Myst Thesis Intro Notes

S/Z

 * "Our evaluation can be linked only to a practice, and this is practice is that of writing. On the one hand, there is what it is possible to write: what is within the the practice of the writer and what has left it: which texts I would consent to write (to re-write), to desire, to put forth as a force in this world of mine? What evaluation find is percisely this value: what can be written (rewritten) today: the writerly. Why is the writerly our value? Because the goa of the literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text." -- Page 4


 * In this ideal text, the networks are many and interact, without any of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds..." - 5


 * ".. the writerly text is Ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world (the world as function, is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism)..." - 5


 * warns against "arranging all meanings of a text around the hearth of denotation (the herth: center, guardian, refuge, light of truth)." 7


 * Connotation is determined by two spaces: a sequential space, a series of orders, a space subject to the successivity of sentences, in which meaning proliferates by layering; and an agglomerative space, certain areas of the text correlating other meanings outside the material text and, with them, forming "nebluae" of signifieds. -- 8


 * I is not an innocent subject, anterior to the text, one which subsequently deal with the text as it would with an object to dismantle or a site to occupy. -- 10


 * This "I" which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other texts, or codes which are infinite, or more precisely, lost (whose origin is lost). -- 10


 * I am not hidden within the text, I am simply irrecoverable from it. -- 10


 * To read is to find meanings, and to find meanings is to name them; but these named meanings are swept toward other names... I name, I unname, I rename: so the text passes: it is a nomination in the course of becoming, a metonymic labor" -- 11


 * The commentary on a single text text is not a contingent activity, assigned to the reassuring alibi of the "concrete" ... it is never anything but the decomposition (in the cinematographic sense) of the work of reading: a slow motion, neither wholly image nor wholly analysis..." -- 12-13


 * Lexias --> "brief, continuous framgments" "units of reading" "arbitrary" "best possible space to observe meanings" "each lexia should have at most three or four meanings to be enumerated" -- 13 - 14


 * "the commentator traces through the text certain zones of reading, in order to observe, therein them migration of meanings the outcroppings of codes, the passage of citations" -- 14


 * "The commentary, based on the affirmation of the plural, cannot therefore work with "respect" to the text; the tutor text will ceaselessly be broken, interrupted without any regard forts natural divisions (syntactical, rhetorical, anecdotic)" -- 15


 * "We must further accept one last freedom: that of reading the text as if it had already been read." -15


 * "the "first" version of a reading must be able to be its last" -- 15


 * "Re-reading is no longer consumption, but play" -- 16

Kant & the Platypus

 * "Out of prudence I decided to shift from the architecture of gardens to gardening, so instead of designing Versailles, I limited myself to digging over some flower beds barely connected by beaten earth paths" -- 4


 * Unicorn & Rhino (Marco Polo calls Rhino the Unicorn) --> page 57

Avatars of the Word

 * This book is for people who read books and use computers and wonder what the two have to do with each other. We may sometimes thinkg we are back that moment in Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame when a character brandishes a new-fangled printed book in his hand against the backdrop of the cathedral and exclaims "This will kill that!" For us, the question is whether the computer will put the book out of business. And if so, what becomes of us readers?" -- preface ix


 * Discussion of Jerome "an irrestible model of the scholarly life: well-chosen books, seemly surroundings, dignity, tranquility" --> This is how we find Atrus in Dunn'i -- 1


 * The inherent anachronism of Myst, digital media object with books written by hand.

The Instability of the Text

 * "Bodies of information created for a computer are marked by the kind of coding possible and the necessary at the time of creation. As the environment changes, it is usually necessary to make at least some small changes in the text to keep it readable" -- 48


 * "None of this is good news for librarians. Whereas the codes book in print form has been a remarkably standardized and stable medium, subject mainly to the depredations of material aging (crumbling paper and breaking binding) the new flood of electronic texts brings with it an exponential increase in the difficulties of making information available to users and preserving it over time" -- 48 - 49
 * Connect to the the difficulty of playing "Old/Original version of game" and the "damaged books in the game"


 * MCLUHAN -> THE CONTENT OF A NEW MEDIUM IS ALWAYS AN OLD MEDIUM (54)


 * "Thus when we quarrel among ourselves about things like an American history curriculum, we should acknowledge that there is very little science or scholarship at stake. Rather, we debate the construction of our national legend, which shifts and changes shape over time." -- 106


 * "There is a serious history that could be written of direct cultural filiations and continuities with antiquity, but this would not boast the poems of Horace of the philosophy of Plato among its high points. It would need to be a history of technology and cultural practices." -- 108
 * Myst as a theme park of Western Civ. As this "history" that presents technology and cultural practice


 * Relating to Multipath of Hypertext -> "This is not to say that the reader's task will become easier. If anything, the burden of responsibility will seem crushingly many. The great risk will be that providers of shortcuts will find devious and enticing ways to flourish and seduce" -- 134
 * Hence the "5 minute" Myst

How We Became Posthuman

 * "Here, at the inaugural moment of the computer age, the erasure of embodiment is performed so that "intelligence" becomes a property of the formal manipulation of symbols rather than the enaction of the human life-world" -- xi


 * "As you gave at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, no matter what identifications you assign to the embodied entities that you cannot see, you have already become posthuman" -- xiv


 * "A defining characteristic of the present cultural moment is the belief that information can circulate unchanged among different material substrates.


 * After Macy Conferences on Cybernetics "humans were to be seen primarily as information processing entities who are essentially similar to intelligent machines" - 7


 * "if we can becomes the information we have constructed, we can achieve effective immortality" -- 13


 * BOOKS & BODIES (falling into book, being trapped (encoded) in books) " Like the human body, the books is a form of information transmission and storage, and like the human body, the book incorporates its encodings in a durable material substrate. Once encoding in the material base has taken place, it cannot easily be changed" -- 29


 * Instead of an embodied consciousness looking through the window at a scene, consciousness moves through the screen to become the pov, leaving behind the body as an unoccupied sheell. In cyberspace, the point of view does not emanate from the character; rather the pov literally is the character." -- 38

Unpacking my Library

 * "Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisifed with the books they could buy but do not like." -- Illuminations 61


 * Of the Book Collector "Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting" -- Illuminations 67

Theses on History

 * "Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years." -- 263

A Thousand Plateaus

 * "A book itself is a little machine" "But when one writes, the only question is which other machines can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work." -- 4


 * "Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come" -- 4-5


 * "the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the world; the book assures the deterritorialization of the world but the world effects a reterritorialization of the book, which in turn deterritorializes itself in the world (if it is capable, if it can)." -- 11


 * "Write, form a rhizome" -- 11


 * "History is always written from the sedentary point of view and in the name of the unitary State apparatus, at least a possible one, even when the topic is nomads" -- 23


 * "Don't just have ideas, have an idea (Godard)." -- 25


 * ONE WOLF OR SEVERAl 26

The Essay as Form

 * "truth abandoned by play would be nothing more than tautology" -- 163

Gamer Theory

 * In gamespace even if know the deal,are a player, have got game, you will notice, all the same, that the game has got you. -- Agony 001


 * Games are no longer a pastime, outside or alongside of life. They are now the very form of life, and death, and time itself. -- Agony 006


 * The gamer's god is a game designer. He implants in everything a hidden algorithm. Faith is having the intelligence to intuit the parameters of this geek design and score accordingly. -- Agony 013


 * The challenge... is to play at play itself -- Agony 019


 * Play within the game, but against gamespace. Be ludic, but also lucid. -- Agony 019


 * For a gamer to be a theorist might not require the ability to play any particular game especially well. The prizes have nothing to do with thinking the game. -- Agony 020


 * Gamespace needs theorists but also a new kind of practice. -- Agony 23


 * Be a gamer, but be a gamer who thinks- and acts - with a view to realizing the real potentials of the game, in and against the world made over as gamespace. -- Agony 025

Gaming

 * Galloway


 * "So, above all, this book is about loving video games" -- xii

Other

 * Ebert on Run Lola Run : []
 * XBOX 360 ad : []
 * "Happy Up Here" - []