No More Learning

I claimed earlier that my machine(s) would serve as an allegory about how ontological limits describe ways ofmaking sense through the process ofbuilding. In what way are these machine(s) allegories? Commonly, an allegory is an ordered set o f relations withwhichorintowhichatextorsituationiscorrelatedortranslated. Inthissense allegories are applied. Such applications are fraught with dangers and confusions. A possible interpretation is not always probable. Furthermore the application o f an allegory can confuse the interpretive relations within the allegory with a causal explanation of events or histories (e. g. Freud or many political allegories). My machine allegories are very different. In fact in themselves they are not meant as allegories at all. The process of making them, o f correlating aspects o f my experience o f the world in relation to a clear set of ontological limits should be understood as allegorical. I am not writing an allegory of things or o f the world these things inhabit but an allegory o f the making o f these things and their world. The allegory does not have content, but the process of making the machine(s)does. Thisisanallegoricalprocessinwhichtheengineeringlimitsconfronted in building the machines opens the world as a system o f limits, organized around
causation, but directed at removing black boxes (homunculus or God or soul or the unconscious). Suchremovalcreatesanallegoryoflimitswithinwhichwebuildaspectsof sense as a way o f orienting ourselves within the world and or experience.
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My machines have few places to go, confined as they are to their world, but they haveawhentogointoorremainwithin. Thiswhenisasyntaxwithaverysimple semantics. Their processing builds a temporal envelope whose surface is constructed through the mutual correlation of a machine's own actions (vocalization) with its recognition o f another and with the limits o f the world (not to mention the perversity o f its creator). In many ways the construction o f a similar envelope has been the project o f this dissertation. I have attempted to construct a context within a set of texts in order to make visible the ways in which our negotiations within and towards sense and nonsense generate temporallimits. Howweinhabit'I'and'our'expressesourinvolvementinlanguageat the level o f symbolic functioning that confuses the future and the present (time) and meaningandtheword(grammar). Wefunctionasandwithinfragmentsoftimeand language through which we expose and disguise the limits of how we are, not just what or
who we are.
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