Introduction
“when bodies fall through empty space
Straight down, under their own weight, at a random time and place,
They swerve a little.”
Lucretius (I.217-19)
In De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things), Lucretius’s first century BCE explanation of the material world, he determines that the fundamental element of all nature is the atom. All subsequent matter stems from those atoms’ tendency to “swerve a little” as they fall through the void. Though Lucretius wasn’t exactly an atheist, that tiny swerve effectively negates any involvement of God in the world and instantiates free will while calling all hierarchies into question. For everything is simply atoms and void.
I begin this introduction with Lucretius for two reasons. As perhaps the most influential writer in the area of philosophical materialism, Lucretius functions as a central interpretive node of this project. This relates to the content of the piece. The second reason relates to the form: Lucretius’s concept of atoms swerving in the void serves a structuring principle for the form of this project. Because the Academy is already filled with textual arguments that politely (and sometimes polemically) guide the reader through the logic, in this project I am interested in experimenting with alternative ways of presenting an argument about intertextuality.
And so a question: can the form of the project perform a fundamental element of the philosophy?
I turn to scalar as a format for this project, because it allows for a greater degree of flexibility than a traditional blog. One of the most frequently touted attributes of the site is its ability to present non-linear narratives through the implementation of paths that walk readers through different lines of argumentation. However, my sense is that this is less non-linear and more multi-linear. To test the limits of non-linear writing, I have elected to ignore paths altogether. To my mind, getting a little lost in this project is part of the point.
But I am not a complete intellectual sadist. I do want to offer a method of navigating this project. If you’ve made it this far, then you’ve already visited the opening visualization. This key-term tag visualization functions as the central navigational intersection. It is fundamentally non-linear. It also has the benefit of looking a bit like models for chemical compounds, thereby visualizing the atomism its pages explore.
Thus far, there are two primary issues that the form of this project raises: (non)linearity and an intertextual tradition. Just as I experiment with non-linear forms of argumentation, so I want to present time as resistant to a narrative about the progress of history. And so contemporary writers find themselves alongside writers from the early modern period. At this point, my selection of writers is based on my interest in the intersection of philosophical materialism, the history of science, post-humanism, and literature. Vicki Callahan described an early iteration of this project as a “thinking machine,” and I think that’s right. The intention here is not the representation of absolute knowledge, but an exploration of the constructedness of these connections. As the authors of Digital_Humanities (2012) argue, “Digital capabilities have challenged the [post]humanist to make explicit many of the premises on which those understandings are based in order to make them operative in computational environments” (4). My hope is that the form of this piece will begin to demonstrate the way that academic argumentation, by its very nature, seeks to spackle over epistemological gaps. Here, I’m highlighting those gaps in order to compose a tradition of secular doubt that ran throughout early modern England, despite accounts of a confident humanism and hubristic Enlightenment.
In swerving from a set course of academic form, my hope is that the composition of these elements will form a new kind of thing.
n.b. This is only a beginning sketch of this project. My intention is to continue to develop it as I read for my field exams.
Straight down, under their own weight, at a random time and place,
They swerve a little.”
Lucretius (I.217-19)
In De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things), Lucretius’s first century BCE explanation of the material world, he determines that the fundamental element of all nature is the atom. All subsequent matter stems from those atoms’ tendency to “swerve a little” as they fall through the void. Though Lucretius wasn’t exactly an atheist, that tiny swerve effectively negates any involvement of God in the world and instantiates free will while calling all hierarchies into question. For everything is simply atoms and void.
I begin this introduction with Lucretius for two reasons. As perhaps the most influential writer in the area of philosophical materialism, Lucretius functions as a central interpretive node of this project. This relates to the content of the piece. The second reason relates to the form: Lucretius’s concept of atoms swerving in the void serves a structuring principle for the form of this project. Because the Academy is already filled with textual arguments that politely (and sometimes polemically) guide the reader through the logic, in this project I am interested in experimenting with alternative ways of presenting an argument about intertextuality.
And so a question: can the form of the project perform a fundamental element of the philosophy?
I turn to scalar as a format for this project, because it allows for a greater degree of flexibility than a traditional blog. One of the most frequently touted attributes of the site is its ability to present non-linear narratives through the implementation of paths that walk readers through different lines of argumentation. However, my sense is that this is less non-linear and more multi-linear. To test the limits of non-linear writing, I have elected to ignore paths altogether. To my mind, getting a little lost in this project is part of the point.
But I am not a complete intellectual sadist. I do want to offer a method of navigating this project. If you’ve made it this far, then you’ve already visited the opening visualization. This key-term tag visualization functions as the central navigational intersection. It is fundamentally non-linear. It also has the benefit of looking a bit like models for chemical compounds, thereby visualizing the atomism its pages explore.
Thus far, there are two primary issues that the form of this project raises: (non)linearity and an intertextual tradition. Just as I experiment with non-linear forms of argumentation, so I want to present time as resistant to a narrative about the progress of history. And so contemporary writers find themselves alongside writers from the early modern period. At this point, my selection of writers is based on my interest in the intersection of philosophical materialism, the history of science, post-humanism, and literature. Vicki Callahan described an early iteration of this project as a “thinking machine,” and I think that’s right. The intention here is not the representation of absolute knowledge, but an exploration of the constructedness of these connections. As the authors of Digital_Humanities (2012) argue, “Digital capabilities have challenged the [post]humanist to make explicit many of the premises on which those understandings are based in order to make them operative in computational environments” (4). My hope is that the form of this piece will begin to demonstrate the way that academic argumentation, by its very nature, seeks to spackle over epistemological gaps. Here, I’m highlighting those gaps in order to compose a tradition of secular doubt that ran throughout early modern England, despite accounts of a confident humanism and hubristic Enlightenment.
In swerving from a set course of academic form, my hope is that the composition of these elements will form a new kind of thing.
n.b. This is only a beginning sketch of this project. My intention is to continue to develop it as I read for my field exams.
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