Clinamen

Hi, all.

Clinamen has moved to: http://www.clinamen.us

Because I am no longer at the University of Texas (I have taken a position at Wayne State University), this space will soon cease to be. I am hoping to move this content over to the new Clinamen...but I'm not 100% sure that will happen.

Anyway, update your RSS readers.

This is a term I learned recently: Pajamahadeen. Wikipedia gives a cursory explanation, and they have some good links. Apparently the American Dialect Society voted it the most creative word of 2004 - I am way behind on this.

This word is going to play into a chapter I'm beginning to write on how Wikipedia (or, maybe, any electronic text) deals with agency and responsibility. Terms like pajamahadeen attempt to provide an image of the blogger/Wikipedian/internet troll under one neat umbrella. As former CBS News executive vice president put it:

"You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of check and balances (at CBS), and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing."

Bloggers (mockingly, of course) took this and ran with it, creating the term pajamahadeen. Still, it is this circulating image of "a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing" that I'm most interested in. Wal-Mart employees have edited the Wal-Mart Wikipedia article, and their not the only ones. Wikiscanner - a tool that traces IP addresses on Wikipedia edits - has shown us that it's not just the pajamahadeen editing Wikipedia (or blogging). This should be evidence enough that the blogosphere and Wikipedia are not controlled by the pajamahadeen.

As you may have noticed, I've renamed my blog. I wanted a name that said a bit more about my interests and that was...well...a little bit more interesting. Below, I offer what others have said about the term "clinamen" (pronounced almost like "cinnamon.") As you will see, it has to do with the impossibility that an atom (or any entity) is completely isolated. For me, this is what rhetoric is about. Everything and everyone is connected or "inclined" to one another. There is no "being by oneself." Such a thing is impossible. It's rhetoric's job to negotiate the ways we "swerve" into one another.

And so, it all begins with Lucretius in the first century BC. Lucretius essentially invented the concept. Here's a quote from his Of The Nature of Things:

"The atoms, as their own weight bears them down plumb through the void, at scarce determined times, in scarce determined places, from their course decline a little- call it, so to speak, mere changed trend. For were it not their wont thuswise to swerve, down would they fall, each one, like drops of rain, through the unbottomed void; and then collisions ne'er could be nor blows among the primal elements; and thus nature would never have created aught."

However, the real reason for using this name for the blog is this quote from Jean-Luc Nancy's The Inoperative Community:

"Still,one cannot make a world with simple atoms. There has to be a clinamen. There has to be an inclination or an inclining from one toward the other, of one by the other, or from one to the other. Community is at least the clinamen of the 'individual.' Yet, there is no theory, ethics, politics, or metaphysics of the individual that is capable of envisaging this clinamen, this declination or decline of the individual within community. Neither 'Personalism' nor Sartre ever managed to do anything more than coat the most classical individual-subject with a moral or sociological paste: they never inclined it, outside itself, over that edge that opens up its being-in-common" (3-4).

This is the definition of clinamen according to the Oxford English Dictionary:

Clinamen

An inclination, bias.

1704 SWIFT T. Tub ix. 106 The round and the square would, by certain clinamina, unite. 1823 DE QUINCEY Let. Young Man, Wks. XIII. 85 An insensible clinamen (to borrow a Lucretian word) prepares the way for it. 1827 HARE Guesses (1859) 226 No old word; which, with a slight clinamen given to its meaning, will answer the purpose.

According to Gilles Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition:

"Ancient atomism not only multiplied Parmenidean being, it also conceived of Ideas as multiplicities of atoms, atoms being the objective elements of thought. Thereafter it is indeed essential that atoms be related to other atoms at the heart of structures which are actualised in sensible composites. In this regard, the clinamen is by no means a change of direction in the movement of an atom, much less an indetermination testifying to the existence of a physical freedom. It is the original determination of the direction of movement, the syntheses of movement and its direction which relates one atom to another...If it is true that atoms, the elements of thought, move 'as rapidly as thought itself', as Epicurus says in his letter to Herodotus, then the clinamen is the reciprocal determination which is produced 'in a time smaller than the minimum continuous time thinkable'. It is not surprising that Epicurus makes user here of the vocabulary of exhaustion: there is something analogous in the clinamen to a relation between the differentials of atoms in movement. There is a declination here which also forms the language of thought; there is something here in thought which testifies to a limit of thought, but on the basis of which it thinks: faster than thought, 'in time smaller...'. Nevertheless, the Epicurean atom still retains too much independence, a shape and an actuality. Reciprocal determination here still has too much of the aspect of a spatio-temporal relation. The question whether modern atomism, by contrast, fulfills all the conditions of a structure mst be posed in relation to the differential equations which determine the laws of nature, in relation to the types of 'multiple and non-localisable connections' established between particles, and in relation to the character of the 'potentiality' expressly attributed to these particles" (184).

Okay, so I took down the "confessions" image because it was creeping me out a little bit. I realized today that I'm trying to figure out a way to brand this blog - and I'm not sure that's a good thing. The bottom line is that I'd like to have something that's nice to look at. The changes I made to the CSS a few months ago are nice, but the site is bare in terms of images. I'd like to change that. But maybe I don't need a "logo."

I was thinking I might put up an image of Rousseau (one of the great "confessors"), but I'm not sure that's what I want either. I'd like something that looks like Colin's Rhetworks site. That spidering network image in the corner is cool looking.

Well, I guess I'll just keep tinkering...

I knew I'd find a way to use that "resurrection" tag again. This time it has a double meaning. In a continued effort to resurrect this blog, I've given the page a bit of a facelift. I've added a link to Twitter at the left, and I've also added an image on the right. I guess this image is my new "logo." I hope you like it...I'm still undecided.

Twitter? I really don't know. I mean, do I want people to know what I am "up to" all the time?

As far as the logo goes, I found an image called "confession sign" on Flickr and changed the color scheme. But it looked choppy and blocky. Luckily, my good friend Will was sitting next to me in the lab and he suggested a great open source "vector graphics editor" called Inkscape. I was able to trace out the image and fill it in with a color that matched my site.

Before:



After:



Yes, I nerded out all day. I also updated my course page with a brief description of the Computers and Writing class I'm teaching in the Fall.

I did manage to read a little bit today. I reread Biesecker's essay "Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from Within the Thematic of Differance" and Michael Leff's "Tradition and Agency in Humanistic Rhetoric." Both of these are texts we read in Diane's Contemporary Theories of Rhetorical Agency class. I'm trying to pull together a big lit review on rhetorical agency for the diss.

Okay, back to finding another way to waste time...I'll put it on Twitter.