On Apr 16, 2012, at 3:35 PM, Shane Mage wrote:
>
> On Apr 16, 2012, at 1:57 PM, Ted Winslow wrote:
>>
>> "We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively
>> human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a
>> weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the
>> construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst
>> architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises
>> his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the
>> end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed
>> in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement."
>
> This is one of those 19th-century clichés that occasionally
> disfigure Marx's writings. Medieval cathedrals, which took
> generations to build,
> certainly never existed in the imagination of any architect, no hive
> is built by "a bee" but by collective labor guided by the hive's
> collective consciousness. And now with computers beginning to serve
> as hive minds for our species "the architect," and with him his
> "imagination," is virtually otiose. We now can see, if we wish,
> that humans, like all structure-building animals, are guided by
> *function*, not imagined structure.
>
> Shane Mage
>
> "When we read on a printed page the doctrine of Pythagoras that all
> things are made of numbers, it seems mystical, mystifying, even
> downright silly.
>
> When we read on a computer screen the doctrine of Pythagoras that
> all things are made of numbers, it seems self-evidently true." (N.
> Weiner)
>
>
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