#partial connections

[as-if-falling]

Self-proclaimed artifice can be intensely irritating. It looks as though complexity is being produced for its own sake. How much more satisfying for the reader or commentator to be able to uncover the artifice for her or himself!

...

My obvious hope is that these awkward and persistent issues will seem culturally interesting phenomena. I can only re-ground them further hoping that you will uncover something beyond the artifice - perhaps in unlooked-for connections that will disturb the arrangement of the account that I given and for which therefore I have given no account. They would point to the gaps in it.

Marilyn Strathern, Partial Connections, p. xxv

[as-if-falling]

Although one's grip on a tool is no less secure because on an infinitesimal scale skin and wood do not touch, the knowledge creates the sensation of there being something left to explain. Certainty itself appears partial, information intermittent. An answer is another question, a connection a gap, a similarity a difference, and vice versa. Wherever we look we are left with the further knowledge that surface understanding conceals gaps and bumps.

Marilyn Strathern, Partial Connections, p xxiii.

[as-if-falling]

The image that Gleick produces of the Cantor dust - the apparently increasing sparseness of the particles - is an opening up of gaps. It is not a segmentary model: the levels are not generated by the division of a pre-existing entity into discrete parts through distinction or opposition like a unit dividing or doubling itself nor does it represent the on/off discrimination of binary digits. Rather, one is made aware of the intermittent nature of intermittency.

Marilyn Strathern, Partial Connections p xxii