500
the kitchen, or rat chewing somewhere in the ceiling now, and then the most welcome exceptions, we drop pieces of French fries for the pigeons under our café
tables, and leave it at that. Some meander about the local zoo, all indications suggesting that no more, on average, than five minutes per visitor is spent reading
ecologically educational materials there.
53.3 Languages and Paradigms with Which to Reunite
Two years prior to his death, in 1978, French philosopher/psycholinguist Roland
Barthes imparted a number of lectures in Paris on the subject of le neutre—the
neutral. His hope was to somehow thwart at long last all those paradigms imposed
upon consciousness, ethics and history by a western heritage of the binary. He
would write in the book comprising those lectures, “Whence the idea of a structural creation that would defeat, annul, or contradict the implacable binarism of
the paradigm by means of a third term – the tertium … The Neutral – my Neutral –
can refer to intense, strong, unprecedented states.” And later in his work, would
state: “An emotive hyperconsciousness thus seems to be a contradiction in terms:
a paradox. I feel this paradox in myself, I have to live, to debate with it”.
9
He was
speaking of the tyrannies of zero and of one which, in electronic circuits impose
logic gates, formats of counting, the representations of “on” and “off” and as such,
in every computer, accountability for each digit, increment, prefix, decimal, fraction, calculation, procedure, conversion … everything. A binary wasteland whose
occupants do not exist, though they gaze upon the present and posterity like concepts-turned-demonic, with a power vested in them to exert every conceivable
inordinate sway over our lives, fueled by electricity, amassed into a world of artificial intelligence and other technologies that have only added to the lacunae separating us from that wilderness at the heart of the biological paradox.
Yes, we use many of these tools to study nature. The question Barthes was grappling with concerns the languages and paradigms by which our self-awareness and
silent hopes in the presence of Others might be liberated and satisfied. This condition, a stultifying human civilization that defines and oppresses most wonder, is
without true reciprocity, that can only be achieved, says Barthes, by some altogether
outside force. A distance from the normal, an exile radically envisioned and
achieved; a language that obeys no language.
Not so with other creatures, we can be fairly certain. Their worlds and community interactions rally free of such stultifying commands and controls, for reasons we have no clue, particularly given that it appears—this absolute freedom—to
exist everywhere outside human consciousness; a level of reciprocity between
species that has given rise in our natural sciences, to the perception and accompanying theories, of interdependence, the most crucial element in the pan-Asiatic
worlds discussed earlier in this work; that source of true reciprocity potential
among humans and every being on this planet. Yet, lacking something imperative,
53 Non-linear Reciprocity
the kitchen, or rat chewing somewhere in the ceiling now, and then the most welcome exceptions, we drop pieces of French fries for the pigeons under our café
tables, and leave it at that. Some meander about the local zoo, all indications suggesting that no more, on average, than five minutes per visitor is spent reading
ecologically educational materials there.
53.3 Languages and Paradigms with Which to Reunite
Two years prior to his death, in 1978, French philosopher/psycholinguist Roland
Barthes imparted a number of lectures in Paris on the subject of le neutre—the
neutral. His hope was to somehow thwart at long last all those paradigms imposed
upon consciousness, ethics and history by a western heritage of the binary. He
would write in the book comprising those lectures, “Whence the idea of a structural creation that would defeat, annul, or contradict the implacable binarism of
the paradigm by means of a third term – the tertium … The Neutral – my Neutral –
can refer to intense, strong, unprecedented states.” And later in his work, would
state: “An emotive hyperconsciousness thus seems to be a contradiction in terms:
a paradox. I feel this paradox in myself, I have to live, to debate with it”.
9
He was
speaking of the tyrannies of zero and of one which, in electronic circuits impose
logic gates, formats of counting, the representations of “on” and “off” and as such,
in every computer, accountability for each digit, increment, prefix, decimal, fraction, calculation, procedure, conversion … everything. A binary wasteland whose
occupants do not exist, though they gaze upon the present and posterity like concepts-turned-demonic, with a power vested in them to exert every conceivable
inordinate sway over our lives, fueled by electricity, amassed into a world of artificial intelligence and other technologies that have only added to the lacunae separating us from that wilderness at the heart of the biological paradox.
Yes, we use many of these tools to study nature. The question Barthes was grappling with concerns the languages and paradigms by which our self-awareness and
silent hopes in the presence of Others might be liberated and satisfied. This condition, a stultifying human civilization that defines and oppresses most wonder, is
without true reciprocity, that can only be achieved, says Barthes, by some altogether
outside force. A distance from the normal, an exile radically envisioned and
achieved; a language that obeys no language.
Not so with other creatures, we can be fairly certain. Their worlds and community interactions rally free of such stultifying commands and controls, for reasons we have no clue, particularly given that it appears—this absolute freedom—to
exist everywhere outside human consciousness; a level of reciprocity between
species that has given rise in our natural sciences, to the perception and accompanying theories, of interdependence, the most crucial element in the pan-Asiatic
worlds discussed earlier in this work; that source of true reciprocity potential
among humans and every being on this planet. Yet, lacking something imperative,
53 Non-linear Reciprocity