Re: asymptote/hyperbola?

smw wrote:
> Michael Zeleny wrote:
>> smw wrote:

> ...

>>> Since my claim referred to the passage in question, your claim to have
>>> "refuted" anything is of the order of all your claims in this thread.

>> I have no interest in refuting anything in this matter. Your original
>> question pertained to the meaning of the math in Kleist's text. We have
>> achieved a rare consensus as to the likelihood of its meaninglessness.

> We certainly have a consensus that it doesn't mean what think it was
> meant to mean.

The subject of your subordinate clause has gone missing. Charity
mandates an interpolation of the first person singular pronoun. Of
course, I am operating on the assumption that you understand the
advantages of being corrected over being able to correct others.
(Gorgias, 458b)

>> At this point, the reader is warranted to withdraw the presumption of
>> charity from the author, inasmuch as the text lacks any markers of his
>> intent to describe a meaningless exchange.

> Nonsense. He's presenting a character who's talking math.

Not quite. His character is pretentiously gibbering math, which
suggests further eruptions of pretentious gibberish elsewhere, as
witness below his take on gravity and inertia.

>> On the contrary, the absurd
>> passages that you cited bear a strong presumption of Kleist's intent to
>> suggest something of profound importance with his mathematical similes.

> Here he goes again... the passage I cited does no such thing. In
> essence, the dancer says "the relationship is complicated, like that
> between [etc.]." Anything you want to say about either the author or the
> dancer is pure speculation, born not by the text but by your (rather
> odd) desire that it be damaging. I think the point is "Zeleny would have
> known better than this silly old Kleist!" Hey, if it rocks your boat.
> Just don't pass it off as reading.

More revisionism on your part.

On your last hermeneutic occasion, you informed us that all the dancer
was saying with his mathematical similes is that the relationship
between the puppeteer's finger movements and the Marionette's limb
movements wasn't immediately obvious. It is undisputed that according
to him, this relationship is "rather artful" or "ziemlich kuenstlich".
So now you are watering down your reading even further in telling us
that the dancer means to say that this relationship is complicated.
There are at least two problems here.

First off, the math the dancer cites is neither artful nor complicated.
If you claim the contrary, it behooves you to cite objective factors
that impute artfulness or complexity to the relations between a
hyperbola and its asymptote, or a number and its logarithm. And when I
ask for objectivity in these factors, I mean to rule out the excuses of
mathematical ignorance to be expected of garden variety humanities
majors such as Kleist and yourself.

But more importantly, as reinterpreted in your latest way, the text
compresses the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of
thought. You are reading Kleist as a flatulent hack, your protestations
to the contrary notwithstanding.

>> As I said, it causes a disappointment characteristic of attending to
>> productions by flatulent hacks, and a low grade thereof, at that. Not
>> only Goethe, but even Poe is devoid of howlers of this sort.

> I begin to see what you mean. Lady Macbeth left me deeply disappointed
> with Shakespeare's morals, too.

Surely you have been seeing my point for some time. Admitting it is
another matter. Stupidity is logically prior to morals. In other words,
an author that depicts stupid characters interacting stupidly in
matters of putative profundity is either pulling your leg or being
stupid himself. Which is it?

>>>> As for the rest
>>>> of your claim, you are making the same mistake that you are trying to
>>>> impute to me. In free indirect speech, the speaker is the narrator
>>>> paraphrasing the remarks of the dancer.

>>> Nope. He's not paraphrasing, he's rendering his words in indirect
>>> speech. German has a mood for that.

>> So does English.

> Well, no. It has some rudiments.

As I acknowledged elsewhere, I misspoke in correcting your grammar.
Like English, German has only four grammatical moods: the indicative,
the imperative, the conditional, and the subjunctive. Unlike English,
German marks some indirect contexts with the subjunctive mood normally
restricted to the past tense of the main verb. The stock examples are:
1. "Ich glaubte er wäre krank."
(I thought he be+3SG+IMPERF+SUBJ ill => "I thought he was ill.")
2. "Er sagte er wäre krank."
(he said he be+3SG+IMPERF+SUBJ ill => "He said he was ill.")
This aside, you are not catching up on my suggestion, presumably
confirmed by your own observation, to account for the markers in free
indirect speech, as per Leo Spitzer's analysis of pseudo-objective
motivation. If anything can save your obsequious reading of Kleist,
this just might be it.

>> "Gerade" and "ungerade" are terms of art in analytic
>> philosophy. I once had the pleasure of receiving Quine's gratitude for
>> correcting his published mistake in this matter.

> Thanks for sharing. It's good to know you're getting appreciated somewhere.

The pseudo-intellectual counterpart to the pilot fish of commerce is
the wannabe footnote to history. I am a footnote to Church and Quine.
Keep this up, and one day you might be known as a footnote to me.

>>>> Whereas the passage with which
>>>> you began this thread involves an additional elaboration of the
>>>> mathematical gibberish, relating in direct speech

>>> Hey, you got something right! It is indeed direct speech!

>> Rereading this thread should suffice to demonstrate that what you took
>> to be my errors exist only as products of your hostile
>> misunderstandings.

> Sure. Like your clever discovery of the word "indeed"!

Would that be anything like your retrograde erasure of that word from
the translation that you so generously furnished for our consumption?
Was there ever an occasion of your honestly acknowledging your mistake?

>>>> the dancer's
>>>> contradiction of the narrator's initial assumption that mechanical
>>>> control of the puppets was "something quite mindless, rather like
>>>> turning the crank on a hand organ."

>>>>>> Let us see you weasel out of the agreement implicit in the narrator's
>>>>>> report of his interlocutor's pseudointellectual gibberish,

>>>>> "Agreement implicit"? You're a clown, Zeleny. Would that be like
>>>>> Shakespeare's agreement implicit in presenting us with Polonius?

>>>> At issue is the agreement between the narrator and his interlocutor.

>>> Again, very good -- to the extent that you now seem to grasp that the
>>> narrator isn't Kleist. The agreement part is still nonsense, of course.

>> I think not, but this is fairly unimportant.

> It was, in fact, at the basis of your claims concerning both the
> narrator and Kleist.

It was one piece of evidence among many. Would your eminence condescend
to turn your scholarly efforts towards a translation that satisfies you
at this sublime stage of your academic career?

>>>>>> as expressed
>>>>>> in its adverbial characterization, "indeed".

>>>>> Lol. The text's written in German. There is no "indeed" anywhere in
>>>>> sight. There is a "zwar" (look it up), part of a sentence reported in
>>>>> indirect speech.

>>>> It does not take a profound insight into German syntax to infer that,
>>>> as reported in indirect discourse, Kleist's "zwar" appears to play an
>>>> assertoric role similar to the use of "à cause de" by Charles-Louis
>>>> Philippe,

>>> It wouldn't take profound insights into German either to infer that
>>> "zwar" refers to the green cheese of the moon. Neither would it be
>>> correct. While "zwar" can mean many things, here it's best translated as
>>> "on the one hand."

>> Kindly refer your beef with translating "zwar" as "indeed" to the
>> translation that you furnished earlier.

> I assumed you'd be sufficiently familiar with the pitfalls of literary
> translations available on the Internet. My apologies. As long as we're
> clear that "zwar" neither means "indeed" nor conveys the paraphraser's
> agreement. Which leaves you with nothing more than a literary character
> making a very lose comparison between finger-line and limb-curve on the
> one hand and asymptote and hyperbola on the other hand which is not in
> itself a mathematical claim of any sort. See, if you were capable of
> checking your unbecoming arrogance, your first assumption would be that
> a smart guy like Kleist who studied math at Frankfurt for a while may
> not lay claim to mathematical genius, but is entirely aware of the fact
> that the relationship between finger-movement and limb-movement cannot
> be the same as both the one between numbers and their logarithms and
> asymptote and hyperbola. To assume otherwise cannot reflect on anyone
> but yourself.

I make no assumptions here. On the other hand, it is hard to avoid the
observation that the relation of a number to its logarithm varies
inversely and out of proportion to any relation obtainable between the
respective motions of the puppeteer's fingers, of the puppet's center
of gravity, and of its extremities. Likewise, it hard to see what any
of them have in common with the relation between asymptote and
hyperbola. And inasmuch as that is the case, it is hard to avoid the
conclusion that Kleist is blowing smoke in the tradition that would in
due course inspire Jacques Lacan to hold forth on the penis:

"The erectile organ comes to symbolise the place of jouissance, not in
itself, or even in its form of an image, but a part lacking in the
desired image: that it is equivalent to the square root of minus 1 of
the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by
the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier."

>>>> i.e. ascribing a certain general applicability to life that
>>>> we are to take for granted. (At the risk of presuming too much about
>>>> your education, you must have been examined on your knowledge of Bally
>>>> and Spitzer.) Even so, I am willing to defer to your authority of a
>>>> native speaker, if you imagine this point to be dispositive in our
>>>> matter. Is it your contention that the narrator does anything but agree
>>>> with the dancer's mathematical postulation?

>>> It is my contention that Kleist throws suspicion on the dancer's theses
>>> throughout, sometimes in subtle ways that wouldn't emerge in a casual
>>> reading of a translation. The narrator, by contrast, is marked as a
>>> polite conversationalist throughout, certainly not as someone who agrees
>>> unconditionally. "I laughed. Indeed, I thought, mind cannot err where
>>> there is none." More importantly, however, Kleist takes care to portray
>>> the narrator as an old man -- "there is someone still alive now who
>>> witnessed this strange and unfortunate event."
>>> ...

>> Again, you are welcome to your credit as a native speaker to claim any
>> sort of subtlety that perishes in translation. I cannot see anything of
>> the sort.

> You cannot see that "there is someone still alive today who witnessed"
> is not the language of a young man?

No, not that. I cannot see Kleist throwing suspicion on the dancer's
theses. Doubtless my failure is due to the lack of subtlety in my ways,
the casual nature of my readings, and my reliance on the translation
that you supplied.

>> Certainly the reappearance of bogus math in the conclusion,
>> with a gratuitous and erroneous reference to infinity traversed by
>> intersecting lines, is of a piece with earlier abuses of reason.

> You are referring to "der Durchschnitt zweier Linien, auf der einen
> Seite eines Punkts, [findet sich] nach dem Durchgang durch das
> Unendliche, plötzlich wieder auf der andern Seite," I presume. What do
> you take that to mean? And if you take it to mean gibberish, why would
> it reflect on anybody but the dancer? Note that the narrator responds
> "somewhat distractedly," "ein wenig zerstreut." Hardly a rapturous
> audience.

I take it to invoke infinity gratuitously. I note also that the
narrator extends the metaphor to postulate "that we would have to eat
of the tree of knowledge a second time to fall back into the state of
innocence." Distracted or not, he seems to play along with the dancer's
affectation of mathematical reasoning by dignifying it with a Biblical
allegory.

>>>> Incidentally, you are absurdly misreading the text in concluding that
>>>> the strings of Kleist's hypothetical marionette are not fastened
>>>> anywhere but at a single point, which is its center of gravity. Aside
>>>> from the fact that neither the dancer nor the narrator makes any claims
>>>> to this effect, this arrangement is mechanically ineffectual. In order
>>>> to control the puppet's center of gravity, the puppeteer has to suspend
>>>> its body at least at three points, as demonstrated in the construction
>>>> manual referenced earlier by Lew Mammel.

>>> Lew thinks like an engineer, i.e. in lovely and useful ways. However,
>>> these marionettes are hypothetical ones. The dancer explicitly states
>>> that each movement has "one" point of gravity; he explicitly states that
>>> the threads are _not_ fastened to the limbs. Lew, I think, was referring
>>> to a point at the knee. The dancer makes fun of a movement reigned from
>>> the ellbow. More importantly, we are clear that the marionettes are
>>> allegorical figures, yah? We are also clear that the problem discussed
>>> is self-consciousness? Doubling?

>> You are fixating on truisms to infer a trite misreading.

> Zeleny, it's you who's forcing me to state the obvious so there can be
> at least some semblance of a shared ground for conversation here. I
> certainly lay no claim to having said anything even slightly un-obvious.
> Yet, in talking to someone who's earnestly trying to elucidate, nay
> correct!, a passage about a marionette both hypothetical and allegorical
> with reference to a construction drawing of an actual puppet, it is no
> longer clear what needs to be said and what does not.

True enough. At this point, it seems worth observing that hypothetical
constructions are nowise exempted from the criteria of feasibility,
whereas allegorical readings depend on support from literal meanings:
Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria,
Moralia quid agas, quo tendas anagogica.

>> Each object
>> has but a single center of gravity. Each object depends on its center
>> of gravity in its path through a trajectory. The net effect of gravity
>> on the dancer, as on the dancing puppet, is the same as if it were only
>> acting at the center of gravity, and not on all of its moving parts.

> Refer yourself to the hypothesis of the "antigrav" puppet, please.

Do you mean this passage?

Zudem, sprach er, haben diese Puppen den Vorteil, daß sie _antigrav_
sind. Von der Trägheit der Materie, dieser dem Tanze
entgegenstrebendsten aller Eigenschaften, wissen sie nichts: weil die
Kraft, die sie in die Lüfte erhebt, größer ist, als jene, die sie an
der Erde fesselte. Was würde unsre gute G... darum geben, wenn sie
sechzig Pfund leichter wäre, oder ein Gewicht von dieser Größe ihr
bei ihren Entrechats und Pirouetten, zu Hülfe käme? Die Puppen
brauchen den Boden nur, wie die Elfen, um ihn zu _streifen_, und den
Schwung der Glieder, durch die augenblickliche Hemmung neu zu beleben;
wir brauchen ihn, um darauf zu _ruhen_, und uns von der Anstrengung des
Tanzes zu erholen: ein Moment, der offenbar selber kein Tanz ist, und
mit dem sich weiter nichts anfangen läßt, als ihn möglichst
verschwinden zu machen.
-- Heinrich von Kleist, Über das Marionettentheater
http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/kleist/marionet/mario002.htm

"In addition," he said, "these puppets have the advantage of
countergravity. For they know nothing of the inertia of matter, which
of all properties is the most obstructive to the dance: for the force
that lifts them into the air is greater than that which pulls them to
the ground. What would our dear Madame G- not give to be lighter by
sixty pounds, or for a counterweight of this size to help her with her
entrechats and pirouettes? Puppets, like elves, require the ground only
to touch on, and by that momentary obstruction to reanimate the spring
of their limbs; while we require it to rest on, and to recover from the
exertions of the dance: a moment which is clearly not dance in itself,
and with which there is nothing to be done except to make it disappear
by all possible means."
-- translated by Philip B. Miller
http://www-class.unl.edu/ahis498b/parts/week9/puppet.html

I confess being daunted by the task of explaining the sub-Arindamian
stupidity embodied herein. To do no more than scratch its surface:
1. The puppets cannot enjoy the advantage of "countergravity" /
"antigrav" unless they are located in orbit, or experience free fall.
2. Under no physical circumstances can they "know nothing of the
inertia of matter", which is determined by their mass, not by their
weight.
More grist for the mill. The dancer is a supercilious ignoramus. How is
this fact reflected in the text? To relate this to another cultural
icon that has oh-so-much in common with the persona you affect
hereabouts, unless we are laughing with Kleist, we are laughing at him.
But Kleist does not seem to be laughing.

ObMovie: Happiness

>> The puppet suspended at a single point is a mostly undamped driven
>> pendulum, with its center of gravity freely oscillating directly below
>> its point of suspension. Its rotation around the axis of its point of
>> suspension to its center of gravity cannot be controlled. As I read
>> Kleist's text, it contains no suggestion of deviating from the normal
>> pattern of suspension referenced by Lew. Rather, his point is to
>> downplay the need for minute individual manipulation of the strings
>> controlling the puppet's limbs.

> "Da der Maschinist nun schlechthin, vermittelst des Drahtes oder Fadens,
> keinen andern Punkt in seiner Gewalt hat, als diesen: so sind alle
> übrigen Glieder, was sie sein sollen, tot, reine Pendel, und folgen dem
> bloßen Gesetz der Schwere"
>
> "Since the machinist now has no other point in his power than this, via
> the wire the string: so all other limbs are what they ought to be,
> dead, pure pendula, and merely follow the law of gravity."

As Lew repeatly pointed out, this gives you no reason to believe that
Kleist is referring to anything other than normally constructed
marionettes, as opposed to the technique of their manipulation.

>> http://monet.physik.unibas.ch/~elmer/pendulum/index.html
>>
>> In the event, the net effect of the forces imparted by the puppeteer's
>> gross manipulation is to cause its center of gravity to deviate from a
>> trajectory that is at the most a second order curve, albeit a parabola
>> rather than Kleist's ellipse. But in denying that each member of the
>> puppet, in the various motions of its dance, has to be placed and
>> pulled individually by the puppeteer, the dancer does not deny the
>> existence of threads fastened to its limbs, let alone the need for
>> multiple threads to control its body.

> "keinen anderen Punkt," "no other point." "Drahtes," wire (sg.),
> "Fadens," string (sg.). You can quibble with his take on construction
> all you like (you're not the first, after all...), within this text, it
> is what it is. It is clear that the narrator has his doubts as well.
> When the dancer begins to talk about the wonders of artificial limbs,
> the narrator challenges him "jokingly": "Ich äußerte, scherzend, daß er
> ja, auf diese Weise, seinen Mann gefunden habe. Denn derjenige Künstler,
> der einen so merkwürdigen Schenkel zu bauen imstande sei, würde ihm
> unzweifelhaft auch eine ganze Marionette, seinen Forderungen gemäß,
> zusammensetzen können." "I said, jokingly, that he had found his man
> that way. For the same artist/artisan, who was capable of building such
> a remarkable thigh/calf, could, without doubt, build him a whole
> marionette according to his demands." The dancer reacts by looking at
> the floor "betreten" (embarrassed).

Der Vorteil? Zuvörderst ein negativer, mein vortrefflicher Freund,
nämlich dieser, daß sie sich niemals _zierte_. - *Denn Ziererei
erscheint, wie Sie wissen, wenn sich die Seele (vis motrix) in irgend
einem andern Punkte befindet, als in dem Schwerpunkt der Bewegung.* Da
der Maschinist nun schlechthin, vermittelst des Drahtes oder Fadens,
keinen andern Punkt in seiner Gewalt hat, als diesen: so sind alle
übrigen Glieder, was sie sein sollen, tot, reine Pendel, und folgen
dem bloßen Gesetz der Schwere; eine vortreffliche Eigenschaft, die man
vergebens bei dem größesten Teil unsrer Tänzer sucht.

"The advantage? First of all, my good friend, a negative one: namely
that it would be incapable of affectation. For affectation, as you
know, appears when the soul (vis motrix) is located at any point other
than the center of gravity of a movement. Now because, with his wires
and strings, it is this very point and no other that the puppeteer
controls, all remaining members are, as they should be, dead, pure
pendulums, which follow the basic law of gravity -- a marvelous
quality, which we look for in vain in most of our dancers."
-- translated by Philip B. Miller

Once again, "it is this very point and no other that the puppeteer
controls" is a matter of his technique, not of his puppet's
construction.

>> Yes, the upshot is to reflect a watered-down rebuttal of the Cartesian
>> ideas of the unitary self, presumably derived from the arguments in the
>> Paralogisms. Further, you might be able to read it as a reaction
>> against Kant's own postulations and conclusions within the tradition of
>> homo duplex. I just cannot see it as very profound. But to my mind,
>> Kant's proper place on the scale of intellectual merit does not go
>> beyond scraping *** off Descartes' boots.

> As I said, if that posture rocks your boat -- wouldn't want to spoil the
> pleasure.

How unlike you to you sell yourself short.
"My main amusement is to piss people off."
-- Silke-Maria Weineck, 2003/07/11

That is the problem with you as a would-be German ironist. The only
ones worth their salt, as witness Henri Heine and Karl Kraus, have a
little Jew in them, and clearly not in the manner that you claim to
have in yourself. The rest of you are powerless to overcome the
cultural predilection that I referenced earlier.

Just as Hattie unwittingly corroborates every misogynistic cliché, so
you take pains to embody every Teutonic stereotype. What do you think
Winnie meant in telling that the Hun was either at your feet or at your
throat? He was calling you a nation of lackeys. Replace the serviette
with the sword to turn the servant into the soldier "just following
orders". The ethos of scholarship is nowhere to be seen in your realm.
And that is where you act so happy to make your home.

Michael Zeleny@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/

.

Loading