Great Paragraph, From On Garbage, John Scanlan c.2005

Wilst the technological appropriation of nature is 'not simply a continuation of Platonic metaphysics', to quote Robert Pippin, it does result from the adaptation of knowledge, and its apparent perfectibility through a succession of separations (or 'clean breaks') that attempt to optimize knowledge. Certainly, it is a response to historical contingencies - as Robert Pippin says, 'crises, inventions, growing paradoxes of the old paradigms, and the gradual "delegitimation" of the old science'. But it is also the separation and withdrawal that derives from the metaphysical understanding of the world (in the sense that metaphysics is always a separation and withdrawal), and is not simply co-extensive with something like capitalist produciton (as Pippin seems to suggest). What we say here, then, is that every act of differentiation - every 'clean break' with the past, creates garbage; results in leftovers. This is not to say that ways and means are not found to re-use this garbage (as I have been arguing, this is what always happens), because nothing ever simply vanishes. Things - objects and ideas, for example - may fall out of use, be declared derelict and demolished, but what results from this just constitues the material for new forms. In the facile 'garbage in, garbage out' vision of instrumentality we fail to see this (instead we only see that garbage 'disappears'), and the irony here could not be greater because of the extra garbage that the personal computer produces. Even here, however, we can detect an attempt to cosmetically alter the fact. Thus, where the Macintosh computer - which provided the basic model of the working environment for most subsequent computers - began with the 'trashcan' as the destination for unwanted files, in the Microsoft version ('Windows' which was charged with simply stealing the Macintosh idea) this is subtly altered to become a 'recycle bin' (complete with the environmentally frendly recycling symbol). While the trash from these virtual bins appears to be liberated to create space on the computer disk that can be re-used, as Slavoj Zizek noted, in reality it is practically impossible to erase and so constitutes 'the ultimate horror of the digital universe', which is that while things may be cancelled, or deleted, 'everything remains forever inscribed'. The possibility of 'undeleting' files tells us that they don't really disappear, and so a 'simple PC contains a kind of "undead" spectral domain of deleted texts which nevertheless continue to lead a shadowy existence "between the two deaths," officially deleted but still there, waiting to be recovered'.

In our ceaseless refinement, as we shall see, we yet manage to restore the dead in other forms as well.

Notes on "the allegory of the cave"

snippets put together from various authors, copied and pasted:

In the allegory, Plato likens people untutored in the Theory of Forms to prisoners chained in a cave, unable to turn their heads. All they can see is the wall of the cave. Behind them burns a fire. Between the fire and the prisoners there is a parapet, along which puppeteers can walk. The puppeteers, who are behind the prisoners, hold up puppets that cast shadows on the wall of the cave. The prisoners are unable to see these puppets, the real objects, that pass behind them. What the prisoners see and hear are shadows and echoes cast by objects that they do not see.

Such prisoners would mistake appearance for reality. They would think the things they see on the wall (the shadows) were real; they would know nothing of the real causes of the shadows.

Marc Cohen

from http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm

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If he were living today, Plato might replace his rather awkward cave metaphor with a movie theater, with the projector replacing the fire, the film replacing the objects which cast shadows, the shadows on the cave wall with the projected movie on the screen, and the echo with the loudspeakers behind the screen. The essential point is that the prisoners in the cave are not seeing reality, but only a shadowy representation of it. The importance of the allegory lies in Plato's belief that there are invisible truths lying under the apparent surface of things which only the most enlightened can grasp. Used to the world of illusion in the cave, the prisoners at first resist enlightenment, as students resist education.

a note on magic realism

"...magic realism presents the very process of modernization (the arrival of machines, the disintegration of old social structures) from the standpoint of the traditional 'enchanted' closed universe - from this viewpoint, of course, modernization itself looks like the ultimate magic....And do we not find something similar in the New Age cyberspace cult which attempts to ground the return to old pagan wisdom in the highest technology? (perhaps aesthetic postmodernism as such is a desperate attempt to infuse pre-modern enchantment into the process of modernization.) Thus we have a double movement of reflexive mediation: (the return to) tradition itself becomes the object of modern expertise; modernization itself becomes the ultimate in (traditional) magic..."
-from Slavoj Zizek, "The Plague of Fantasies"

"running a bath, throwing out the baby" part two

WOLFGANG MIEDER

"(DON'T) THROW THE BABY OUT WITH THE BATHWATER":The Americanization of a German Proverb and Proverbial Expression*

In memoriam Wayland D. Hand

excerpts from:http://www.deproverbio.com/DPjournal/DP,1,1,95/BABY.html

When the proverb "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water" or its parallel proverbial expression "To throw the baby out with the bath water" appear today in Anglo-American oral communication or in books, magazines, newspapers, advertisements or cartoons, hardly anybody would surmise that this common metaphorical phrase is actually of German origin and of relatively recent use in the English language. It had its first written occurrence in Thomas Murner's (1475-1537) versified satirical book Narrenbeschwörung (1512) which contains as its eighty-first short chapter entitled "Das kindt mit dem bad vß schitten" (To throw the baby out with the bath water) a treatise on fools who by trying to rid themselves of a bad thing succeed in destroying whatever good there was as well. In seventy-six rhymed lines the proverbial phrase is repeated three times as a folkloric leitmotif, and there is also the first illustration of the expression as a woodcut depicting quite literally a woman who is pouring her baby out with the bath water.1 Murner also cites the phrase repeatedly in later works and this rather frequent use might be an indication that the proverbial expression was already in oral currency towards the end of the fifteenth century in Germany.

But when, how and why did this proverbial expression and proverb find their way into the English language where they are today also quite well known and often cited? Why should English speakers even consider using this somewhat grotesque image of washing a baby in a small movable tub and then throwing this human treasure out with the dirty bath water, when their language has such well established equivalent proverbial expressions as "To throw the helve after the hatchet", "To throw away the wheat with the chaff" and the bland "To throw away the good with the bad"?