MDDM Ch. 76 ..a sort of Shadow ever in the Room [747.27]

Bandwraith at aol.com Bandwraith at aol.com
Sun Sep 22 08:09:38 CDT 2002


>From Igor Aleksander, How to Build a Mind: Toward
Machines with Imagination (New York, NY: Columbia UP,
2001), "Liberating Philosophy: The Empiricists," p.72...

"There is no doubt that an increasing number of people
know what they know from television and radio. That's no
bad thing, but it has positive and negative effects... Had
there been television in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, how could the views of the great thinkers of
the time have survived the ambitions of the pushy 
producers? [Goes on, mimicking a dream sequence
between the author and a "pushy producer"] 'We would
like to go and interview some of these ancient chaps.
Descartes was it, or Locke? Could you help explain to
our viewers what they are saying in case it gets too...
difficult? We also plan to ask them what they think about
your ideas of conscious machines... {follows, fictionalized
interview of first Descartes, and then Locke].
 

In a message dated 9/22/02 6:14:03 AM, davidmmonroe at yahoo.com writes:

<< From Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism:
Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven, CT:
Yale UP, 1998), "Introduction," pp. 1-9 ...

"... the early twentieth century, when new strategies
for reputation building ... responded to increasingly
international cultural interchanges, the growing
prominence of the early mass media, the rising
pressure of advertising, the unprecedented fusion of
information and entertainment, and the challenges
presented by a dense, highly differentiated array of
institutional arenas in which to speak to an
increasingly fragmented public.  Strategies of
authorial construction changed as authors sought to
address different publics ....
   "Those strategies, diverse and contradictory as
they were, must be situated within the institutional
field in which they unfolded.  More typically,
instead, scholars and critics have attempted to define
modernism through a unilateral focus on formal devices
and ideological constellations....  Such claims
typically draw on arguments derived solely from the
reading of literary texts or artworks, a procedure
that evinces excessive faith in our capacity to
specify the essence and social significance of
isolated formal devices and to correlate them with
complex ideological and social formations, slighting
the intervenient institutions that connect works to
readerships, or readerships to particular social
structures.  To focus on these institutions, instead,
is to view modernism as more than a series of texts or
the ideas that found expression in them.  It becomes a
social reality, a configuration of agents and
practices that converge in the production, marketing,
and publicization of an idiom, a shareable language in
the family of twentieth-century tongues.  To trace the
institutional profile of modernism in the social
spaces and staging venues where it operated can teach
us a great deal about the relations between modernism
and popular culture, the fate of aesthetic autonomy,
authorial self-construction in advancing modernity,
and the troublesome place of literary elites in public
culture." (pp. 4-5)

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