Heraclitus
Actually, this quotation comes from Plato (Cratylus 402a); the fragment
of Heraclitus that actually survives has been translated by Daniel W. Graham
as "On those stepping into rivers staying the same different and different
waters flow." Graham suggests that there is no theory of flux at all in Heraclitus, that in fact
his point was simply that flux is that which makes the river a river,
that Heraclitus pointed out that flow and change were inherent aspects
of some things. Of course, the more common interpretation of
Heraclitus holds that he meant that the universe was constantly in motion,
that the world was interconnected and constantly changing.
Bataille
The quotation is taken from Volume VI of Bataille's complete works, La Somme athéologique II. Sur Nietzsche. Memorandum. Annexes. (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), p. 408, translated by Michele H. Richman in Reading Georges Bataille: Beyond the Gift
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1982), p. 130. Bataille employs this notion of
communication in the context of his critique of Jean-Paul Sartre's notion
of the subject as cogito: "The cogito, for Sartre, is the inviolable, atemporal, irreducible foundation.... For me, it exists only within a relation... it is a network of communications, existing within time.
The atom refers to a wave: to language, words exchanged, books written and
read. Sartre reduces a book to the intentions of an author, the author.
If, as it appears to me, a book is communication, the author is only a link among many different readings." (Richman, 130).
Bohm
Will Keepin's explanation is instructive: "To put it crudely, one
could say that nouns do not really exist, only verbs exist. A noun
is just a 'slow' verb; that is, it refers to a process that is progressing
so slowly so as to appear static. For example, the paper on which
this text is printed appears to have a stable existence, but we know
that it is, at all times including this very moment, changing and
evolving towards dust. Hence paper would more accurately be called
papering--to emphasize that it is always and inevitably a dynamic
process undergoing perpetual change. Bohm experimented with restructuring
language in this dynamic mode, which he called the rheomode,
in an effort to more accurately reflect in language the true dynamic
nature of reality."
Guattari
Guattari, "The Role of the Signifier in the Institution," Molecular Revolution (76). For
Guattari the subject is transpersonal; the human being is an effect of language;
the human subject is a conduit for language. "No longer does a person
communicate with other persons: organs and functions take part in a machinic
'assembly' which puts together semiotic links and a great interweaving of
material and social fluxes" ("The Micropolitics of Fascism," Molecular Revolution, 223).
Conquergood
Dwight Conquergood, "Poetics, Play, Process, and Power" (1989). Conquergood's
notion of the trickster is a mythical character that finds expression in many
cultures; Schutzman's Tarot Card Fool
is one such expression.
Media Environments
Marshall McLuhan argued
that technology extends the human sensory
apparatus. What he asks us to do is to read media as sensory components
of our environment. A television set, for example, is seen less as a communication
device and more as a piece of furniture. In Counter-Blast he writes
that "environment is process, not container" (13). A television is not a container
for information any more than a rose garden is a container for roses. The
rose garden, as part of the sensory environment, pleases the sense of sight,
excites the sense of smell, and both delights and threatens the sense of
touch. The television offers a barrage of imagery, sound, and idea to excite,
enthrall, admonish, thrill, and even terrify the senses. The disruption
in the total sensory environment by the privileging of one or two senses
produces an overall sensory experience. This overall experience--this sensory
environment--is as spatiotemporally real as a rose garden, a beach, or any
other environment.
Gorgias
The Greek word psychagogia, literally, leading of the soul, is used in Plato's Phaedrus to define a positive role for rhetoric (techne psychagogia tis dia logon, "the
art of leading the soul by means of words"). In its original
context this word described a ritual of raising souls from the dead.