Joanna
----- Original Message -----
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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