shows how the very design of a formal language is a design for machine control.\n', 'Access to hardware functions is limited not only through the software application, but through the syntax the software application may use for storing and transmitting the information it processes.\n', 'To name one computer control language a “programming language,” another a “protocol,” and yet another a “file format” is merely a convention, a nomenclature indicating different degrees of syntactic restraint built into the very design of a computer control language.\n', 'In its most powerful Turing-complete superset, computer control language is language that executes.\n', 'As with magical and speculative concepts of language, the word automatically performs the operation.\n', 'Yet this is not to be confused with what linguistics calls a “performative” or “illocutionary” speech act, for example, the words of a judge who pronounces a verdict, a leader giving a command, or a legislator passing a law.\n', 'The execution of computer control languages is purely formal; it is the manipulation of a machine, not a social performance based on human conventions such as accepting a verdict.\n', 'Computer languages become performative only through the social impact of the processes they trigger, especially when their outputs aren’t critically checked.\n', 'Joseph Weizenbaum’s software psychotherapist Eliza, a simple program that syntactically transforms input phrases, is a classical example,5 as is the 1987 New York Stock Exchange crash that involved a chain reaction of “sell” recommendations by day trading software.6 Writing in a computer programming language is phrasing instructions for an utter idiot.\n', 'The project of Artificial Intelligence is to prove that intelligence is just a matter of a sufficiently massive layering of foolproof recipes—in linguistic terms, that semantics is nothing else but (more elaborate) syntax.\n', 'As long as A.I.\n', 'fails to deliver this proof, the difference between common languages and computer control languages continues to exist, and language processing through computers remains restrained to formal string manipulations, a fact that after initial enthusiasm has made many experimental poets since the 1950s abandon their experiments with computer-generated texts.7 The history of computing is rich with confusions of formal with common human languages, and false hopes and promises that formal languages would become more like common human languages.\n', 'Among the unrealized hopes are artificial intelligence, graphical user interface design with its promise of an “intuitive” or, to use Jef Raskin’s term, “humane interface,”8 and major currents of digital art.\n', 'Digital installation art typically misperceives its programmed behaviorist black boxes as “interactive,” and some digital artists are caught in the misconception that they can overcome what they see as the Western male binarism of computer languages by reshaping them after romanticized images of indigenous human languages.\n', 'The digital computer is a symbolic machine that computes syntactical language and processes alphanumerical symbols; it treats all data—including images and sounds—as textual, that is, as chunks of coded symbols.\n', 'Nelson Goodman’s criteria of writing as “disjunct” and “discrete,” or consisting of separate single entities that differ from other separate single entities, also applies to digital files.9 The very meaning of “digitization” is to structure analog data as numbers and store them as numerical texts composed of discrete parts.\n', 'All computer software controls are linguistic regardless of their perceivable shape, alphanumerical writing, graphics, sound signals, or whatever else.\n', 'The Unix command “rm file” is operationally identical to dragging the file into the trashcan on a desktop.\n', 'Both are just different encodings for the same operation, just as alphabetic language and morse beeps are different encodings for the same characters.\n', 'As a symbolic handle, this encoding may enable or restrain certain uses of the language.\n', 'In this respect, the differences between ideographic-pictorial and abstract-symbolic common languages also apply to computer control languages.\n', 'Pictorial symbols simplify control languages through predefined objects and operations, but make it more difficult to link them through a grammar and thus express custom operations.\n', 'Just as a pictogram of a house is easier to understand than the letters h-o-u-s-e, the same is true for the trashcan icon in comparison to the “rm” command.\n', 'But it is difficult to precisely express the operation “If I am home tomorrow at six, I will clean up every second room in the house” through a series of pictograms.\n', 'Abstract, grammatical alphanumeric languages are more suitable for complex computational instructions.10 The utopia of a universal pictorial computer control language (with icons, windows, and pointer operations) is a reenactment of the rise and eventual fall of universal pictorial language utopias in the Renaissance, from Tommaso Campanella’s “Città del sole” to Comenius’ “Orbis pictus”—although the modern project of expressing only machine operations in pictograms was less ambitious.\n', 'The converse to utopian language designs occurs when computer control languages get appropriated and used informally in everyday culture.\n', 'Jonathan Swift tells how scientists on the flying island of Lagado “would, for example, praise the beauty of a woman, or any other animal ... by rhombs, circles, parallelograms, ellipses, and other “geometrical terms.” 11 Likewise, there is programming language poetry which, unlike most algorithmic poetry, writes its program source as the poetical work, or crossbreeds cybernetic with common human languages.\n', 'These “code poems” or “codeworks” often play with the interference between human agency and programmed processes in computer networks.\n', 'In computer programming and computer science, “code” is often understood either as a synonym of computer programming language or as a text written in such a language.\n', 'This modern usage of the term “code” differs from the traditional mathematical and cryptographic notion of code as a set of formal transformation rules that transcribe one group of symbols to another group of symbols, for example, written letters into morse beeps.\n', 'The translation that occurs when a text in a programming language gets compiled into machine instructions is not an encoding in this sense because the process is not oneto-one reversible.\n', 'This is why proprietary software companies can keep their source “code” secret.\n', 'It is likely that the computer cultural understanding of “code” is historically derived from the name of the first high-level computer programming language, “Short Code” from 1950.12 The only programming language that is a code in the original sense is assembly language, the human- readable mnemonic one-to-one representation of processor instructions.\n', 'Conversely, those instructions can be coded back, or “disassembled,” into assembly language.\n', 'Software as a whole is not only “code” but a symbolic form involving cultural practices of its employment and appropriation.\n', 'But since writing in a computer control language is what materially makes up software, critical thinking about computers is not possible without an informed understanding of the structural formalism of its control languages.\n', 'Artists and activists since the French Oulipo poets and the MIT hackers in the 1960s have shown how their limitations can be embraced as creative challenges.\n', 'Likewise, it is incumbent upon critics to reflect the sometimes more and sometimes less amusing constraints and game rules computer control languages write into culture.\n', '\n', 'Notes \n', '\n', '1. Hugh Kenner, “Beckett Thinking,” in Hugh Kenner, The Mechanic Muse, 83–107.\n', '2. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ”Chapter I: Nature of the Linguistic Sign.” \n', '3. See the section, “Saussurean Signs and Material Matters,” in N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 42–45.\n', '4. For example, Steve Wozniak’s design of the Apple I mainboard was consijdered “a beautiful work of art” in its time according to Steven Levy, Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, 81. \n', '5. Joseph Weizenbaum, “ELIZA—A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine.” \n', '6. Marsha Pascual, “Black Monday, Causes and Effects.”\n', '7. Among them concrete poetry writers, French Oulipo poets, the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and the Austrian poets Ferdinand Schmatz and Franz Josef Czernin.\n', '8. Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems.\n', '9. According to Nelson Goodman’s definition of writing in The Languages of Art, 143.\n', '10. Alan Kay, an inventor of the graphical user interface, conceded in 1990 that “it would not be surprising if the visual system were less able in this area than the mechanism that solve noun phrases for natural language. Although it is not fair to say that ‘iconic languages can’t work’ just because no one has been able to design a good one, it is likely that the above explanation is close to truth.” This status quo hasn’t changed since. Alan Kay, “User Interface: A Personal View,” in, Brenda Laurel ed. The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, Reading: Addison Wesley, 1989, 203.\n', '11. Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver’s Travels, Project Gutenberg Ebook, available at http:// www.gutenberg.org / dirs / extext197 / gltrv10.txt / .\n', '12. See Wolfgang Hagen, “The Style of Source Codes.”\n']
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read() & readlines() from an etherpad¶
Let's also use another input source: an etherpad
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# You can read the content of an etherpad, by using the /export/txt function of etherpad # See the end of the url below: from urllib.request import urlopen url = 'https://pad.xpub.nl/p/archivefever/export/txt' response = urlopen(url) #print(response) #txt = response.read() txt = response.read().decode('UTF-8') print(txt)
XPUB 1 Post digital itch SWARM 01 An annotated version of: Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression Author(s): Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz Source: Diacritics, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Summer, 1995), pp. 9-63 GLOSSARY OF TERMS 1 Commencement an act or instance of commencing; beginning. 2 Commandment a command or mandate. 3 Ontological of or relating to ontology, the branch of metaphysics that studies the nature of existence or being as such; metaphysical. 4 Nomology the science of law or laws. 5 Arkhé From ἄρχω (árkhō, “to begin”) + -η (-ē, verbal noun suffix) 1. beginning, origin 2. sovereignty, dominion, authority (in plural: ἀρχαί) 6 Jussive form, mood, case, construction, or word expressing a command. 7 Cleavage the act of cleaving or splitting. 8 Surreptitious obtained, done, made, etc., by stealth; secret or unauthorized; clandestine. 9 Physis From φῠ́ω (phúō, “grow”) + -σῐς (-sis). 1. origin, birth 2. nature, quality, property 3. later, the nature of one's personality: temper, disposition 4. form, shape 5. that which is natural: nature 6. type, kind 7. Nature, as an entity, especially of productive power 8. creature 10 Thesis From τίθημι (títhēmi, “I put, place”) + -σις (-sis) 1. a setting, placement, arrangement 2. deposit 3. adoption (of a child) 4. adoption (in the more general sense of accepting as one's own) 5. (philosophy) position, conclusion, thesis 6. (dancing) putting down the foot 7. (metre) the last half of the foot 8. (rhetoric) affirmation 9. (grammar) stop 11 Tekhné From Proto-Indo-European *tetḱ- (“to create, produce”) 1. craft, skill, trade 2. art 3. cunning, wile 4. Means 12 Nomos From Ancient Greek νόμος (nómos) 1. The body of law, especially that governing human behaviour. 2. A territorial division of ancient Egypt; a nome. 13 Arkheion Neuter of *ἀρχεῖος (arkheîos, “related to office”), from ἀρχή (arkhḗ, “office, government, rule”), from ἄρχω (árkhō, “to rule”) town-hall, residence, or office of chief magistrates 14 Archon ( ancient gr ἄρχων) - Ruler (In ancient Greece, one of the 9 chief magistrates of the city states. [from Greek arkhōn ruler, from arkhein to rule] 15 Substrate 1. an underlying substance or layer; 2.In biology: a substance or surface which an organism grows and lives on and uses as food.; 16 Hermeneutic adjective- concerning interpretation, especially of the Bible or literary texts. noun-a method or theory of interpretation. 17 Domiciliation the act of making a particular place your legal home or place of business 18 Topology From Ancient Greek τόπος (tópos, “place, locality”) + -(o)logy (“study of, a branch of knowledge”) 19 Consignation 1. To give over to the care or custody of another. 2. a. To put in or assign to an unfavorable place, position, or condition: "Their desponding imaginations had long since consigned him to a watery grave" (William Hickling Prescott). b. To set apart, as for a special use or purpose; assign: "South American savannas [that are] now consigned to grazing" (Eric Scigliano). 3. To deliver (merchandise, for example) for custody or sale. 20 Insurmountable Too great to be overcome. 21 Moses as a "historical noval" Refers to the book "Moses and Monotheism" by Sigmund Freud Freud gives a new interputation to the story of Moses and the Hebrew slaves in Eygept. In Freud's retelling of the events, Moses led only his close followers into freedom (during an unstable period in Egyptian history after Akhenaten's death ca.1350 BCE), that they subsequently killed the Egyptian Moses in rebellion, and still later joined with another monotheistic tribe in Midian who worshipped a volcano god called Yahweh. Derrida uses this story as a case of sychoanlising a text. 22 Exergue (fr) 1. inscription, the initial part of a book which usually hosts a motto or a quotation; 2. the motto or the quotation itself; 3. in numismatics, the part of the coin that contains written informations. PAGE 9/10 Let us not begin at the beginning, nor even at the archive. But rather at the word "archive"-and with the archive of so familiar a word. Arkhe we recall, names at once the commencement [1]and the commandment[2]. This name apparently coordinates two principles in one: the principle according to nature or history, there where things commence-physical, historical, or ontological [3] principle-but also the principle according to the law, there where men and gods command, there where authority, social order are exercised, in this place from which order is given-nomological [4] principle. There, we said, and in thisplace. How are we to think of there? And this taking place or this having a place, this taking the place one has of the arkhe [5]? We have there two orders of order: sequential and jussive [6]. From this point on, a series of cleavages[7] will incessantly divide every atom of our lexicon. Already in the arkhe of the commencement, I alluded to the commencement according to nature or according to history, introducing surreptitiously [8]a chain of belated and problematic oppositions between physis[9] and its others, thesis[10], tekhne[11], nomos [12], etc., which are found to be at work in the other principle, the nomological principle of the arkhe, the principle of the commandment. All would be simple if there were one principle or two principles. All would be simple if the physis and each one of its others were one or two. As we have suspected for a long time, it is nothing of the sort, yet we are forever forgetting this. There is always more than one-and more or less than two. In the order of the commencement as well as in the order of the commandment. ἀρχή Arkhe : arxḗ – properly, from the beginning (temporal sense), i.e. "the initial (starting) point"; (figuratively) what comes first and therefore is chief (foremost), i.e. has the priority because ahead of the rest ("preeminent"). * The origin of archive is complex, and the meaning of the word has constantly been evolving since it first arose. * The concept of archive is itself hard to archive. * Chicken or egg? Did the concept of an archive come first or the act of archiving? * Was the object of an archive already an archive before it was archived? * An archive holds both, nomological and ontological aspects: NOMOLOGICAL principle - law-like principle. ONTOLOGICAL aspects - relating to or based upon being or existence. https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.timetoast.com/public/uploads/photos/11887299/zpage102.gif The concept of the archive shelters in itself, of course, this memory of the name arkhe. But it also shelters itself from this memory which it shelters: which comes down to saying also that it forgets it. There is nothing accidental or surprising about this. Contrary to the impression one often has, such a concept is not easy to archive. One has trouble, and for essential reasons, establishing it and interpreting it in the document it delivers to us, here in the word which names it, that is the "archive." In a way, the term indeed refers, as one would correctly believe, to the arkhe in the physical, historical, or ontological sense, which is to say to the originary, the first, the principial, the primitive, in short to the commencement. But even more, and even earlier, "archive" refers to the arkhe in the nomological sense, to the arkhe of the commandment. As is the case for the Latin archivum or archium (a word that is used in the singular, as was the French "archive," formerly employed as a masculine singular: "un archive"), the meaning of "archive," its only meaning, comes to it from the Greek arkheion[13]: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons[14], those who commanded. * Property x knowledge x power = Archive Party!!!! * Concept of the archive contains (and conceals) the origin/predecessor of archive, thus archive's relation to power. * Commencement and commandment - went from being the origin to being the actual action of archiving. * The connection between knowledge and power is established - the action of archive came from a place of privilege. * The action of archiving gives, and comes from, a position of power: An archive cannot exist unless it is in relation to power. * The inforcement of interpretation, sourced from ideology (we are unconscious of it, it is a predjudice we all hold as truth). * There can’t be an archive if there is no power. Must we remember this relation to power? Is this what the writer talks about when he says that the concept shelters itself? * When the traumatic origin of the archive is unraveled, authority is challenged. * An archivist needs to select and categorize and thus it is inescapable for an archive to be subjective/excluding. * The archive thus always holds the power to frame material. * Responsibility and agency of the archive; of the subjects that archive. * Ideology: We are not consicous of it, it is a shared prejudice that we all hold, unaware of its posession. * For the archive to forget its origin (ideology, contextual determinations) is a conveniance for the ones holding the power. https://main-designyoutrust.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/0-29.jpg?iv=110 The Banco di Napoli Historical Archives can be considered the largest archival collection of bank documents in the entire world. There are documents dating back to the middle of the 1500s to the present day. The citizens who thus held and signified political power were considered to [9 ---- 10] possess the right to make or to represent the law. On account of their publicly recognized authority, it is at their home, in that place which is their house (private house, family house, or employee's house), that official documents are filed. The archons are first of all the documents' guardians. They do not only ensure the physical security of what is deposited and of the substrate[15]. They are also accorded the hermeneutic [16]right and competence. They have the power to interpret the archives. Entrusted to such archons, these documents in effect state the law: they recall the law and call on or impose the law. To be guarded thus, in the jurisdiction of this stating the law, they needed at once a guardian and a localization. Even in their guardianship or their hermeneutic tradition, the archives could neither do without substrate nor without residence. ARCHONTIC - Relating to an archon. ARCHON ( ancient gr ἄρχων) - Ruler (In ancient Greece, one of the 9 chief magistrates of the city states. [from Greek arkhōn ruler, from arkhein to rule] * To own the knowledge is to own the power. * In the beginning of the word archive referred to archons who would file and store important documents in their own home. * The archons were entrusted by the general public with storing important documents. They were guardians of the documents. * They were considered to posess the right to make or represent the law: Kind of early politicians? HERMENEUTICS - is the theory and methodology of interpretation especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts. Hermeneutics is more than interpretive principles or methods we resort to when immediate comprehension fails. Rather, hermeneutics is the art of understanding and of making oneself understood. (source: (Wikipedia) * Archon also has a negative, tyran-like connotation. * Discourse producing its knowledge. As the archive. Hermeneutics - interpretation. A thing (concept) does not exist, until we say it does. Discourse meeting reality. * Residence of the archive is its physical location. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/36/Tabularium_3D.jpg/800px-Tabularium_3D.jpg It is thus, in this domiciliation [17], in this house arrest, that archives take place. The dwelling, this place where they dwell permanently, marks this institutional passage from the private to the public, which does not always mean from the secret to the nonsecret. * Transparency * Secret as temporary, non-secret as permanent. The process of becoming public (demystification) is active. * Collection vs. Archive (the word "collection" seems to be without a notion of power, an "archive" implies it has something to do with power) * The beginning of archiving as an institutional practice. * Arcons held political power and power to interpret the documents they were collecting, the documents which also determined the law. * Archives change from a private - as in the homes of certain individuals (archon) - to a public matter. Being made available to the general public? * The public archive vs where it is held (in a private home). How did they get the power to host it? "According to Aristotle's Constitution of the Athenians, the power of the king first devolved to the archons, and these offices were filled from the aristocracy by elections every ten years." * The passage from the domestic to the public = property + the edicts (hermeneutic tradition). * Absence of the process of interpretation (the archon imposes the law as he had interpreted it, but we, as normal folks, have no idea on how he came to the conclusions. * Causality: Cause (the law written) and effect (the law being exercised, a thief being punished) are clear, but the process in between those two is a mystery. * The notion of the process going from private to public got lost because its not disclosed. * It was still a very enclosed and intransparent matter - the internal processes were not disclosed. * The action was not disclosed, only the results. * Archives were made public but this was not not promulgated - not accessible for everyone. * Still a private matter even though made public - as still stored in private places. * private>public>nonsecret (It is what is happening, right here, when a house, the Freuds' last house becomes a museum: the passage from one institution to another.) With such a status, the documents, which are not always discursive writings, are only kept and classified under the title of the archive by virtue of a privileged topology [18]. They inhabit this unusual place, this place of election where law and singularity intersect in privilege. * The Freud's last house is also the place where he did the 'talking cure', a home, a clinic, and an archive. * Reference: Alternative ways of ordering knowledge: Aby Warburg (see also a 'gathering together of signs') on page 10. * "Virtue of a privileged topology " connects the notion of "situated knowledge" that is defined as: "what one knows or experiences reflects one's social, cultural, and historical location." * Singularity of interpretation, as the documents are not "discursive writings", not all of the possible interpretations are possible (ever). * Archived documents as an important basis for other textual work (glue). * Election in the sence of "the chosen ones" - the elite, the ones that have the resources to form or inforce (general) opinions by managing knowledge constructing a version of really that is to be obeyed (nomology). * "...documents, which are not always discursive writings, are only kept and classified under the title of the archive by virtue of a priveleged topology." I compare this to museum archives, where the smallest sketches of a famous artist can be preserved, whereas works of lesser known artists (often artists of color, non-western artists, women artists) are frequently lost, because they aren't considered as worthy as even a small sketch made by Leonardo, for example. https://i0.wp.com/www.world-archaeology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Freud-Freud-Museum-London.-Freuds-study.-Photo-by-K.-Urbaniak-19.jpg?w=700&ssl= http://www.ruthieosterman.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/rsz_img_1547.jpg http://assets.londonist.com/uploads/2015/08/19998659773_a783845b56_b.jpg At the intersection of the topological and the nomological, of the place and the law, of the substrate and the authority, a scene of domiciliation becomes at once visible and invisible. * Here, Derrida is referring to and enforcing the previous passage: "The dwelling, this place where they dwell permanently, marks this institutional passage from the private to the public, which does not always mean from the secret to the nonsecret." * The archive can be compared to the notion of a black box - we see its inputs and outputs, but not the actions within. The mechanisms within are invisible, visible only to the priviledged (the knowledgeable). (See also Flusser). * "Tales from another archive." I stress this point for reasons which will, I hope, appear more clearly later. They all have to do with this topo-nomology, with this archontic dimension of domiciliation, with this archic, in truth patriarchic, function, without which no archive would ever come into play or appear as such. * Toponomology is the intersection between privilege and law. * Archive (today mostly considered as an objective / a neutral instance) arose from a rather authoritarian history/concept. * The burried memory of the archive - the one that can't remember its origins, as that would collide with its underlaying principles (the toponomology). * Archives were, at the time, patriarchal. * The patrirach refers to the material/the book/the law, he is the servant of it, "it's not his fault". lol * Are all archives patrirachal? Is ideology patriarchal? Today? * Yes, a lot of them are still. * Today archives are often still connected to power. * Will they be forever? The ones that take archiving in their own hands are also in a process of reclaiming the power. * There is no neutral system. To shelter itself and sheltered, to conceal itself. This archontic function is not solely topo-nomological. It does not only require that the archive be deposited somewhere, on a stable substrate, and at the disposition of a legitimate hermeneutic authority. The archontic power, which also gathers the functions of unification, of identification, of classification, must be paired with what we will call the power of consignation [19]. By consignation, we do not only mean, in the ordinary sense of the word, the act of assigning residence or of entrusting so as to put into reserve (to consign, to deposit), in a place and on a substrate, but here the act of consigning through gathering together signs. It is not only the traditional consignatio, that is, the written proof, but what all consignatio begins by presupposing. * "To shelter itself and sheltered, to conceal itself." Talking about ideology that requires a collective loss of memory (already introduced on page 9). * "legitimate hermeneutic authority": The one who who holds the power/is in the position (and has the authority) to interpret. * Functions of hermeneutics (nomological principle) are: "the functions of unification, of identification, of classification, ...". * The necessary loss of memory: the notion of forgetting is hard to archivist. * "gathering together signs", position of power. * Decolonizing the archive? * "Professional archivists have the power and authority to construct a dominant narrative on virtually any topic. Unfortunately, the archival world is built on a legacy of colonialism, appropriation, and community disenfranchisement. The power imbalance between archivists and the marginalized communities they often document leads to the dissemination of inaccurate and harmful accounts." Reference: http://unrh.org/decolonizing-the-archive/ * Don't take information for granted - question their context and reason for their selection/dissemination - consider all possible influences. * Are archives necessarily patriarchal? This is how they started, but are they still? It is still connected to power - while maybe everyone can archive, some archives will be considered more “valid” then others, depending on who is the archivist. Consignation aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration. In an archive, there should not be any absolute dissociation, any heterogeneity or secret which could separate (secernere), or partition, in an absolute manner. The archontic principle of the archive is also a principle of consignation, that is, of gathering together. • Taxonomy • Consignation is related to the collection and ordering of signs ("gathering together") but it is also located in a desire to order. [Is this an assumption {presupposition} of what is the case. Does this aid the 'forgetfulness' of the archive's origin?] • Consignation is a trick to make an illusion of unity. • Consignation as the drive (the need) in contrast to chaos (or swarm) of data. • Consignation gives order to things and thereby give birth to illegitimate power. • Data and information are very different concepts, as data is the neutral basis for information. • Systematization: the desire for order, management of complexity. • GOOGLE = LAW [Re: archiving the self: Google - Facebook orders data into information. Reference: Boris Groys: Subjectivity as Medium of the Media, Radical Philosophy: https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/subjectivity-as-medium-of-the-media]. Groys writes: "The Hegelian servant subject builds a state – as a prison for its master, who is reduced to the role of a citizen under the control of law. The contemporary post-deconstructive, capitulated subject builds the Internet – as a prison for the traditional master subject of thinking being reduced to the role of a network user and ‘content provider’. Here, the servant subject gives up its own message and begins to serve the messages of the others – it becomes a server. It becomes Google, Facebook,Wikipedia and innumerable other Internet agencies. By doing so the capitulated, servant subject captures and puts all the ‘content providers’ – all the alleged masters of their messages – into the prison of media networks. Not accidentally, the individual sites on Facebook all look like epitaphs; and the whole network looks like a huge cemetery and, at the same time, like a forum for post-mortal, post-deconstructive conversations." Now, back to Derrida... • The (Old) Greeks loved beauty, perfection... • Desire is the drive that runs the consignation. Things can be interpreted (by psychoanalysis) through the subjective desire of the maker (the archeon, the power-holder). • This is a subversive act. Instead of focusing only on the content of the archive, one interprets the maker, therefore, undermines/questions their authority, through the situated knowledge this kind of an investigation produces. • The one that interprets these documents is the one that is making the rules. So, the act of gathering is an act of power too. So as a user of the archive you should be aware of the process that was behind it. • Consignation is the illusion of uniting. Is it data or information? Consignation helps transit the archive from a source of data to a source of information. Derrida says this is an illusion. • Who gets to articulate the laws? Don’t forget this, Derrida says, it should be criticized. The archive is affiliated with the institution which is never neutral. (Wikipedia is not created for the world where censorship exists. Sources and references are being deleted, writers being chased after, etc.) • "Archive" vs "the one that archives". • Can the internet be considered an archive? • Shouldn't we be aware who own the platforms? • Content must be categorized to be an archive. (Hashtags? Semantic web?) • The difference between a collection and an archive: possessing power. • Noun vs. verb: Archiving on the internet is endemic. We are all archiving! • An archive has a set of procedures, strives for permanence. (But don't we all strive for permanence?) • The human experience is very conditioned. CONSIGN (definitions): ⁃ to hand over or deliver formally or officially; commit (often followed by to). ⁃ to transfer to another's custody or charge; entrust. ⁃ to set apart for or devote to (a special purpose or use): to consign two afternoons a week to the club. ⁃ to banish or set apart in one's mind; relegate. I't goes without saying from now on that wherever one could attempt, and in particular in Freudian psychoanalysis, to rethink the place and the law according to which the archontic becomes instituted, – (wherever one could interrogate or contest, directly or indirectly, this archontic principle, its authority, its titles, and its genealogy, the right that it commands, the legality or the legitimacy that depends on it, wherever secrets and heterogeneity would seem to menace even the possibility of consignation,) – this can only have grave consequences for a theory of the archive, as well as for its institutional implementation. [This paragraph has been repunctuated.] • The connection of archives to power, as well as people in power to select and interpret, poses a big risk for a society and for the concept of archives in general. • Questioning of power articulating (interpreting) the laws. Critique is in place. To take it for granted, the theory of the archive is endangered. • What is the psychology of the archive? Psychoanalysis can be used as a point of reference outside of ourselves; a tool to think with. • Is the perpetually reflexive state of a human being possible? Cognitive philosophy + post-structuralism clash boom boom!!!!! • When you set up an archive, making decisions on what you will and will not archive, you are essentially excluding something. Connection to power, to management of knowledge. Mirroring ideology or its opposition (as an activist archive). • We should ask what is the psychology of the archive. There is a gestalt that is forced upon the archive. A science of the archive must include the theory of this institutionalization, that is to say, at once of the law which begins by inscribing itself there and of the right which authorizes it. This right imposes or supposes a bundle of limits which have a history, a deconstructable history, and to the deconstruction of which psychoanalysis has not been foreign, to say the least. • "A science of the archive must include the theory of this institutionalization" - Against the memory-loss. • "The law which begins by inscribing itself there and of the right which authorizes it." Here, speaking about commandement. • Psychoanalysis is a tool to read 'desire'. You can psychoanalyse archives through the desire of the maker. What's the context of the maker as a person? • Doing that threatens the theory of the archive as it takes away the objectivity. (And the power of subjective interpretation?) • The authoriy of an archive is bound to the absence of its memory. But it is still neccessary to do it. • There are different ways to psychoanalyse it. What is the desire here? Who is this person? What are his motives? Political view? Class? Where is he from? • Psychoanalysis can backfire on the archive. These questions can strip it from it’s power and make it less legitimate. • Maybe the word "archive" is still used with all its history even though modern archives challenge it. • Curating. Museum collections. Archiving art, always from a context, institutionally created memory. • Reference: Exhibition, Wes Anderson, Kunsthistorisches museum Vienna ([https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/nepwqx/wes-anderson-curated-an-exhibition-in-vienna-here-are-some-photos) • Narratives are intuitive, the visitors/observers are challenged to imagine. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FOOTNOTE: 1. Of course, the question of a politics of the archive is our permanent orientation here, even if the time of a lecture does notpermit us to treat this directly and with examples. This question will never be determined as one political question among others. It runs through the whole of the field and in truth determines politics from top to bottom as res publica. There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation. A contrario, the breaches of democracy can be measured by what a recent and in so many ways remarkable work entitles Forbidden Archives (Archives interdites: Les peurs frangaises face a l'histoire contemporaine). Under this title, which we cite as the metonymy of all that is important here, Sonia Combe does not only gather a considerable collection of material, to illuminate and interpret it; she asks numerous essential questions about the writing of history, about the "repression" of the archive [318], about the "'repressed' archive" as "power... of the state over the historian" [321]. Among all of these questions, and in referring the reader to this book, let us isolate here the one that is consonant, in a way, with the low tone of our hypothesis, even if this fundamental note, the patriarchive, never covers all the others. As if in passing, Sonia Combe asks in effect: "I hope to be pardoned for granting some credit to the following observation, but it does not seem to me to be due to pure chance that the corporation of well-known historians of contemporary France is essentially, apart from a few exceptions, masculine.... But I hope to be understood also..." [315]. * Psychoanalysis as a method means, that order can no longer be assured as authority is questioned. * Is the archive a tool of power and hierarchy? * "There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory." - Power can apply either to people that are demystifying the archive, gaining awareness about its course of becoming (contextual and hermeneutic data/conditions) or to the actual archons (of today or of the past), the commanders that institute and enforce power by the control of memory, history, knowledge. * What's the point of having the archive, if it does not function as a tool to gain power? * Authority controls resources. * We can’t detach the archive from politics and the long history behind it. For example, like many things, the history is very masculine and so are the archives therefore for sure excluding some types of information. * Being impartial in the practice of archiving means at times, the archivist must consider documents of different weight on equal grounds. For example, edit wars in Wikipedia. Statements in Wikipedia pages need to be sourced. This creates a bias towards statements that align with the government's views, since content published by dissidents are systematically censored and taken off the internet. The concept of archive is also biased towards written cultures and languages. * Can we have an impartial archive? The thing is you need resources to maintain it so can you get those resources and still be neutral? * Not everything finds its way into the archive and it thereby never is impartial. You cannot have an apolitical / neutral archive. * An archive will always display biases. * Is it possible to archive responsibly, what would be the practice? * Relates to the Pepsi Paloma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Paloma ) scandal. * Reference: patriarchive blog: https://patriarchive.wordpress.com/about/ This deconstruction in progress concerns, as always, the institution of limits declared to be insurmountable [20],' whether they involve family or state [10 ---- 11] ... law, the relations between the secret and the nonsecret, or, and this is not the same thing, between the private and the public, whether they involve property or access rights, publication or reproduction rights, whether they involve classification and putting into order: What comes under theory or under private correspondence, for example? What comes under system? under biography or autobiography? under personal or intellectual anamnesis? In works said to be theoretical, what is worthy of this name and what is not? Should one rely on what Freud says about this to classify his works? Should one for example take him at his word when he presents his Moses as a "historical novel" [21]? In each of these cases, the limits, the borders, and the distinctions have been shaken by an earthquake from which no classificational concept and no implementation of the archive can be sheltered. Order is no longer assured. * "Insurmountable": too great to overcome. * Moses brings laws, the 10 commandments from the mountain. He is a figure of nomology. * "Order is no longer assured." because authority/power is questioned. Nomological principle, its interpretation ceases to be valid. * Forgetting history or power of knowledge? Would people get too empowered, it they would have the knowledge (of history)? * [Moses-Ark-archive-covenent] * Reference: Moses and Monotheism (1939) by Sigmund Freud: In which Freud gives a psychological interpretation of Michelangelo’s representation of Moses (“Der Moses des Michelangelo”) in terms of an exceptional and rational power of self-control over the passions, considering it the image of a hero of spirituality, ready to sacrifice his individual affective life to defend the fate of the people. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f4/%27Moses%27_by_Michelangelo_JBU310.jpg/480px-%27Moses%27_by_Michelangelo_JBU310.jpg I dream now of having the time to submit for your discussion more than one thesis, three at least. This time will never be given to me. Above all, I will never have the right to take your time so as to impose upon you, rapid-fire, these three + n essays. Submitted to the test of your discussion, these theses thus remain, for the time being, hypotheses. Incapable of supporting their demonstration, constrained to posit them along the way in a mode which will appear at times dogmatic, I will recall them in a more critical and formal manner in conclusion. * Introduction on what the author will talk about later in the text. The hypotheses have a common trait. They all concern the impression left, in my opinion, by the Freudian signature on its own archive, on the concept of the archive and of archivization, that is to say also, inversely and as an indirect consequence, on historiography. Not only on historiography in general, not only on the history of the concept of the archive, but perhaps also on the history of the formation of a concept in general. * This paragraph contains words (impression, signature, historiography), which tangent towards the understanding of "writing history" as an active process of inscription. * History does not write itself, it’s written by people - almost exclusively the winners. (Could it be co-written by the users?) * Can every concept be psychoanalized? * "in the history of the formation of a concept in general." every concept can be psychoanalized, understood contextually and historically, in relation to power structures and institutions that shaped the concepts. * Just a thought: How many words do we use daily, without being aware of their real origin, their creators, the contexts that gave birth to them? We are saying for the time being Freudian signature so as not to have to decide yet between Sigmund Freud, the proper name, on the one hand, and, on the other, the invention of psychoanalysis: project of knowledge, of practice and of institution, community, family, domiciliation, consignation, "house" or "museum," in the present state of its archivization. What is in question is situated precisely between the two. * What is the "Freudian signature" in this context? * Sigmund Freud here can be considered as an archon, and the invention of psychoanalysis is here equated with the archive. We do not want to talk about psychoanalysis in either of the ways, we call the process "Freudian signature" in order to avoid either of the binaries. (The holder of the power OR the institutionalization of it.) Middle ground. But it is a kind of a cheat. * Archive as a blackbox. The mechanisms within are invisible, visible only to the privileged. Psychoanalysis as a tool to look at the non-disclosed process of interpretation. * https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Shahriman_Zainal_Abidin/publication/259524711/figure/fig1/AS:339673143627784@1457995796319/Freuds-iceberg-model-of-unconscious-pre-conscious-and-conscious-levels.png Having thus announced my intentions, and promised to collect them so as to conclude in a more organized fashion, I ask your permission to take the time and the liberty to enter upon several lengthy preliminary excursions. * And then, the Archive fever, A Freudian impression by Jacques Derrida continues into unimaginable excurses of the mind ... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EHvaRxyWwAEzO1p?format=jpg&name=900x900
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# To come back to searching for patterns ... you can use the if/else statements to search for annotation symbols in one of the pads you're annotation atm! from urllib.request import urlopen url = 'https://pad.xpub.nl/p/!%E2%80%93Nina_Power/export/txt' response = urlopen(url) lines = response.readlines() for line in lines: line = line.decode('UTF-8') if '😡' in line: print(line)
In the era of emojis[😡😡], we have forgotten about the politics of punctuation. Which mark or sign holds sway[0] over us in the age of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube comments, emails, and text messages? If we take the tweets of Donald Trump as some kind of symptomatic indicator[9], we can see quite well that it is the exclamation mark*** [6] – ! – that dominates. A quick look at his tweets from the last 48 hour period shows that almost all of them end with a single declarative sentence or word followed by a ‘!’: ‘Big trade imbalance!’, ‘No more!’, ‘They’ve gone CRAZY!’, ‘Happy National Anthem Day!’, ‘REST IN PEACE BILLY GRAHAM!’, [1]‘IF YOU DON’T HAVE STEEL, YOU DON’T HAVE A COUNTRY!’, (we shall leave the matter of all caps for another time), ‘$800 Billion Trade Deficit-have no choice!, ‘Jobless claims at a 49 year low!’ and so on … you get the picture. Trump’s exclamation mark is the equivalent of a boss slamming [8] his fist down on the table, an abusive partner shouting at a tentative[3] query[5], an exasperated [2] shock jock[2b] arguing with an imaginary[4] opponent. It is the exclamation mark as the final word, which would not be so frightening if Trump’s final word was not also [1]backed up by nuclear annihilation [7], the US army, the police, court and prison system, vast swathes [11] of the US media and electorate, and multiple people around him too afraid to say ‘no.’ This is the exclamation mark as apocalypse*, not the ‘!’ of surprise, amusement, girlish shyness, humour, or ironic puncture. This is the exclamation** of doom.[10] [How so?]Because it is backed up by [1]. [😡😡] --> state of mind of Trump https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump - at your own risk. 😡 [2] exasperated 😡: intensely irritated and frustrated
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# Try to search for more patterns in a pad!
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