Mind's Eye Re: Götterdämmerung

You will be 'pleased' to know that  Stanford University Press has published a number of Luhmann's books in English: Social Systems (1995), Observations on Modernity (1998), Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy (1998), Art as a Social System (2000), The Reality of the Mass Media (2000), Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity (2002), and A Systems Theory of Religion (2012) - plus his last two volume monstrosity,  Anyone wanting a look at this particular goobledegook could look for free here -http://www.anci.ch/_media/beitrag/ancilla2006_66_kjaer_systems.pdf

My view is most of this material and all of economics beyond a few counting tricks is supplication and jobsworth.

On Tuesday, March 3, 2015 at 4:15:56 PM UTC, frantheman wrote:

I'm still here - in some sense anyway. More passive, thoughtful, watching, listening and thinking. As they say on Facebook; it's complicated. There's such a volume of stuff out on the web now that I find my reluctance to contribute to it growing ever stronger in the past years. Do I have anything to say that thousands are others aren't saying? Is any attempt we make to say something not drowned out in a cacophony of of puppies, selfies, mindless chatter and incivility? In a world where significance seems to have become dependent on reduction to a viral hash-tagged tweet, or a five-second video on Vine, what happens to depth, complexity, the possibility of real interaction? Has communication finally reduced itself to atomic brevity and superficiality? Otherwise - tl;dr. 

"There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong." What Menken actually said was a little different; "Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong" (The Divine Afflatus, 1917). Even within the same language quotational drift occurs. Interpretative drift is a constitutive element of discourse. Our communication is always a hit-and-miss thing, or maybe, better, a constantly creative process. What you say, what I understand. Each of us culturally in our own particular place, but sharing enough to bring some kind of communication into being - a wonderful, organic, continually self-creating kind of thing, with all sorts of levels, eddies, side-effects. An orchestral symphonic symbolic performance of memes and tropes. And that's just when it's carried out between people who "share" a common language.

Accurate, one-to-one translation/conveyance of meaning is impossible; even between two speakers of the same language. Communication becomes something else, something independent. The German theorist, Niklas Luhmann, has some interesting ideas in this area. It's a deeply counter-intuitive way of seeing things - and useful as an instrument to challenge one's own assumptions, even if you don't go all the way with him.

Nobody - as far as I know - has translated Luhmann's major works from German into English. Understandably - it's hard enough trying to figure out what exactly he's saying in one language without trying to express it in another, and when you move to his discussions and arguments with Habermas (another German master of the complicated obtuse) ... forgeddaboudit!

Though translation programmes have improved in the past decade, they're still a long way from being good. Because "meaning"/"sense" is always contextual (human subjective contextual), therefore always fluid and shifting. This is more than just "fuzzy logic." I suspect we will need genuine AI as the basis of operating systems to make them really work. Two people from different lingusitic backrounds with very limited vocabularies can communicate better - agree that they have achieved some kind of understanding - than a programme which has access to comprehensive dictionaries.

For the past months I've been formally studying - in the academic sense - in German. Kulturwissenschaft at that. It's a weird experience - there's stuff I can understand better in English, other stuff works better in German. There isn't even a good translation of the subject I'm doing my Masters in. A literal English translation of Kulturwissenschaft would be "cultural science" but English academia generally calls it "cultural studies." Which, when you think about it, means something else. Well, it's a post-modernist phenomenon anyway, which, arguably, allows one to be multidimensional with reference to meaning!

And sometimes it can be enormously productive to take an ordinary, everyday word in a particular language and twist it, mine it, pummel it, rape it, alienate it. Poets do this all the time. Sometimes even academics (a pretty mediocre lot for the most part) manage it. The use of the German word Verstehen ["to understand"] is one example.

Am Sonntag, 1. März 2015 01:56:27 UTC+1 schrieb Chris Jenkins:

Was passiert, wenn der einzige Weg, wie wir kommunizieren konnte, war durch Fremdsoftware nicht in der Lage zu verstehen, unsere Emotionen? Die digitale Kommunikation nicht Ton jetzt vermitteln, sich vorstellen, wenn sie verloren auch Nuancen in der Übersetzung?

Ich denke an das, weil ich die Gespräche in dieser Gruppe häufig brechen in zwei Menschen aneinander vorbei sprechen. Ich frage mich, wenn sie die anderen Lautsprecher verstehen überhaupt. Wenn unsere Worte verloren nicht nur ihr Ton, sondern auch ihre heimatlichen Dialekt; wenn sie etwas wurde noch der Sprecher nicht verstehen, bevor sie von einer anderen Person erhalten, würden wir in der Lage, überhaupt zu kommunizieren?

Ich wünschte, Fran waren hier, um zu wiegen; er würde haben Einblick Ich würde wertvoll wie ein englischer Muttersprachler, die so viel Zeit in einem Land mit einer anderen als seiner Muttersprache verbracht hat, zu finden. Gabby hat ähnliche Einsicht gegeben, wie viel Zeit sie in englischer Sprache bei uns verbringt, (und wie oft habe ich gefragt, ob ich einen Sinn in der Übersetzung verpasst), aber ich nehme an, sie werden meist nur Spaß meines schlecht übersetzt machen Deutsch. : D

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