aw. Re: Where did ...

[alice wellintown]

The dots on the page or what rhetorical analysis calls artful diction
or tropes are arranged in paterns or what rhetorical analysis calls
artful syntax or schemes. This is analysis 101. You don't need a
Standford computer to count the words or identify patterns when a
text, the kind Nabokov calls a minor author text is studied. The dots
and the patterns are generic and it takes an experienced writer or
reader of such texts only a quick skim to calssify it or put it in a
genre (Aristotle to Chicago School see Booth). But when the text, say
a Jackson Pollack Painting, is the work of genius, the Stanford
computer is, while usefull still, limited by its use of the
translation of words to numbers. This point, as we discussed
previously when we dismissed McLuhan's folk/literate binanry, and the
surmises of Gleick on computers that use words or "languages",
although favoring the deeper stories of Pinker, is an ancient one that
Plato and Arsitotle plumbed. That it has surfaced as a preoccupation
of the academy should not surprise, as we are in the middle of a
communications crisis or revolution that the Greeks would both
recognize and find monsterous. Humanism, the David with a stone, now
only rolls it to the top of Camus's mountain top, where it finds
nothing, and can not smile about it. Or maybe it's just gas.