Beginning

I (i)

In L'invention intellectuelle Judith Schlanger suggests that noise, the sheer mass of popularisation which the French call "vulgarisation" contributes to significant breakthroughs.  Each rearticulation of current knowledge is a displacing repetition and affects however slightly the paths open and opening to thinkers.  Opting for more flash, Marshall McLuhan stated that breakdown leads to breakthrough.  One could endorse such a historiography of crisis and rupture.  However ways have been opened to do otherwise.

I (i)

I (ii)

McLuhan's way of telling stories was grounded in a faith where the past was good and the future would be better.  Whatever alternatives were available to McLuhan at mid-century, one does well in this late twentieth century to attend to Ludwig Pfeiffer as he expresses the hope of moving away from "cultural nostalgia and technological euphoria" which have turned sour (Materialities of Communication 12). The past cannot be glorified and the future remains uncertain.  The one is not here and the other not gone.

I (ii)

I (iii)

Thus one comes to do the careful reading of less than spectacular texts, to take up the essays, meditations and theoretical accounts of less well known thinkers, to sift patiently and find the variations in the production of cultural paradigms.  There can be no Pharaonic injunctions against straw since all this activity is of course keyed to intervention, repeated intervention, vulgar intervention, against dominant ideologies.

I (iii)

I (iv)

All this meddling is focused upon the repeated and varied question of the organization of the senses, in particular the possibilities of translation between sight and sound.  The study before you is testing the discursive limits of current models of the human sensorium.

I (iv)

I (v)

Each section of the study examines how an organization of the senses affects theory making.  The sections need not be read in any particular order.  They may stand alone.  Or they may be paired.  The section entitled Prosthetics & Proxemics demonstrates that forms of sensory organization are correlated with models of reproduction.  To test this correlation, the next section, Maieutics, examines the sensory biases at work in models of reproduction.  The next sections are concerned with sensory organizations in theory-making about models themselves.  Emulations examines a critique of a model of the generation of narratives and it is paired with Dyads & Dialectics, a section devoted to models of interpretation.  The irony of pairing sections in a study so avowedly bent on critiquing the reification of couples can but find its supreme expression in an invitation to view the intended closure of the study as a provisional pairing of the section called Storing and Sorting which stakes the claim that models and material practices stand in a dialectical relation to each other with a metacommentary section called appropriately Metacommentary which explains why the boundary lines in the pairings perception-reproduction and generation-interpretation keep breaking up or down whichever direction you prefer. This pair elaborates the themes exposed in the section Axioms. And in good comparative fashion all the sections travel similar ground in different ways.

I (v)

I (vi)

There is no getting lost if you have patience with repetitions, tolerance for a bit of noise and stamina for a lot of vulgar recoding.  Nothing novel.  But worth repeating and refreshing.  You will find the model of the cybernetic machine applied to human communication and perception.  You will find the critique of the ideology of romance applied to the politics of reproduction.  You will find critique and modelling combined.

I (vi)

I (vii)

You will not find a big bang. In the presentation, there is no moment of great disclosure.  This choice arises not just from a historiographic suspicion of hastily claimed breaks with the past.  The decision to arrange the presentation to allow for a variety of reading sequences also stems from epistemological considerations.  A plot marrying reproduction and revelation would depend upon an initial separation of the knowing, the known and the knower.  It would be senseless.  The tool and the user are part of a system of events.  And it is through tools we come to sense the world, comprehend our selves, understand our work and know our tools. And such ways of thinking, such practices of embodiment, query the tidy relation between revelation and reproduction, a relation that is responsible in large measure for many a discursive move that conflates world, self and text, reducing the complexity of their interaction to a dull and deadening dyad.

I (vii)