Sunday surprise the first — neat tweets from KarlreMarks
[ by Charles Cameron — Brexit, graphical thinking, serpents — there’s never a dull moment with Karl Sharro on Twitter! ]
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Karl Sharro is reMarkable and indeed reTweetable:
I had to do this: The easy guide to why Brexit happened. pic.twitter.com/YpVRAZGBMT
— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) July 1, 2016
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An hour or so before I saw that tweet from Sharro, I’d tweeted a quote from Suzanne Langer:
The most radical difference is that visual forms are not discursive. They do not present their constituents successively, but 4/5 @semblnet
— hipbonegamer (@hipbonegamer) July 3, 2016
I was quoting Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key — hat-tip: Steven H. Cullinane:
Visual forms— lines, colors, proportions, etc.— are just as capable of articulation, i.e. of complex combination, as words. But the laws that govern this sort of articulation are altogether different from the laws of syntax that govern language. The most radical difference is that visual forms are not discursive. They do not present their constituents successively, but simultaneously, so the relations determining a visual structure are grasped in one act of vision.”
I think that’s generally right, and goes some way to explaining why “reading” a HipBone Game is cognitively different, even when the game is played entirely in verbal moves, from an equivalent reading of the same “move” tests in sequence.
I noted Sharro’s visual example — worth clicking all the way through to see it full scale — because although it’s a visual representation of a cluster of texts, it follows a timeline from left to right, and is thus simultaneously sequential and synchronic. A neat trick.
BTW, Sharro is celebrated for an earlier diagram I’ve posted here — with glee, and with his amazing purely textual equivalent!
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OK so now my focal length is just right for KarlreMarks Twitter feed, and I find this beauty — also about Brexit — too:
Large numbers of people gather in London to demand that large numbers of people shouldn't be heard.
— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) July 2, 2016
What’s so neat here? Well, it appears to be a paradox of self-reference — ourobouros, a serpent biting its own tail if you like — and it’s very nicely done. The “large numbers of people” gathered in London, of course, aren’t the “large numbers of people” they say shouldn’t be heard, and if Sharro had tweeted —
Large numbers of people gather in London to demand that large numbers of other people shouldn’t be heard”
— the paradox would have been gone, the serpent biting its own tail morphed into a serpent biting another serpent — a far less interesting spectacle.
Or would it? At the level of particular crowds, yes, the paradox would vanish, one crowd biting another, but at the level of implied principle, a crowd voicing the denial of the principle that the voices of crowds deserve a hearing would still be self-refuting in just the way Sharro plays on.
So the paradox would be like Schrodinger’s cat, dead while alive — or even better, the Cheshire Cat, niow here now gone, perhaps?
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Life, she is rich in paradox.
