The Fourfold Visions of William Blake and Martin Heidegger

Notes

¹ See my "A Fever for Archiving: How Humanities Scholarship Works the Web."

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² Like Hayles, my goal is not to devalue the William Blake archive, which is an exceptional research tool (I made extensive use of it in composing this essay), but to take issue with the print-centered ideology of ownership, authorship, and Authority that characterizes the archive.

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³ Like Hayles, I borrow the term “remediate” from Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin’s Remediation: Understanding New Media.

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⁴ For a detailed discussion of this collage, and its relationship to design and cognition, see Rosalind Kraus, The Optical Unconscious.

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⁵ W.J.T. Mitchell defines the hypericon as “a piece of moveable cultural apparatus, one which may serve a marginal role as illustrative device or a central role as a kind of summary image . . . that encapsulates an entire episteme, a theory of knowledge” (49).

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⁶ For a sample of student work, see Amy Ruud’s fourfold vision at <http://libarts.udmercy.edu/
~ruudar/portfolio/electronica>

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⁷ To quote Heidegger, “according to ordinary usage, the word Gestell [frame] means some kind of apparatus, e.g., a bookrack. Gestell is also the name for a skeleton. And the employment of the word Ge-stell [Enframing] that is now required of us seems equally eerie, not to speak of the arbitrariness with which words of a mature language are thus misused” (Question 20).

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⁸ In what I would like to consider a phenomenological-Romantic translation of Blake, Heidegger thus described the “single vision” of modern science: “nature reports itself in some way or other that is identifiable through calculation and . . . remains orderable as a system of information” (Question 23).

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⁹ See Martin Heidegger's "The Thing."

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