Singing Finnegans Wake: A Key to Samuel Barber’s “Nuvoletta”

Samuel’s Barber’s 1947 “Nuvoletta,” the only freestand-ing song of the composer’s maturity, derives its text from the most famously arcane novel in the literary canon, James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. Musicologist Pollack dissects the text in a literary analysis, but also showing how its vivid imagery and lyric resonance is treated in Barber’s musical setting, thus offering performers crucial preparation for its performance.

27 Open Problems in Kolmogorov Complexity

This formula can be informally read as follows: the ith messagemi brings us log(1=pi) "bits of information" (whatever this means), and appears with frequency pi, so H is the expected amount of information provided by one random message (one sample of the random variable). Moreover, we can construct an optimal uniquely decodable code that requires about H (at most H + 1, to be exact) bits per message on average, and it encodes the ith message by approximately log(1=pi) bits, following the natural idea to use short codewords for frequent messages. This fits well the informal reading of the formula given above, and it is tempting to say that the ith message "contains log(1=pi) bits of information." Shannon himself succumbed to this temptation [46, p. 399] when he wrote about entropy estimates and considers Basic English and James Joyces's book "Finnegan's Wake" as two extreme examples of high and low redundancy in English texts. But, strictly speaking, one can speak only of entropies of random variables, not of their individual values, and "Finnegan's Wake" is not a random variable, just a specific string. Can we define the amount of information in individual objects?

Introduction

It started with curiosity: The name of the French philosopher seemed to pop up here and there, while we were working on dissertations and postdoc-projects. Not just, as we already knew, in the works of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze, Bernard Stiegler and German media historians like Bernhard Siegert and Erich Hörl, but also in books and articles by John Durham Peters, Elisabeth Grosz and Yuk Hui. Simondon seemed to be relevant when discussing the question of technology in the Anthropocene, digging into neo-cybernetic trends within critical theory, understanding New Materialism and challenging AI-philosophy. What was it about this French philosopher that could inspire so many different thinkers and fields of thoughts? We soon realized that we did not know very many people who had worked with the ideas of Simondon, and thus, set forth to produce some texts on him. With this issue, we do not intend to give a comprehensive introduction to Simondon’s philosophy. What we hope to do, is to offer a handful of reflections upon how to use Simondon today. We do this by publishing an article on the politics of problems in the thinking of Simondon and Gilles Deleuze, written by Stefano Daechsel and a three-part interview on Simondon’s oeuvre with Yale-professors Gary Tomlinson, John Durham Peters and Paul North, conducted by Johan Fredrikzon. In addition, we have pieced together a few editorial texts: An overview of interesting articles and books on Simondon that we came across as we edited this volume, and a brief vocabulary of Simondonian thought. The article and interview provide several answers to the question why Simondon is a relevant thinker today. Gary Tomlinson argues that Simondon offers key insights to evolutionary studies: He is able to bridge the gap between cultural and evolutionary biology. This is due to the Simondonian understanding of culture, Tomlinson argues, as something that arises in evolution and also shapes it. ”We were toolmakers before we were human”, as Tomlinson writes in the article ”Semiotic Epicycles and Emergent Thresholds in Human Evolution” (Glass-bead.org, 2017), which he quotes in the interview. Furthermore, Simondon flirts with what John Durham Peters calls neo-Thomism, a view of the history of technology that is not transcendental, nor teleologically determined or based on an idea of progress, but that is nevertheless intelligible. As John Durham Peters says in his interview: ”Thomism gives you a potential of the world as an intelligible totality, much like James Joyce in Finnegan's Wake: a vision of the world as a knowable whole.” Simondon’s philosophy according to Durham Peters is ”Aristotelian in the sense that nature has a structure which in some ways corresponds to the structure of understanding (…), the processes by which nature works and the processes by which technology works are analogous”. Most importantly, Simondon identifies possible strategies for resistance. Studying technology is necessary for us to act as political individuals, Stefano Daechsel argues in his article on Simondon and Deleuze. ”[T]here is an urgency to Simondon’s call for a technical culture that would foster a ‘genuine awareness of technical realities (…)’, such an awareness of technology ‘possesses political and social value’.” We need to delve into the technical realities, not in order to liberate ourselves from technology, but in order to modify and gain some kind of agency as technological beings. With reference to Robert de Niro’s character in Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil (1985), Paul North also reflects upon the agency of the individual through the figure of the tinkerer: ”The kind of freedom where you can do anything, like ex nihilo creation. Simondon wants nothing to do with that. It is the middle person, the one who can take an invention and actually make it into a form of life, bring it in line with the milieu and allow each to change the other, that is interesting for Simondon.” Toward the end of the interview, North claims philosophy of technology today is looking for new resources in order to comprehend the world we live in. Mazzilli-Daechsel begins his article by stating that we need a way out of our politics of defeatism today. Simondon is a useful source to go to, in both regards. We hope this volume demonstrates that. In addition to the section on Simondon, this issue of Sensorium Journal features two reviews, on the recent complete transcript of the Macy Conferences edited by Claus Pias and two books in the series “Understanding Media Ecology”. We hope you enjoy your reading!

Finnegans Wake

An experimental masterpiece by James Joyce, published in 1939. Joyce began writing it during 1923 and parts of it appeared under the title Work-in-Progress within literary periodicals, such as transition, and in pamphlet form. It has a reputation as the most difficult text of literary modernism. Joyce set out to write "a history of the world" and much of the structure of the book derives from Italian philosopher and historian Giambatista Vico’s New Science (1725), which breaks down history into a series of cyclic phases. The final title, however, alludes to a Dublin street ballad about a builder who falls from a ladder: Tim Finnegan is aroused from unconsciousness when a drop of whisky touches his mouth during the wake organized by his family, who think him dead. Joyce used this to allude to Viconian myths of fall and redemption or resurrection. It was written during the early years of Irish independence and the Wake’s mythic re-cycling of history and literature also bears upon contemporary developments. The absence of apostrophe in the title is deliberate: although derived from "Finnegan’s Wake," it also urges the Irish (Finnegans) to rise from their historical stupor.

Here comes nobody: a dramaturgical exploration of Luciano Berio's Outis

This study, intended as a seventy-fifth birthday tribute for Luciano Berio, examines the dramaturgy of his most radical theatrical work, Outis (1995–6). To a greater extent than any of his previous operatic works, Outis dispenses with linear narrative. Instead, it constructs an associative network of images – visual, verbal and musical – upon a cyclic frame. A recurrent source for these images is the story of Odysseus/Ulysses, the wanderer, and the many different texts that stem from that tradition. These include Ulysses by James Joyce – whose work has long been a source of inspiration for Berio. This essay suggests, however, that it is rather the techniques and aspirations of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake that provide the most telling analogue for what Berio here seeks to achieve.

VII. After the Poet

I am not competent to evaluate translations into any language other than English, but I am told that O. Weinrich’s rendering into German verse (1960), in an edition which is both scholarly and sensitive, is outstanding.In general the versions which have appeared since the war are free from the sort of artificiality which had dogged most earlier versions, a hangover from the Victorian age. (Catullus had his own artificiality, but that is a different story.) They are also free from expurgation and bowdlerizing, complete, frank in approach and in language, in fact authentically reflecting the original. The first of these, and one of the best, was J. Lindsay, Catullus: the Complete Poems (1948). Lindsay had made an earlier translation, but this was better. He was a vigorous Australian, an original but erratic scholar, and a minor poet of genuine merit. Other meritorious versions of the full corpus have since appeared, by F. O. Copley (1957), R. A. Swanson (1959), C. H. Sisson (1966), Peter Whigham (1966), James Michie (1969), R. Myers, and R. J. Ormsby (1972), Frederick Raphael and Kenneth McLeish (1978). Several of these translators are both scholars and men of letters, holding university posts in classics. Several are poets in their own right: Sisson once wrote: ‘I have had my eye on Catullus for years – as what poet would not who could make out even a little of the Latin?’ Several have made some reputation for translations of other authors. Jean Granarolo comments that the versions are often scholarly or, at all events, conceived for a wide popularization. I omit one version of which a reviewer said that the reader was ‘confronted with a Catullus who seems to have stepped from the pages of Finnegan’s Wake’.