touch
Oh yeah, so I never got around to writing up what I thought of the Derrida movie after watching it last weekend. I thought it was pretty good, except that there were too many places where the movie was saying, "Look! I'm a movie!" -- shots of the camera crew filming and whatnot. Although I did enjoy the scene where they filmed Derrida watching part of one of the interviews he did, then filmed him watching THAT (so he was watching himself watch himself :). I also appreciated how they didn't try to pass the movie off as some sort of authoritative biography of the man's life or anything like that; in a sense the film uses Derrida to deconstruct itself as you watch it.
In one of the interviews in the film, Derrida talks about the cliché of the eyes being the window to the soul. Actually what he said was that even though the rest of the face ages, the eyes do not. (Or maybe he was just talking about himself, because I've certainly met people who have a very ancient or tired look in their eyes...) Then he started talking about hands, and why philosophers talk so much about them, and how they are such an important part of what makes us human, because we use them to make tools, to write, and so on. This made me wonder why, whenever I draw a portrait, I try to incorporate the person's hands in the image as well (usually grumbling to myself the entire time about how hard it is to draw them correctly ;). I think I understood to some extent what Derrida was getting at -- you can tell almost as much about a person from the way their hands look and move as you can from looking into their eyes. A portrait would in a way be incomplete without the subject's hands.
There's this novel, Diaspora, by Greg Egan, which is set in a future in which humans have the technology to upload their own consciousnesses into a giant network and live an essentially immortal life as a computer program. I was struck by the following passage in Chapter 1, describing the "birth" of a new person within this network:
Amidst all this organic plasticity and compromise, though, the infrastructure fields could still stake out territory for a few standardised subsystems, identical from citizen to citizen. Two of these were channels for incoming data - one for gestalt, and one for linear, the two primary modalities of all Konishi citizens, distant descendants of vision and hearing.
I remember thinking, What about the sense of touch? These transhumans can see and hear the things in their environment, but they can't touch them; their everyday experience would be pretty unreal by our standards, like a perpetual dream that you could never wake up from. (Of course, if you were born in this kind of environment, you wouldn't miss something you've never even had, I guess.) And think about how this changes the way they would interact with each other -- they couldn't hug their friends, or kiss their lovers, or even just tap someone on the shoulder. It's like they're living in a giant chat room where they can say "*hug*" to someone, but they can't actually do it. (I don't think it's a coincidence that Egan happens to be a computer programmer, as well as an author. ~_^)
In one of the interviews in the film, Derrida talks about the cliché of the eyes being the window to the soul. Actually what he said was that even though the rest of the face ages, the eyes do not. (Or maybe he was just talking about himself, because I've certainly met people who have a very ancient or tired look in their eyes...) Then he started talking about hands, and why philosophers talk so much about them, and how they are such an important part of what makes us human, because we use them to make tools, to write, and so on. This made me wonder why, whenever I draw a portrait, I try to incorporate the person's hands in the image as well (usually grumbling to myself the entire time about how hard it is to draw them correctly ;). I think I understood to some extent what Derrida was getting at -- you can tell almost as much about a person from the way their hands look and move as you can from looking into their eyes. A portrait would in a way be incomplete without the subject's hands.
There's this novel, Diaspora, by Greg Egan, which is set in a future in which humans have the technology to upload their own consciousnesses into a giant network and live an essentially immortal life as a computer program. I was struck by the following passage in Chapter 1, describing the "birth" of a new person within this network:
Amidst all this organic plasticity and compromise, though, the infrastructure fields could still stake out territory for a few standardised subsystems, identical from citizen to citizen. Two of these were channels for incoming data - one for gestalt, and one for linear, the two primary modalities of all Konishi citizens, distant descendants of vision and hearing.
I remember thinking, What about the sense of touch? These transhumans can see and hear the things in their environment, but they can't touch them; their everyday experience would be pretty unreal by our standards, like a perpetual dream that you could never wake up from. (Of course, if you were born in this kind of environment, you wouldn't miss something you've never even had, I guess.) And think about how this changes the way they would interact with each other -- they couldn't hug their friends, or kiss their lovers, or even just tap someone on the shoulder. It's like they're living in a giant chat room where they can say "*hug*" to someone, but they can't actually do it. (I don't think it's a coincidence that Egan happens to be a computer programmer, as well as an author. ~_^)