THE CODE

may be genetic - politic - civic and other technics
depend on code(s) which are identical, as being all what we study in terms of

CODE

Conception of Time, resurrection, cloning OR Conception of Word, industry, engineering

...chose your page - this page will continue with the Code of Labor

While the Significand (manifested in naming & genetics) is nearly disclosed by the end of the millennium, the Code remains more enigmatic - it is questioned through memory & genetics, as well as through legislation of societies, and also in laws of Artificial Intelligence.

Yet our civilization has foreruned a sound preamble for a knowledge and understanding of what is a Code process.
First, the distinction between Significand and Code can be seen through the Division of Labour. At a first level, the professional categories (farmer, miller, baker etc...) look like a primal form of Significand - they each relate to another (as words do between themselves) - but they include a second relation : the farmer with his plow, the miller with his mill, the baker with is oven - that is the professional with his tool. Within the Significand order, this bivalent relationship implies a additional notion that the 'Code' is supplying.

Second, the combination between Significand and Code is shown through ancient traditional allegories. Especially, the Art of Memory depicts the superimposition of two sets of Significands, as building a Code. One can refer to the illustration, as well as the legend, for seeing how the combination of a series of names with a series of places, supports a phenomenon that will be referred as a 'Code'.

These two approaches(2) suggest an analytical model where the Code is shown in opposition with the Significand .
All my research indicates that the Art of Memory allows a complete approach to this conception - for it inherently carries an history, which tells us what objective components distinguish Code and Significand.
The WWW offers excellent pages about the Art of memory - [A], [B], [C], [D], [E] - so that an excerpt [from C] will here suffice :

Curiously, the use of memory systems did not become immediately obsolete with the invention of printing, but instead became elaborated into yet another form as a complex, Neoplatonic magic which would have a far reaching, though somewhat obscured, influence.

This excerpt is alluding to the transformation which affects the Art of Memory when it passes from a manuscript culture to a printed literature. This change began at Guttenberg's time and is currently achieving a process that we can call an apocalypse.

This reversal/turn over (that the word 'apocalypse' means) is fully represented in the comparison between the two schemas - e.g. the one which represents namely the Art of Memory (the green circles represent the Significands/places of the Symposium in Cicero's report), with the one which represents its modern version, namely PLural ANalysis (the green circles are now in the adjoining room, where they represent the articles of the Code).

It has been Psychoanalysis' performance, during the 20th century, to disclose the logic of this reversal/inversion (an introduction to this analysis can be started with the presentation thread on this site or overviewed in its theory thread). It concludes that the cybernetic tools (Artificial Intelligence today/tomorrow in work places) achieve this apocalypse, where the industry is re-generating the Code of Nature.

The obscure influence of the elaborated transformation in the Art of Memory (as said in the excerpt above) can thus be elucidate today. Amongst division of labor, a new category is processed by Cybernetics (robots, computer, artificial memory, artificial intelligence etc...) ; it alters the Art of Memory into a new version - a 're-version' - can we say, as applied in PLAN's form.

Its result in restoring Natural Codes can be seen by anyone who makes the effort in following this development of a traditional thinking in Western civilization/industry.

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NOTE (1) - of course this Letter/Code distinction, as presented there, is allegorical and analytic <back>

NOTE (2) - Distinction and Combination allow the typical superimposition (attributed to names and places) which characterizes the Art of Memory.
At the end of the Renaissance, G.Bruno assumed the shift that the printed letter had caused in civilization. Here is an example of a Bruno's wheel which superimposes sets of symbols to another - in a rotative combination, as (as shown in PLural ANalysis today).
This Symbol/Symbol was prefiguring current Cybernetics . It brings also an interesting light upon a work that we would like to mention :
A type of rotation - actually a filter by the means of a code (arithmetical Base) - has been successfully applied between two ancient sets (the Alphabet & the First Verse of the Hebrew text). It allows a compelling recognition of the 'zero' in the mathematical order - as challenging the cause of the printed writing in the Cybernetization process. Unfortunately a good site for this study does not want to be linked - you can find another good one.for introducing to a logic of alphabet - an important most probable discovery, which may be combined with the Athenian sociology, in order to explain how the awareness of  a logic of code has been gradually built in our civilization.<back>

© CYBEK of New York, 1999.