Why Not |
|
Sooner or later, a recursive response would lead me to model reading and writing in terms of symmetry in the context of translation. Simultaneous interpretation could later model speaking and attending to the spoken. Symmetry somehow held the key to the connectivity of the sensory modalities and was perhaps a means of refiguring the putative rivalry between the visual and the aural. I had co-operation on my mind. Like any philogically resourceful translator, I refused to concede that the untranslated is untranslatable because the tension between expression and the means of expression forces one back to the source to examine what it is that the source is expressing or continues to express. There a kind of receptivity at work in the act of translation. It is an active listening; it is question chaining. Translative receptivity is at work in any act of reading or writing or speaking or perceiving. So attuned to symmetry, I could not not raise the issue of translation from one sensory modality to the other, from the visual to the aural or back and forth. If the principle of its possiblity is easy to establish as a working axiom, finding a likely mechanism might be too. It was very tempting to fetishize the word, the verbal artefact, as the halfway house between the aural and the visual. But the prison house of language however halfway was not a world to call home. Home is where the symmetry is. A single verbal language is not home for a translator. Home is in the activity of translation. That is where the symmetry resides. Where is the symmetry in the activity of translation? Translation involves a source and a target. The symmetry is not between a source and a target, between an input and output. It is not between one set of arrangements and an other. It is in the arranging, in the shuffle of beginning, middle and end. It is trivial to say reading and writing like translation are a combination of product and process. They are, after all, all acts of sign manipulation, acts of semiosis. Before "all" implodes into one universal category, let us consider more closely the symmetry of semiosis. The symmetry is not between reading and writing. It is not between acts of semiosis. The act itself displays symmetry. Each act of reading, each act of writing, each act of translation involves two products and a process. For each there is a source, a target and an event of transformation. The symmetry emerges at a certain level of abstraction from point through movement to point, from source through transformation to target. Like the movements of some conceptual oragami, a perptual folding ensues where target becomes source for the next event of transformation. If a wild limitless semiosis is released, it is not without the recuperable symmetry of closure. In the abstract realm of movement and point, the event of transformation is a destination. Abstraction is not so scary. It is a simple matter of counting and recounting. Two and one. One one one. One and two. Two and one. One one one. When any point is considered the site of a movement, single acts of semiosis can be linked together and their collective symmetry explored with another bit of abstraction (and another nod to infinitization). The symmetry of a single act of semiosis is replicated not between two acts but at least three. Triplification may seem like needless complication, another superfluous application of the principle of similarity across scale. For me it was a necessary abundance edging me to a very spacious geometry for I was about to link abstraction and perception via the concept of notation. From there, I could hypothesize that if what we perceive are signs, then semiosis can model perception. Along the trail of three the drama of translation was restaged in terms of asking questions and stories of synchronistion. The relation of the aural to the visual or for that matter between any two sensory modalities can be schematized as the relations between triplets.
I had found a marvelous machine model, a sensorium that
worked on cybernetic principles. I had an inkling
what the model could do. Excited but wary, I began to
subdue the urge to explain purpose (having gotten in
trouble trying to explain my explanations). There are
many translations to track parenthetically, many
recoveries from recursivity to perform. It is perhaps
easier to explain why a situation is not the case for
critique is a species of rule application. We delve
into the nature of the rules themselves when we wearily
ask
|