Damien wrote:
>Such divisions into contrasted categories swiftly fall apart, however.
Is it fiction or science which is holistic rather than reductive? Science,
we guess at first, is surely the very paradigm of the reductive, stripping
the meat and fat from the bone, boiling down the flensed carcase into a
skeletal substrate, all sumptuous life reduced to numbers. But that's true
also of the mechanics of fiction, as narratologists show us: every imagined
action, in folk story and Tolstoy alike, derives from a handful or two of
types, functions, actants, deployed in words built from an equally small
number of distinguishable acoustic or graphic segments. Meanwhile, even the
most austere and limited science cannot (or should not) escape the context
of its whole surround, as the non-local connections of quantum theory
prove, the vast geometries of Relativity's inertial frames, the dense
ecological webs of the life sciences, the no-less-dense economic and
psychological webs of culture. Fiction's mythemes, science's vectors and
tensors, serve alike to direct us in (re)constructing stories adequate, in
some appropriate and contextually satisfying fashion, to the unspeakable
plenitude of the world.<
Damien, forgive me for not reading this cornecopic paragraph, but it wasn't attached to the email I responded to. I still think your paint brush is enormous, and doused with multi-colored pigments. Instead of corners there are bay windows with a view.
Mythemes in our transhumanist culture are quite precious building blocks of culture and a means to apply reason to imagination. I think of "serious fiction" as an appropriate phrase to describe this mental mobility and bundling, although there is certainly shortcomings in mytheme translations. Back to Units and vectors.
Natasha
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