Sunday, August 31, 2025
Saturday, August 30, 2025
Undoing the Concept of Reality as a Construction / EZE, 2025
Human beings show up with behavior ready-to-hand. And while use of language is a behavior, the capacity to use language is not the same as the capacity to communicate, which is also a behavior.
Behavior often elicits a response, but behavior is not in itself a means of communication whether or not we interpret it as a noun or not. We simply tend to align action with communication as a metaphor, which makes [all] action a form of signaling.
Perhaps signaling is the pervasive metaphor of our present-day technology, indeed of our world, as we have the capacity to make sense of signals and thereby give them meaning.
But behavior is often noise, a signal that distorts other signals.
Signal and noise constitute communication theory, but too, we might re-do communication theory as a theory of signaling.
Indeed, we are prone to think of behavior as communicative, but breathing, eating, drinking, ... , however ritualized, however socially constructed, have no immediate dependency on language or on our ability to communicate what they are as such. Whether or not we give these gerunds language, we do them. But our doing them often becomes a context for a discussion about influence, namely, the influence of thought, of language, of various other types of behavior on these behaviors.
Essentially, within the dualism made by the distinction between thought and action, when we take the linguistic turn, we make reality a construction of thought, thought which is made manifest through language, ... .
But foregoing the linguistic turn, on the level of behavior, with no dualism in play, we speak yet of influence, and reality at this level is not a construction so much as an interplay.
Directionally, when we assume the primacy of our use of language, which is, after all, a type of behavior, rather than the primacy of behavior itself, we live under the influence of an assumed need for language and of constructions thereof.
Note: Though agreed that reality is not entirely a social construct, the use of behavior is intended to give a general basis of action, but it is not used to imply a distinction between the subjective and the objective, whatever such a distinction might entail.
The use of behavior, here, rather, is close to the behavior defined by this sort of behavior analysis, and behavior analysis generally plays well in relation to social constructionism.
Which phrase fits the situation better?
We are our language.
We are our behavior.
For example, we speak of the influence of social media on behavior. A problem most immediate here is that our behavior on social media is still a behavior of a sort.
On this level too, we need not discuss the influence of social media on behavior as we might just as well discuss the impact of our behavior on some other behavior. For example, the influence of action on thought.
The following questions concern our ability to escape influence as well as our power to influence:
Do we live within socially constructed realities? Yes. Do we have the capacity to escape socially constructed realities? Yes and No. Do socially constructed realities constitute our world entirely? No, ... our world has gaps, gaps often of the asemic sort.
Related Themes
ma, fūdo / EZE, 2025
On Between-ness
Fūdo
Sriharsa
Watsuji Tetsurō
Augustin Berque
On Difference
Galleries / Sites (from Cece Chapman)
Friday, August 29, 2025
Thursday, August 28, 2025
A Near Asemic Switch-Logic: The Rose / EZE, 2025
A speculation on a development from Imagism to Asemic Writing.
The credo for Imagism is the primacy of the image.
Does this primacy illicit a kind of cliché-breaking in the image-narrative pattern, which then renders the conventional logic asemic or nearly so?
See also: Trope, Tropes and Archetypes and Clichés
For example, take this lyric in "The Rose": Some say love, it is a razor / That leaves your soul to bleed. This lyric breaks the trope ~ cliché by substituting soul for heart, which, in turn, risks making itself asemic, i.e., without meaning or more to the point, dysfunctional in its normal form as communication.
Indeed, the expected noun (image)-verb (action), your heart to bleed, makes more sense than the given noun-verb, your soul to bleed, a phrase which defies the usual sense of what a soul does.
But notice too how the rupture of the image-narrative flow in "The Rose" is not altogether unlike the rupture forced by the verb-lacking juxtaposition of images in "In a Station of the Metro"?
Continuity as a Logical Imperative
Wednesday, August 27, 2025
Sunday, August 24, 2025
Saturday, August 23, 2025
Monday, August 18, 2025
Asemics as the "The Hole Story" / EZE, 2025
"The Hole Story" by Cecil Touchon
Hermeneutics
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Mathematical Analysis
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Machine Learning and Topology
A Survey of Topological Methods
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Notes:
A hole is an in-between-ness.
In-between-ness is a gap in the whole, a gap not on the edge(s).
In-between-ness is a lack in the parts, a gap on the edges that meet to form the whole.
Asemics too is an in-between-ness.
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An Asemic Geometry of In-Between-Ness
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Sunday, August 17, 2025
fulu as asemics (from Cece Chapman) / EZE, 2025
Fulu looks to be a kind of spirit writing (Fuji).
Indeed, Wikipedia now defines fulu as "asemic Taoist magic symbols and incantations".
Works of fulu look to have (or to have had) semantic content, but over time, the need for semantic content may have fallen out, leaving works of fulu asemic.
Per the Wikipedia, here is the narrative at play in this de-semantic process:
... scholars of Taoism such as James Robson and Gil Raz have claimed that the incomprehensibility of written forms is central to the talisman's perceived authority and efficacy, and is one of talismanic script's defining features.
During the Eastern Jin Dynasty (317–420), it was already considered unnecessary for users of Taoist talismans to be able to decipher the writing on them in order for them to be considered efficacious. Ge Hong noted in his Baopuzi that as long as the inscription was authentic, successful use of the talisman did not depend on whether the user was able to decipher its script. By this time, the talisman's illegibility had already become a sign that they were of divine authority and held supernatural provenance. (from Dominic Steavu)
An aside for Hegelians: ... , note the Hegelian dialectics at play here, with Aufhebung operative, but ... .
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A Reflection:
Tortoise Shell Markings in the Dragon Bones Series
by Cece Chapman and Jeff Crouch (2020)
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A Cecil Touchon Project
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