On the way in generally thinking on the structuring architecture of this blog and updating my older projects on issues of perception … the evolving gap seemed to be invitating to introduce another voice.
The key element is imperial perspective, that way of looking at a distant foreign reality by subordinating it to one’s gaze, constructing its history from one’s own point of view, seeing its people as subjects whose fate is to be decided not by them but by what distant administrators think is best for them. From such willful perspectives actual ideas develop, including the theory that imperialism is a benign and necessary thing. In one of the most perceptive comments ever made about the conceptual glue that binds empires together, the remarkable Anglo-Polish novelist Joseph Conrad wrote that “the conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion and or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish believe in the idea — something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.”
… read on this article from Edward Said in Al-Ahram coming via springerin.
… read on this article from Edward Said in Al-Ahram coming via springerin.
The introduction of ‘voices’ is meant not only literally in quoting excerpts coming close to my ideas, but also on the level of themes. A further outlining of this concept will be established in the themetical index of the archive structure. Also the still unactivated links for info and texts will contain longer descriptions on the idea of structuring this blogging gap.
.. Information is not unframed knowledge but knowledge framed provisionally in unstable data structures….
… different orders of information continually interact to create new orders of information. … Formerly distinct knowledges once grouped into discrete specializations are transformed into relatively indistinct bodies of information that move like the turbulent flow of fluids. Nostalgic for a central ordering principle, Slothrop constantly suspects the presence of “a reflex of order beyond the visible” but before he can come up with a suitable totalizing explanation the ordering of ordres flutuates and sends the narrative off in a new direction. What troubles him the most is that order seems to have become disorderly, uncontrollable, that direction no longer entails directedness, that the ordering of orders now exists without reference to an order of orders.
… different orders of information continually interact to create new orders of information. … Formerly distinct knowledges once grouped into discrete specializations are transformed into relatively indistinct bodies of information that move like the turbulent flow of fluids. Nostalgic for a central ordering principle, Slothrop constantly suspects the presence of “a reflex of order beyond the visible” but before he can come up with a suitable totalizing explanation the ordering of ordres flutuates and sends the narrative off in a new direction. What troubles him the most is that order seems to have become disorderly, uncontrollable, that direction no longer entails directedness, that the ordering of orders now exists without reference to an order of orders.
