Plate 'o Triangles

Still slogging through Stephenson's tome. Some times I feel as if I have been sentenced like Erasmus to copy the book, and eventually I will go mad, or perhaps gather wisdom like Jad. I am 400 pages into Anathem. The story proper began around page 200. Lots of set up, I hope it pays off. There is a lot of Plato, specifically the Timaeus, at least what I can remember from my Philosophy of the Middle Ages class I took as an undergrad. the Ideal world, the world we sense, the world contained by God. I remember drawing diagrams of triangles within triangles for the mid-term in that class. I suppose I could go look it up, but I know I'm not going to do that, instead I'll just rely on my  idea of the ideal of the book (Timaeus) that I can glean from the "speculative" fiction of Anathem. But as the characters in Anathem have said, there are no new ideas. But then there wouldn't be in an infinite number of universes; all ideas would exist if all possible permutations of "worlds" existed. I think the Amber Chronicles played with this idea in a more succinct manner.  I guess I aut to be going now.

Lost in Space, or Who’s on Third

“We should remember that it is the inter - - the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the inbetween space - - the carries the burden of the meaning of culture” (Bhabha 56).


Somewhere between the speaker and the addressee meaning occurs. I think that was coming from Bordieu: the assumption that what I have to say is worth hearing and that the person to whom I am speaking is worthy of hearing it. It is not only my words and my intentions that give the utterance meaning, but the person to whom I am speaking.
I believe there is “a there there,” a meaning that is the “true” meaning, although I am not sure that if it is there or not is of any real importance at all. The interpretation is of more importance than what is being interpreted. I believe how we interpret the world, whether it is there or not, occurs somewhere between what I see and what everyone else sees. In an astrophysics class as an undergraduate, the professor described how the moon only appears to revolve around the earth. In fact, the earth and moon each revolved around a common point; it was just that the point around which they both revolved was inside the earth, not the center of the earth, but inside off center somewhere, that made it appear that the moon revolved around the earth. The same was true of any stellar bodies; the one with the greater mass was closer to the center point, often encompassing the center point. This is how I see the socially-constructed interpretation of reality- - the group with the most mass, or power, is closer to the point of revolution, yet it is still not the center. We all have an influence in how the world is viewed, yet not an equal or just influence. Somewhere in this astronomical, (starry-eyed?) tangent, I think is an analogy to Bhabha’s “third space of enunciations which (he) has made the precondition for the articulation of cultural difference” (Bhabha 56). It is not the hegemonic culture, nor The Other that makes the meaning of culture but the dynamic space between the two. Each of the polarities need the other for the meaning they give themselves, yet the meaning for the whole comes about in the liminal space between the two.