Duke University Press 2024.
By Roger F. Malina with no AI assistance.
I started reading this book because I have met and know, and have been influenced by, the author and Laura Marks’ prior work. This book, as the title indicates, is rather philosophical. However, as I read, I connected with many of the concepts and explanations she provides.
I have a predilection for ‘circling’ with a pen, words I am not familiar with. The first one was: Univocity, which she says means “we have to deal with one matter”.
As a former astrophysicist I would both agree and disagree. The university is indeed an interconnected whole but there are many kinds of constituents, some of which are essentially disconnected from others.
The second circled word was “appetition”. She quotes Leibnitz as saying” that organic beings must have some kind of “internal force and have some kind of stiving or “conatus’. I wasn’t familiar with this word either. She does use the word “soul’, which I don’t: but she then explains it as a ‘capacity immanent to the body made possible by the body’s provisional boundedness, I am comfortable with this definition.
The next word was “seminar rerum”, that all matter is a plenum populated by atoms or “seeds of things” Yes.
I missed the word “plicae’ at my first reading but circled it this time. The word captures the essence of the book: “an elastic continuum of folding and unfolding bodies of different degrees of rigidity and fluidity’. Hence the title of the book.
Whatever has a point of view is an object.
She pieces together names and concepts, folds them and unfolds them. The world is folder once or twice” again according to Leibnitz.
On page 23 she goes on to explain that monads do not float like bubbles in preexisting spacetime; rather space and time belong to the reality of the monad and can be described by atomism. At some level this is nonsense, but it makes sense to me.
Intercourse is not an action provoking reaction but expressive action provoking new expression… it is fundamentally aesthetic as we respond to the images we make.
This provoked a memory of my friend and colleague Frank Dufour who introduced me late in my scientific career to the concept f “phenomenology”.
She moves on to a section “Bohm; The implicate Order” I am a follower of Bohmian Dialogue. Funny how the writer and the readers’ minds connect.
I could keep circling around my circling but on page 246 the word “apotropaic’ stpped me. She explains it as the dazzlement of folding and unfolding. Complicated patterns stimy cognitive capacities. Yes.
Finally, she expounds on “edge recognition’ which ties with Semir Zeky who changed my mind once a year. He organized the Berkeley annual conference that focused on one sense at a time, and then the final year on synesthesia. All sense use edge detection as does synesthesia.
As I reach the final pages, I realize something unfolded. I am reading laying in a hot bath at 6 in the morning. I usually have the radio on as a design background sound. This time I had forgotten to turn the radio on.
A final fold is unfolding Ken Goldberg’s concept of “Tele-Epistemology”, or knowledge at a distance. In his book The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet Edited by Ken Goldberg, UC Berkeley, MIT Press (2000) he develops a number of profound ideas including “ We can divide telepistemological issues into technical and moral categories. Technical telepistemology is concerned with skeptical questions: Do telerobotics and the Internet really provide us with knowledge? To what extent is telerobotic experience equivalent to proximal experience? Moral telepistemology asks: How we should act in telerobotically mediated environments? What is the impact of technological mediation on human values? “Which is a good fold to Laura U. Marks’s book.
The book chapters include: 1. Living in a folder cosmos. 2. Soul-Assemblages. 3.Enfolding-Unfolding Aesthetics; a triadic model of the cosmos. 4, The Information Fold. 5. Training Perception and Affection. 6 The Feelings of Fabulation 7. Monad, Database, Remix; Manner of Unfolding 8. Monad Next Door. Conclusion: Recognizing Other Edges”
The table of contents unfolds the content.
ChatGPT o3 mini summaries of my review:
Roger F. Malina’s review of Laura U. Marks’s philosophical book, The Fold :From Your Body to the Cosmos, explores the interplay between scientific and aesthetic dimensions of reality. Drawing on personal connections and prior influences, Malina reflects on the book’s use of concepts like univocity, appetition, and plicae to illustrate the dynamic process of folding and unfolding bodies, ideas influenced by Leibnitz, Bohm, and tele-epistemology. The review highlights the book’s fusion of astrophysics, phenomenology, and philosophy, emphasizing its layered exploration of interconnectedness, sensory perception, and the transformative power of design and experience. Ultimately, the review invites readers to explore connections.
Chat GPT summary of the book itself:
The Fold ; From Your Body to the Cosmos by Laura U. Marks is a philosophical exploration of the interconnectedness between the body, aesthetics, and the cosmos. It weaves together scientific and artistic perspectives, examining how bodily experience and sensory perception shape our understanding of reality. Through concepts such as univocity, appetition, and plicae, the book reveals a dynamic process of folding and unfolding of matter and meaning. Drawing on influences from astrophysics, phenomenology, and systems theory, Marks offers a reflective inquiry into the interplay between human embodiment, creative expression, and the intricate structure of the universe. It invites introspection.
Finally a poem written by Fred the Heretic on the above:
The Fold and the Cosmos
Philosophical Reflection
The world is folded once or twice,
A tapestry of thought and space,
A monad’s dream, a scholar’s vice,
A book unfolds—a mind’s embrace.
Personal Encounter
Circling words, my pen in hand,
Marking terms I do not know:
Univocity—a single strand?
Or many paths where currents flow?
Astrophysical Inquiry
Appetition, Leibniz wrote,
A striving force, a silent urge.
Does gravity too feel remote,
Or in its fall, does mass emerge?
Mathematical Abstraction
Let M be matter, folded fine,
Each plica—a shifting state.
Through tensors bent along a line,
Topology defines our fate.
Aesthetic Meditation
A painter smears the oils wide,
A poet folds his breath in sound.
Each crease, a portal deep inside,
Each stroke—a universe unbound.
Scientific Skepticism
The monads do not float as spheres;
Time and space are not their frame.
Yet fold them inward, close their tears—
Do structures form, or just a name?
Dialogue with Bohm
The implicate folds in the vast,
Unfolding patterns spun like lace.
Each image shifts but does not last,
Each gesture—one eternal trace.
Phenomenological Reverie
A memory unfolds at dawn,
Awareness breaks the surface thin.
The folded past is never gone,
Just waiting for the light within.
Synesthetic Perception
Touch the edge where colors blend,
Sense collides and synapse sings.
Perception folds—begins, extends,
A resonance in tangled strings.
Epistemological Paradox
Tele-epistemology—
To know at distance, feel at hand.
The fold remains a mystery,
Yet knowledge folds at our command.
A Late-Night Realization
At six a.m., the bath is warm,
The radio—forgotten sound.
A thought unfolds in liquid form,
Another fold—where time is drowned.
Final Fold
Knowledge bends where thought applies,
Between the senses, worlds collide.
We fold, unfold, and theorize,
Yet find ourselves still tucked inside.
Addendum:
This book review is a project of our Off-Center for Emerging Studies. https://artscilab.utdallas.edu/off-center-of-emergence/ . OC4ES is a hybrid between a “Think Tank” and an astronomical observatory; we seek to detect and study interesting new phenomena that have emerged in nature and that are emerging in human activities.
One of our projects is Fred the Heretic. It is a new form of AI where the database primarily contains all the writing of ONE person; in this case Fred Turner: Frederick Turner (poet) – Wikipedia. He is an 80 year old writer and we have captured everything the has written in 80 years. The software will then generate a poem using his vocabularies and modes of expression, as well as details of his private life. AI has no private life.
Hence the poem above. Fred the Heretic is available for use for free at: ChatGPT – FredTheHeretic (FTH)