Before the internet could be properly imbedded in our dreams archetype-ally, Mark Stefik edited a 1997 book that treated the Global Information Structure (aka Internet) as an inevitability of our mythic-knowledge-structures, like mandalas. Strange, I don't remember dreaming about anything like the internet before it appeared. A weird volume that overuses positivity so ruthlessly, you might think it's propaganda. The link below is the full book preview (the full book minus some pages). Begins with Vannevar Bush's prophetic essay on the I-way.

http://www.worldcat.org/title/internet-dreams-archetypes-myths-and-metaphors/oclc/60140991/viewport

The Matrix, a self-reflective progeny no less alert than Lucas' first Star Wars, was culled from equal parts THX-1138 and Tron. Both films (Tron and THX) shared unique cybernetic ratios of digital journeys far before the dominance of the PC and are brilliantly contrasted in chroma styles, hues, dialogue nuances and physicality versus 'virtual' or software avatar'd beings. What they shared was more crucial, both failed to make their budgets back, both posed anonymous guards with long poles, both involved escaping speeding bikes, and pivotally, both films lack a coherent and sustained crescendo. Flynn merely did what Neo does, he jumps without fear, but with little build-up to get an audience to root. Tron is the almost-masterpiece, and is perhaps the most informed animated film of the 80's. Lisberger and company take the Disney tower hostage for a late summer in 1982 and alter the rules by cutting away before morphs and tweens finish, pretending as if these glistening lights in transition are normal everyday happenings, subtley they advanced the craft of the virtually exotic.  Now forced to eat its own children (The Matrixes) made at other studios (Warner Bros), Disney has crafted the Tron reboot as a 'legacy' film with falsely iconic hacker Flynn and child now dealing with a more complex INNER. The strains of adding credibility shows in Legacy's design choices, what was hallucinatory as digital is now solid, credible. As a film forced to compete somewhat with its spawn, Legacy now has to make note of The Matrix's possibilities, and since the rules in Tron:Legacy cannot change: it's much easier to suggest them visually (note the furniture overlapping). Tron's Bally-Midway arcade game outgrossed the film 10:1.

below, taking it too literally, too early: tron: LEG-acy

The nearer edge of the subjective cuts across and includes part of our present time, viz. the moment of inception, but most of our present belongs in the Hopi scheme to the objective realm and so is indistinguishable from our past. There is also a verb form, the INCEPTIVE which refers to this EDGE of emergent manifestation in the reverse way-as belonging to the objective, at the edge at which objectivity is obtained; this is used to indicate beginning/starting, and in most cases there is no difference apparent in the translation from the similar use of the expective. But, at certain crucial points, significant and fundamental differences appear. The inceptive, referring to the objective and the result side, and not like the expective to the subjective and causal side, implies the ending of the work of causation in the same breath that it states the beginning of manifestation.
- BENJAMIN LEE WHORF AN AMERICAN INDIAN MODEL OF THE UNIVERSE

Since 1977, UT Austin has hosted The Maya Meetings, a four day annual workshop of epigraphic research, where teams and individual students and professors descend upon the Mesoamerican Center and pour over their year of research and offer papers and discussions of what decipherment has occurred. Of course the workshop has overlapped with the SXSW festival, allowing the participants to study the Maya by day and absorb the cutting edge of music film and recently interactive by night. This year, however, the meetings have been moved to Casa Herrera in Antigua, Guatemala, a sister facility of the Mesoamerican Center and will then alternate between there and Austin to ensure the linguistic distances between glyph and word are drawn closer together.

See you in Antigua!

Perhaps the greatest scholar you never knew, Charles Laughlin is at the vanguard where neuroscience meets anthropology; his major contribution is a theory of consciousness-phenomenology he posited called biogen structuralism. One of his key arguments is that semiotics is a backwoods plateau in philosophy, that it isn't aiming for completion nor can it become self-aware, and it cannot export accurate data and analysis for a collective since it is based purely in observation. In a way he considers semiotics fictional, and he has considerable arguments based in neural science, stemming from structural patterns that emerge after the stage of observation.

Why is this important? Because it indicates we may have diverged from evolving thought and turned instead to a fashion of thought - semioticians and most current day philosophers may be no different than fashion designers, except their slender lines and curvy metaphors are set in text, the caress of opinions now institutionalized into an academic jet-set. All components and agencies for the semiotician's discussion, gender, class, skin color, ethnicity, are not considered biologically or even neurologically (which would make us examine their uses and misuses as tools) they are instead viewed as values, mostly through a cross-lateral of emotion and logic, data like cultural values which shift individually. Science under this lens should be viewing current-day philosophy as hopelessly medieval, as the pulses of egos merely vaunting for attention.

Laughlin is one of the few crossover talents between myth and science since he explores storytelling, metaphor and memory as neural function. He can cogently describe formulas of thinking and memory and how they are structured by referencing neuroscience, he's a scientist's Oliver Sacks. In his emeritus stage, his two central collaborators no longer living, and with his central thesis book out of print, Laughlin continues to explore the possibility we may have overlooked central tenants to our evolution by ignoring the basic evidence of what our brains are showing us. His recent blogposts, though a year old, are critical, and deal with something he labels The Crisis. By dissolving semiosis as a shared tool, Laughlin alters the late 20th century's order, he forces us to look at thinking we may have missed: unconscious, or hidden structuralism rather than the conscious semiosis that was being taught and formalized into academic conditioning. In a way, conspiracy fantacists like Robert Anton Wilson, myth seekers like Carlos Casteneda, and novel historians like Michel Foucault were each operating with a glass ceiling, they were stylists scratching at the edges of science, where analogue and vast 'formulas' remained invisible in the dark, they themselves embodied key archetypes (the primary) as they perceived others (secondary). Wilson and Casteneda don't claim to know the rationale for their observations, it seems as if they've stumbled across their prose, even their subjects. Foucault on the other hand is a detective by choice. His semiosis is the least-knowing perhaps since he claims to comprehend it so well that he prepares for his own ridcule in preface to the Archeology of Knowledge by defying it in advance. Foucault's descendants, articulators like Zizek and Delueze, are probably getting more least by the day.

Read on and break your chains.

http://charleslaughlin.blogspot.com/

http://www.biogeneticstructuralism.com/index2.htm

This pivotal work is available on his site, An Ibis in the Tree, here previewed below, our underline.

It is our view that the emergence of structuralism in a science is a mark of its maturity.  What do we mean by structuralism in that sense?  We mean that observables are explained by reference to non-observed principles, schemes, operators or structures, the activities of which produce, perhaps even cause, the observables (see Ackoff and Emery 1972 for the distinction between “cause” and “produce”).  Prior to the emergence of a structuralist theory base, a science tends to be pretty much a natural history of observables (see Brown 1963).  You collect all the butterflies you find, pin them to a wall, and then you try to order them in some way.  They all have blue wings, all red wings, or are all big butterflies, medium-sized or little butterflies, butterflies with a black thorax, brown thorax, and so on.  This was the state of biology before Darwin, the state of chemistry before the periodic table, and the state of physics before Newton’s Principia.  This was also the state of anthropology before structuralism.  Anthropological theory today has an unsettling, unsatisfying effect upon many of us unless it has some kind of structural underpinning to it, and this is a sure sign of the maturation of the discipline. 

            This means that in some sense the explanation of observables is by reference to unobserved operations.  For semiotic structuralists these unobservables are usually formulated by deduction from abstracted patterns of similarity in observables.  Similar patterns in observables lead to the deduction of the structures underlying them and that produce or cause them.  So Levi-Strauss likens the relationship between “mechanical models” (or principles of reason) and observables (like patterns of elements and relations in myths or symphonies) to the relationship between the camshaft in a machine that produces jigsaw puzzles and the puzzles themselves.  The analyst is no longer interested in the jigsaw puzzles once he has deduced the shape or configuration of the camshaft.  It is the task of science to get at the camshaft.  In the last volume of Mythologique (1971), he admits that the camshaft must have something to do with the human brain.  But a mere admission of relevance is insufficient from our point of view to preclude him being classed as a semiotic structuralist because he only gives lip service to the neurosciences.  His theory remains uninformed by the neurosciences and the methodology he uses, which is almost totally deductive from patterns in cultural texts, treats the matter of mind as though the brain itself was not also an observable.  In other words, he makes the mistake that Jean Piaget, Earl Count and others do not make, being trained as they were in biology. 

Who is Geoffrey Burbidge?