{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","title":"Bodies in code  interfaces with digital media","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0415970164","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","id":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","uuid":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","title":"Bodies in code  interfaces with digital media","normalized_title":"bodiesincodeinterfaceswithdigitalmedia","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0415970164","isbns":["0415970164","0415970156","9780415970167","9780415970150"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":348,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Bodies%20in%20code%20%20interfaces%20with%20digital%20media","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/search"},"page":{"printed_page":249,"pdf_page":262,"physical_index":262,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"3beae1ce63705503a4e3959e0b021d449a60eb2d18abccbc2ac4147f1bf75aeb"},"chapter":"bodies in code","content":"British cyberneticist Donald MacKay first introduced this important difference in his attempt to supplement Claude Shannon's mathematical theory of information with a theory of meaning. According to MacKay, there are two constituents of a unit of information: selection and construction. Selection corresponds to Shannon's technical conception of information and designates the probability of a message's likelihood, given the formal repertoire of choices.xxii Construction, on the other hand, specifies a larger context for selection—namely, the behavioral state of the receiver—by which MacKay means not simply cognitive predispositions but “visceral responses and hormonal secretions\"—that is, the most primitive embodied faculties.xxiii,8 For MacKay, information cannot be divorced from meaning because selection necessarily occurs in dirty, real-world situations in which embodied tendencies contaminate and thus actively contribute to the production of information.\n\nMacKay's differentiation of meaning from the (purely technical) informational value of a message helps to flesh out the difference Zampanò has built into the phenomenon of the echo: the difference of reptition. By correlating meaning with the recipient's particular behavioral state rather than an observable change in his or her behavior, MacKay's theory encompasses situations involving the repetition of a message. Despite lacking informational value, a repeated message retains its meaning because this simply is the behavioral state it specifies, regardless of whether the receiver is already in that state.\n\nBy allegorizing this correlation of information with meaning, the myth of Echo operates an epochē of the phonocentric exactly opposite to that informing orthographic recording. Rather than preserving the past as a trace of the unlived (the past not lived by me), it serves to open the present moment of enunciation onto its uncanny doubling, to discover within it the possibility for an analog echoing that does not so much preserve the trace of the past as carry its force into the future in a way as unpredictable and singular as this or that reader's set of embodied predispositions.\n\nA novel of ceaseless repetition across media, of mediation as repetition, House of Leaves ultimately proffers a model of reading as analog echoing. The exemplary instance of this model is Truant's \"first reading\" of the text. That is why, in a footnote added to Zampanò's discussion of echo, Truant recounts his self-transformation as an experience of the double synaesthetic crossing effected by the institution of echo as the mythico-physical condition of possibility for hearing. Musing on the “intensely personal nature\" of Zampanò's consideration of echo in the orientation of the blind, Truant goes on to recount his own expanded and heightened visual capacities:\n\nTHE DIGITAL TOPOGRAPHY OF HOUSE OF LEAVES\n\n249","previous_page":248,"next_page":250}