VV(11): Any Sovereign or Broken Yo-Yo further cont'd ...

[jporter]

You may have made this connection already and I may have missed it, but just
to be sure, from "Nearer, My Couch, to Thee:

"In the idea of time that had begun to rule city life in Poor Richard's day,
where every second was of equal length and irrevocable, not much in the
course of its flow could have been called nonlinear, unless you counted the
ungovernable warp of dreams, for which Poor Richard had scant use. In
Frances M. Barbour's 1974 concordance of the sayings, there is nothing to be
found under "Dreams," dreams being as unwelcome in Philly back then as their
frequent companion, sleep, which was considered time away from accumulating
wealth, time that had to be tithed back into the order of things to purchase
20 hours of productive waking. During the Poor Richard years, Franklin,
according to the "Autobiography," was allowing himself from l A.M. to 5 A.M.
for sleep. The other major nonwork block of time was four hours, 9 P.M. to 1
A.M., devoted to the Evening Question, "What good have I done this day?"
This must have been the schedule's only occasion for drifting into reverie
-- there would seem to have been no other room for speculations, dreams,
fantasies, fiction. Life in that orthogonal machine was supposed to be
nonfiction."

And then there is always that harmonic synchrony often coming into play when
several women of menstruating age co-habitate. It's enough to make even poor
linear Atlas shrug, or to take out the trash without being asked...

jody 

> From: Dave Monroe <monroe at mpm.edu>

> Subject: VV(11): Any Sovereign or Broken Yo-Yo further cont'd ...
> 
> "Any sovereign or broken yo-yo" (V., Ch. 8, Sec. i, p. 217)
> 
> Continuing further in Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty and Automatic
> Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986),
> Chapter 5, "The Authoritarian Conception of Order," pp. 115-121 ...
> 
> And what, finally, does the mechanical clock have to do with the
> original problem, the disregard for feedback mechanisms in Europe before
> 1700?  (115)
> 
> Common characteristics do indeed emerge.... From the beginning, the
> image of the clock was linked with concepts that people held in high
> regard ... (115)
> 
> .... the regularity of its running ... (115)
> 
> .... connection between the clock and the Divine ... (116)
> 
> From the conviction that the world had the character of clockwork
> followed the belief that nature obeyed the laws of mechanics. (116)
> 
> The clock image called forth a number of related meanings. (116)
> 
> .... regularity, order, and harmony ... (116)
> 
> .... one of the first concrete illustrations of a new abstraction that
> was in the process of formulation, namely, the concept system. (117)
> 
> The actions of the various parts of a system always originated in the
> same way: they were initiated by a single central cause. (117)
> 
> .... hierarchical ... (117)
> 
> The specialties of the central authority were information, memory,
> judgment, and decision. (118)
> 
> The similarity between the structure underlying this centralist and
> authoritarian conception of system and the structure of clocks ... (118)
> 
> .... closely related to a deep-seated and widely shared belief in
> determinism. (118)
> 
> .... idealized the qualities of regularity, order and harmony. (119)
> 
> .... insisted on the clock as the prototype for the world ... (119)
> 
> .... sought to discredit magic ... (119)
> 
> .... advertised the advantages of authoritarian, centralist command
> structures, be they in the body, in society, or in the universe. (119)
> 
> .... illustrated and thus reinforced the general world view of
> determinism. (119)
> 
> Together they outline a specific approach to the problems of
> establishing order among a mass of related, interacting parts and of
> organizing, maintaining, and controlling complex dynamic systems.  The
> clock mechanism thus becomes an illustration of a general conception of
> order ... (119)
> 
> The central authority communicates with the subordinate members of the
> system through rigid cause and effect relationships that are
> unidirectional and do not provide for or appreciate return signals ...
> (120)
> 
> For several centuries, the clock's most important function was perhaps
> to serve as an instrument of popular education and, indeed,
> indoctrination. (120)
> 
> In both its roles, as a timekeeper and as a demonstration model of a
> rational, purposeful action, the clock served as an important and
> purposely used instrument in preparing the masses for the ways of
> industrial society. (121)
> 
> Why the disregard for feedback before 1700? (121)
> 
> Hm ...
>