Time Magazine’s annual “Person of the Year” announcement is, year after year, grossly misunderstood.

There was plenty of outrage earlier this month when a London storefront revealed sidewalk spikes meant to keep the homeless from getting too cozy.

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There was plenty of outrage earlier this month when a London storefront revealed sidewalk spikes meant to keep the homeless from getting too cozy.

The BBC children’s television programme Teletubbies is, evidently, based upon an SF conceit. But how meaningful is it to call it SF? Whilst conceding science-fictional elements to the show, most viewers, I suppose, would not think of it as belonging to the SF genre. And yet there is a point in making the identification.

The Teletubbies live in Teletubbyland, a sort of hi-tech hobbiton of green fields and hills, dotted with coloured flowers and grazing rabbits, under a bright blue sky. The four Teletubbies themselves live in a sunken dome, tended by technological gadgets of various sorts: a robotic vacuum-cleaner called ‘Nu-nu’ who cleans up all messes, food-producing and other machines, and periscopes that rise spontaneously from the turf to talk or sing to the Teletubbies.

The ’tubbies are differentiated from one another in various ways, and each has a favourite toy or prop. They are, in descending order of size: Tinky-Winky (who is purple, his antenna a triangle shape, his favourite ‘prop’ a handbag); Dipsy (lime green, his antenna a straight-up phallic thrust, his favourite prop an enormous black-and-white top hat); La-La (yellow, her antenna curled like a pig’s tail, her prop a ball); and Po, the littlest of them (red, his antenna a circle, his prop a scooter). The show’s conceit is that these curious space-alien-creatures represent toddlers at different stages of development, such that Tinky-Winky has the greatest (although still severely limited) linguistic capabilities, and Po talks in baby-talk. They are also differentiated in terms of character: they all have racially ‘white’ faces and hands, except for Dipsy who is racially ‘black’ (quite apart from his pimp hat, Dipsy adopts rather patronisingly stereotypical hip-hop dance postures). La-La likes to sing. Po likes to ride around on her scooter. All four of these beings have television screens inset into their bellies: which is, of course, the feature that gives the show its name.

We need to understand what philosophers in the Middle Ages, from Italy to India to China, already understood perfectly well: Money is not a thing, and is certainly not a scarce resource. Money is a promise. And it is a promise we keep to those we value and break to those we do not. In Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain, sovereign-debt default seems ever more likely. If it occurs, then what will happen? Certain promises will be kept, and others will be broken. As we learn from politicians every day, it is rarely possible to keep all promises exactly as one has made them. Today, in the United Kingdom, many politicians are saying, “I know I was elected on a solemn pledge not to raise tuition fees, but now that I’m in power I realize that was unrealistic. We will have to triple them."

Are signs and meanings just as vital to living things as enzymes and tissues? Liz Else investigates a science in the making EVERY so often, something shows up on the New Scientist radar that we just can't identify easily. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a brand new type of flying machine that we are going to have to study closely? That was our reaction when we first heard about a small conference held in June at the philosophy department of the Portuguese Catholic University in Braga. There, a group of biologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, information technologists and other scholars from all over the world gathered to discuss some revolutionary ideas for developing the hitherto obscure field of biosemiotics.

Jacques Rancière prepares for us a parable. A student who is illiterate, after living a fulfilled life without text, one day decides to teach herself to read. Luckily she knows a single poem by heart and procures a copy of that poem, presumably from a trusted source, by which to work. By comparing her knowledge, sign by sign, word by word, with the poem she can, Rancière believes, finally piece together a foundational understanding of her language: “From this ignoramus, spelling out signs, to the scientist who constructs hypotheses, the same intelligence is always at work – an intelligence that translates signs into other signs and proceeds by comparisons and illustrations in order to communicate its intellectual adventures and understand what another intelligence is endeavoring to communicate to it. This poetic labour of translation is at the heart of all learning.” The Emancipated Spectator (2008)

What interests me in Rancière’s example is not so much the act of translation as the possibility of mis-translation. Taken in light of The Ignorant Schoolmaster we can assume that Rancière is aware of the wide gap that exists between knowing something and knowing enough about something for it to be valuable. But what distinction can we uncover between the ‘true’ and the ‘false’, hell, even between the ‘true’ and ‘almost true’? How does one calculate the value of what is effectively a mistake? Error appears to be a crucial component of Rancière’s position. In a sense, Rancière is positing a world that has from first principles always uncovered itself through a kind of decoding. A world in which subjects “translate signs into other signs and proceed by comparison and illustration”. Now forgive me for side-stepping a little here, but doesn’t that sound an awful lot like biological development? Here’s a paragraph from Richard Dawkins (worth his salt as long as he is talking about biology): “Think about the two qualities that a virus, or any sort of parasitic replicator, demands of a friendly medium, the two qualities that make cellular machinery so friendly towards parasitic DNA, and that make computers so friendly towards computer viruses. These qualities are, firstly, a readiness to replicate information accurately, perhaps with some mistakes that are subsequently reproduced accurately; and, secondly, a readiness to obey instructions encoded in the information so replicated.” Viruses of the Mind (1993)

Hidden amongst Dawkins’ words, I believe, we find an interesting answer to the problem of mis-translation I pose above. A mistake is useless if accuracy is your aim, but what if your aim is merely to learn something? To enrich and expand the connections that exist between your systems of knowledge. As Dawkins alludes to above, it is beneficial for life that errors do exist and are propagated by biological systems. Too many copying errors and all biological processes would be cancerous, mutating towards oblivion. Too much error management (what in information theory would be metered by a coded ‘redundancy‘) and biological change, and thus evolution, could never occur. Simply put, exchange within and between systems is almost valueless unless change, and thus error, is possible within the system. At the scale Rancière exposes for us there are two types of value: firstly, the value of repeating the message (the poem) and secondly, the value of making an error and thus producing entirely new knowledge. In information theory the value of a message is calculated by the amount of work saved on the part of the receiver. That is, if the receiver were to attempt to create that exact message, entirely from scratch. In his influential essay, Encoding, Decoding (1980), Stuart Hall maps a four-stage theory of “linked but distinctive moments” in the circuit of communication:

production circulation use (consumption) reproduction

John Corner further elaborates on these definitions:

the moment of encoding: ‘the institutional practices and organizational conditions and practices of production’; the moment of the text: ‘the… symbolic construction, arrangement and perhaps performance… The form and content of what is published or broadcast’; and the moment of decoding: ‘the moment of reception [or] consumption… by… the reader/hearer/viewer’ which is regarded by most theorists as ‘closer to a form of “construction”‘ than to ‘the passivity… suggested by the term “reception”‘

(source) At each ‘moment’ a new set of limits and possibilities arises. This means that the way a message is coded/decoded is not the only controlling factor in its reception. The intended message I produce, for instance, could be circulated against those intentions, or consumed in a way I never imagined it would be. What’s more, at each stage there emerges the possibility for the message to be replicated incorrectly, or, even more profoundly, for a completely different component of the message to be taken as its defining principle. Let’s say I write a letter, intending to send it to my newly literate, ignoramus friend. The letter contains a recipe for a cake I have recently baked. For some reason my letter is intercepted by the CIA,who are convinced that the recipe is a cleverly coded message for building a bomb. At this stage in the communication cycle the possibility for mis-translation to occur is high. Stuart Hall would claim is that this shows how messages are determined by the social and institutional power-relations via which they are encoded and then made to circulate. Any cake recipe can be a bomb recipe if pushed into the ‘correct’ relationships. Every ignoramus, if they have the right teacher, can develop knowledge that effectively lies beyond the teacher’s. What it is crucial to understand is that work is done at each “moment” of the message. As John Corner states, decoding is constructive: the CIA make the message just as readily as I did when I wrote and sent it. These examples are crude, no doubt, but they set up a way to think about exchange (communication and information) through its relationships, rather than through its mediums and methods. The problem here that requires further examination is thus: What is ‘value’ and how does one define it within a relational model of exchange? Like biological evolution, information theory is devoid of intentionality. Life prospers in error, in noise and mistakes. Perhaps, as I am coming to believe, if we want to maximise the potential of art, of writing and other systems of exchange, we first need to determine their inherent redundancy. Or, more profoundly, to devise ways to maximise or even increase that redundancy. To determine art’s redundancy, and then, like Rancière’s ignoramus, for new knowledge to emerge through mis-translation and mis-relation.

Extract from 'Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes', page 46

Signage—the kind we see on city streets, in airports, on highways, in hospital corridors—is the most useful thing we pay no attention to. When it works well, it tells us where we are (as when an Interstate marker assures us we're on the right highway) and it helps us to get where we want to go (as when an airport banner directs us to our gate). When it fails, we miss trains, we're late to appointments, we spend hours pacing the indistinguishable floors of underground parking garages, muttering to ourselves in mounting frustration and fury. And in some cases, especially where automobiles are involved, the consequences of bad signage can be fatal.

Bad signs can send perfectly ordinary citizens into spirals of obsession. Take Richard Ankrom, a Los Angeles artist who thought the junction of the 110 freeway and the 5 freeway was badly marked. In 2001, he put on an outfit that looked like the ones Caltrans highway workers wore, climbed up onto a freeway gantry, and mounted an aluminum sign he'd manufactured himself according to state specs. The sign stayed up for nine months without anyone noticing what he'd done; when the story leaked to the press and Caltrans finally cottoned on, the agency left the sign up for eight more years (eventually replacing it with one of their own that served the same function).

Pharaoh Khufu intends to secure his riches beyond the grave, and into the afterlife. He captures the greatest architect known in his kingdom, and forces him – through a threat to his entire people – to build him an impenetrable tomb: a Pyramid no thief can plunder. The architect sets to work, knowing that upon completion of the tomb he himself will be sealed inside with the dead Pharaoh. How is it possible to build the most secret catacomb, a labyrinth impossible to breach, without passing on its secret through the workers who build it?

In the classic Hollywood film, Land of the Pharaohs, such a conundrum is posed. The architect needs a team of workers that Khufu can trust, to construct the mechanism by which the tomb will close itself off to eternity. The Pharaoh has the solution: the workers he gives the architect have had their tongues cut out. In exchange for their devotion the slaves will accompany the architect and Khufu to the afterlife. No secret will pass their lips.

How do we pass on a message in a world with impenetrable borders? And in turn, how do we determine its secure transmission? The codes we devise become useless at certain horizons: if the slave cannot speak, he cannot exchange; if a being from another land does not know our language, it cannot understand us; if a message is encrypted, one must also pass on the method to crack it.

Sometimes the codes we devise to enslave, become apparatus in their own demise...

The tongue-less slave is still a liability in a literate society; in turn, a literate slave is a still liability in a digitised society. At every stage in the development of communication technologies human subjects have been relinquished power of one kind, only for a power of another kind to evolve and liberate them once again. The human body is the central locality for all information exchange. Even today, with our writing technologies, our radios, computers and nano-particles, it is the human form that dictates all particulars of scale and substance. What matters now is not the tongue – an organ reduced of its power by hieroglyphics and alphabets – yet in order to silence, corrupt regimes and over-zealous governments still effectively mutilate their subjects. In the West, information monoliths such as Google and Wikipedia help us mediate the space between discrete, complex reams of data. It is as if, in the modern age, to spite its people all China needed to do was cut off the equivalent of their tongue, building up around them a labyrinthine firewall that determines their silence; that reduces their identities to the status of tongueless slaves.

Sometimes to properly conceal something, one must devise a better way to encode it...

Page Du Bois, in her book, Torture and Truth, posits the human body as the primary node of information exchange. She recounts a tale in Herodotus' Histories. Histiaeus shaves the head of his most trusted slave and tattoos on his scalp a message urging his alley to revolt. Once the slave's hair grows back he is sent on his mission. If captured he is incapable of betraying his master: he does not know the message, nor could he understand it if he saw it. He merely knows to tell the receiver to shave his head upon arrival, a fact that would be hidden from any third party who attempted to intercept the message. This one extra layer of protection is an act of encoding; a slight of hand in the trick of communication. The slave is the medium of transmission: his knowledge is the code necessary to decrypt the message, rather than the message itself.

During the time of Histiaeus the human body was the focal point of most human action. We hunted, or worked the land by man power. We conversed, exchanged, delineated and deranged our culture with the hand, the tongue, the eye – all within the small horizon of the single human form. We worked in man-power before horse-power, steam-power before nuclear-power – each shift delineating a phase transition in information states – there can be no Chief without a Chiefdom; no King without a Kingdom. If I was the master of the tattooed slave (let's not believe for too long that this is my wish) I would extend Histiaeus' coding trick even further: sending the message on the scalp of a slave whose whole body has been tattooed, allowing the hair to grow over the part of his body where the true message lies. In any system of exchange, noise has the greatest power to conceal - whether intentionally or not. Making full use of the medium of transmission is the mark of a truly uncrackable system.

But as the distribution of our information systems grows wider – from the tongue, through the quill, to the printing press, and the internet – the importance of the body as a foundation for action remains. What method of distribution would we use to communicate with an intelligence completely alien to our own? Waggling your tongue at them may express a desire to communicate, but it would not transmit your message. Handing them a printed and bound book, perhaps replete with pictures, photographs and diagrams, might spark their interest for a moment, but no deep understanding between you would emerge. At present, organisations like SETI rely on very simple repeated patterns in their broadcasts to the stars. But a sequence of well timed dots and dashes can only express the existence of an intelligence - it is incapable of delivering a particular message. SETI broadcast these simple sequences because if any alien race were to intercept our messages they would, by definition, be incapable of interpreting the message from the code, or the code from the background noise inherent in our transmission. How do you determine what a tongue is trying to express if you don't even know what a tongue is?

Sometimes the method chosen to encode something, determines the impossibility of its comprehension...

In 1972 NASA launched the Pioneer 10 probe into space. Its objective was to study “the interplanetary and planetary magnetic fields... the atmosphere of Jupiter and some of its satellites,” subjects that required a distant communication hub – a device cast further from the human body than any before it.

After plotting its proposed trajectory through our solar system NASA researchers noted that in a matter of a few decades Pioneer 10 would become the first man-made object to pass the orbit of Pluto. It was decided that to make symbolic use of this opportunity the probe should be fitted with a message: a way for an extra terrestrial civilisation to retrace Pioneer's steps if ever one were to come across it. The resulting golden plaque, now streaming through the outer Oort Cloud of our solar system, is one of the most anthropocentric objects ever created. As art historian Ernst Gombrich noted a few years after its launch, the multiple scales and symbolic indicators etched onto the plaque would be almost impossible for a true 'alien' intelligence to decode. Alien minds encased in alien bodies wouldn't even be able to separate the code from the message:

“Reading an image, like the reception of any other message, is dependent on prior knowledge of possibilities; we can only recognise what we know. Even the sight of the awkward naked figures in the illustration cannot be separated in our mind from our knowledge. We know that feet are for standing and eyes are for looking and we project this knowledge onto these configurations, which would look 'like nothing on earth' without this prior information. It is this information alone that enables us to separate the code from the message; we see which of the lines are intended as contours and which are intended as conventional modelling. Our 'scientifically educated' fellow creatures in space might be forgiven if they saw the figures as wire constructs with loose bits and pieces hovering weightlessly in between. Even if they deciphered this aspect of the code, what would they make of the woman's right arm that tapers off like a flamingo's neck and beak? The creatures are 'drawn to scale against the outline of the spacecraft,' but if the recipients are supposed to understand foreshortening, they might also expect to see perspective and conceive the craft as being further back, which would make the scale of the manikins minute. As for the fact that 'the man has his right hand raised in greeting' (the female of the species presumably being less outgoing), not even an earthly Chinese or Indian would be able to correctly interpret this gesture from his own repertory.”

Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion

In communication terms sharing the same kind of body is identical to living the same kind of code. Communication needs at least two parties, it needs a message, and more likely than not it needs a medium of transmission. At all points on this schema there is the potential for corruption, for noise to seep into the system. But lest we forget that without the same binary matrix, no computer would be able to interpret any other. The body too is a coding matrix. It represents a shared scale, it is composed of the same states of matter and bound within each of its cells one will find very similar coiled structures of DNA, encoding the sequences that determine each body's shape, status and character. On Earth the bodies that result from these codes are incredibly similar, whether what results is a fruit fly, a horse or a human. We are slaves to these codes. And everything we intend to say, everything we fail to say, everything that our masters try to restrict us from saying, exists as a consequence of the bodies that compose us.

Sometimes the message only lasts as long as the system it upholds...

The architect and the silenced slaves make their way to the centre of the Great Pyramid, carrying the body of Pharaoh Khufu as they descend. As the labyrinth clamps shut behind them – a code designed to wipe out all evidence of itself as the catacombs collapse – one question looms large: what exactly were the riches the architect and his companions worked so hard to protect?

"At the extreme limits of empiricism meaning is totally plunged into noise, the space of communication is granular, dialogue is condemned to cacophony: the transmission of communication is chronic transformation."

Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science and Philosophy

In 1972 NASA sent into deep space an interstellar probe called Pioneer 10. It bore a golden plaque.

The art historian Ernst Gombrich offers an insightful commentary on this:

  The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has equipped a deep-space probe with a pictorial message 'on the off-chance that somewhere on the way it is intercepted by intelligent scientifically educated beings.' It is unlikely that their effort was meant to be taken quite seriously, but what if we try? These beings would first of all have to be equipped with 'receivers' among their sense organs that respond to the same band of electromagnetic waves as our eyes do. Even in that unlikely case they could not possibly get the message. Reading an image, like the reception of any other message, is dependent on prior knowledge of possibilities; we can only recognize what we know. Even the sight of the awkward naked figures in the illustration cannot be separated in our mind from our knowledge. We know that f

This layered process of figuring out what someone else is thinking — of mind reading — is both a common literary device and an essential survival skill. Why human beings are equipped with this capacity and what particular brain functions enable them to do it are questions that have occupied primarily cognitive psychologists.

Now English professors and graduate students are asking them too. They say they’re convinced science not only offers unexpected insights into individual texts, but that it may help to answer fundamental questions about literature’s very existence: Why do we read fiction? Why do we care so passionately about nonexistent characters? What underlying mental processes are activated when we read?

Ms. Zunshine, whose specialty is 18th-century British literature, became familiar with the work of evolutionary psychologists while she was a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the 1990s. “I thought this could be the most exciting thing I could

Sacrifice, speech, writing and art: I am interested in the different ways in which a sacrifice, a sacrament, a spoken word and a written word act as signifiers. The notion for instance that the sacrament, at the point of its acceptance, is understood as becoming the signified. What can you tell me / what has been written about the notions of sacrifice and their relationship to speech, art and the technologies of writing? I am at the very early stages of writing on these themes (so forgive any gross generalisations I make here).

I have a sort of vague notion that speech in a pre-literate society acts in a similar way to the sacrament, i.e. that the spoken word somehow becomes what it signifies (the mimesis of pre-literate speech is imminent). Writing on the other hand acts at a distance, and the notions of referral seem to be quite different when a meaning is ascribed to an iconographic or phonetic indicator carved in stone or written on paper. I am also interested in how art and the sacrifice have functioned through the ages.

I guess I would like your thoughts. AskMefi has never let me down in the past!

• Has anything specific been written on the move from sacrificial mimesis to written mimesis?

• Any interesting writings on sacrifice as it relates to art, language and literature?

Thanks in advance