continuity – Fractal Ontology

All posts filed under: continuity

Overcome

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

A situation tends to bring about the specific conditions of its overcoming. Thus advances in transportation and telecommunication technologies are slowly bringing about not only the collapse of the classical temporal and spatial interval as such, the annihilation of the discrete; but also a simultaneous collapse of classical distribution or dissemination as such, a self-destruction of the sign through optimal transmissivity, and hence finally the death of the voice along with the signal, the […]

The Language Mechanism: Notes on de Saussure

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

by Joseph Weissman

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continuity / diachrony / evolution / institution / language / linearity / linguistics / logic / sign / synchrony / time

A language thus has this curious and striking feature. It has no immediately perceptible entities. And yet one cannot doubt that they exist, or that the interplay of these units is what constitutes linguistic structure. That is undoubtedly a characteristic which distinguishes languages from all other semiological institutions. Ferdinand de Saussure (Course in General Linguistics, 105) After having investigated the physiological mechanisms of speech, Saussure turns to consider the nature of linguistic signs. In his […]

On Fractal Geometry

Sunday, January 20, 2008

by Joseph Weissman

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boundary / continuity / dimension / disorder / evolution / fractal / mathematics / mobius / rupture / science / topology / turbulence

Fractals are an example of a discovery from what claims to be a very new kind of science — a science of feedback, turbulence and emergence — which harnesses an old but ubiquitous species of chaos. A fractal can informally be defined as a recursively self-similar figure. They are not extrapolated from a geometric logic based on units. Rather fractals are constructed on the basis of an infinite program, such that the result ‘overflows’ any […]