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Looking backward, figuring forward: Modelling, its discontents & the future Willard McCarty Kings College London staff.cch.kcl.ac.uk/~mccarty DH2007 J. M. W. Turner, The Morning after the Deluge (1843) Slide 2 2 1.In need of help 2.From comfort to claustrophobia 3.From claustrophobia to (foolish?) agoraphilia 4.A Metamorphoses Game? Slide 3 3 Two styles of reasoning Nobel Prize medal for Physics & Chemistry: the Genius of Science unveiling the goddess Isis , nature loves to hide (Heraclitus frag. 123) Nobel Prize medal for Literature: a young man, sitting under a laurel tree, being instructed by the Muse & writing down her song Slide 4 4 1.In need of help 2.From comfort to claustrophobia 3.From claustrophobia to (foolish?) agoraphilia 4.A Metamorphoses Game? Slide 5 5 Relational model of personification superimposed on Picassos La mort d'Orphe (1930) Slide 6 6 1.In need of help 2.From comfort to claustrophobia 3.From claustrophobia to (foolish?) agoraphilia 4.A Metamorphoses Game? Slide 7 7 mathesis, n. 1. Mental discipline; learning or science, esp. mathematical science. Now rare. 2. After M. Foucault: the science or practice of establishing a systematic order of things. poiesis, n. [< Gk., creation, production < to make, create, produce, thus poetry] Creative production, esp. of a work of art; an instance of this. Slide 8 8 our universes are limited, not by the demands of problems that need to be solved but by extraneous standards of rigor. The result is a mind- set of reductionism, of looking only downward toward subsystems, and never upward and outward. Robert Rosen, On Biology and Physics, in Essays on Life Itself (Columbia, 2000): 2. I live in a world of others words. And my entire life is an orientation in this world, a reaction to others words (an infinitely diverse reaction), beginning with my assimilation of them and ending with assimilation of the wealth of human culture Mikhail Bahktin, From Notes Made in 1970-1, in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Emerson and Holquist (Texas, 1986): 143 For there is no [context] as an objective structure, existing in nature. There are practices of [contextualizing] of articulated reaching. And theres no shortage of dubiously useful ways for characterizing structure in the frozen object called [the context], given the possibilities of transcription, recording and terminological classification David Sudnow, Going for the Jazz, in Ways of the Hand: A Rewritten Account (MIT, 2001): 126 Slide 9 9 1.In need of help 2.From comfort to claustrophobia 3.From claustrophobia to (foolish?) agoraphilia 4.A Metamorphoses Game? Slide 10 10 Artificial vs natural (Paul Wegener, Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, 1920) 1. Constructing resources 3. Modeling of (analytic) VR reconstruction : Struder model, St Gall 5. Modeling for possible worlds 2. Inventing new genres Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England Second Life 4. Modeling for (synthetic) Ivanhoe Game Slide 11 11 1.A text is a unit of language that is not reducible to a series of propositions. 1.1Texts do not establish how the world is all that is the case but instead foster imaginative inquiry into all that could be the case if appropriate scenarios could be constructed. To treat writing as a text is to set it against the fixities of the world and against the disciplines we trust to establish those fixities. 1.11Considered historically, texts weave into one another in networks of intertextuality. So in dealing with textuality there is no feasible principle of closure. Texts are generative. Charles Altieri, Tractatus Logico-Poeticus, Critical Inquiry 33 (Spring 2007: 528), my emphasis Afterwords Nature does not reason, and its operation is at one with itself.... Ultimately, shouldn't we say that nature is a more perfect art, since it is inside the thing itself, and is immanent and immediate? Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis (Belknap, 2006): 24