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Title: African Influences in Cybernetics
Author: Ron Eglash, 1995

 

African Influences in Cybernetics

Ron Eglash

 

Footnotes

1.This was combated in different ways by structuralists and post-structuralists. According to Levi-Strauss, the arbitrariness of non-western symbolics (e.g.a fox stands for stupidity in one mythology and cunning in another) proves that they are just as digital as Europeans with the exception of the oral/literate dichotomy. Derrida, while agreeing with this position, takes Levi-Strauss to task for retaining the oral/literate dichotomy, and details how speech is just writing in air instead of paper – thus again using digitaly as the justification for epistemological equivalence. Tragically, poststructuralists have adopted Rousseau's assumption that analog representation is not as abstract as digital.

2.That's not to say that the division is uniform (e.g ., occasional use of digital motifs in reggae) nor that there are not instances of third alternative, analog representation, on other side for example, while Monique Wittig's The Lesbian Body used digital collages to create a European-centered self-birthing, Audre Lorde's lesbian self-birthing in Zami was equally recursive, but based on analog representation.

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