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aleph · Index
Models
The lethal text
Writing under
erasure
Mesopotamian
myth
The Gilgamesh
legend
The namshub of
Enki
The Tower of Babel
story
The song of the
Sirens
Plato's metaphor of
the cave
"man's insanity is
heaven's sense"
The Ultimate
Melody
Macroscope
The Origin of
Consciousness in the
Breakdown of the Bicameral
Mind
Snow Crash
deoxy >
philosophos
Models
A model is an intellectual structure which exists in a genotypal relationship to a
referent. It abstracts the essential features of a referent. Thus a blueprint is a
model, and the house built from it is its referent.
Baudrillard's simulacrum is of course a model without a referent: "a perfect copy
of a nonexistent original." It is not really important whether a physical referent
exists or not. It is not even important that it can exist. What's important is the
existence of nonphysical structure.
The world of Plato's Ideal Forms is a such model. So is the world of Robinson
Crusoe, which is an Enlightenment economy in miniature. So are the arks of
Noah and Utnapishtim, and Gerlenter's Hospital.
Models are absolutely central to cyberspatial thought. Cyberspace itself is a
model. Not necessarily or even importantly of particular real spaces, but of space
itself: its boundedness, its volume, its updownleftright orientation, its
passageways, and so on.
I would argue that a certain class of literary texts, including the ones just named
above, are recognizably "cyberspatial" in that some of their fascination comes
from their modelmaking. By this definition, the legend of Noah's Ark is
"cyberspatial." I do not claim, of course, that the Bible anticipates cyberspace by
4700 years. Rather, I make the converse claim: cyberspace is the latest
manifestation of a fascination with models which goes back 4700 years.
index—deoxy