My first reaction is to mock Heraclitus for saying that if you just figure out how the universe works you'll see how the universe works; but one thing this book has taught me is that these ideas had to be invented, and it looks like Heraclitus might have invented the idea that there is such a system. Plus he has this to say about phase two of philosophy: "Let us not make random conjectures about the greatest matters."
Wed Sep 13 2006 00:04 More Amazing Pre-Socratic Philosophy:
Brendan praised my Sept. 12 entries from previous years, placing me under pressure, but really I got nothing. I can however posit a hypothesis that Heraclitus was the first crackpot philosopher. The Pythagoreans pioneered the proud hacker/crackpot tradition of trying to reduce everything to a single concept, but they chose "number", a concept which has meaning even if you don't accept the philosophy. Aristotle liked number okay, but didn't like the Pythagoreans, and he pointed out the many foibles that result when you say that all is number. It looks like Heraclitus saw this coming and avoided it by explaining everything in terms of a really vague concept: the logos, which in this context seems to mean "system of physics".
To refresh your memory, the basic plot is that a real estate
company is trying to make money by building houses. In the pilot, the
company has only a model home: an incomplete shell of a house designed
to sell other houses. Over the course of the series they build more
houses, but their fortunes never improve, because the company is run
by incompetents who care only about polishing their egos and stabbing
each other in the back. Now, I'm not a big reader of Variety
(or, as I believe it's now called, More of the Same), so I'm
not up on all the industry gossip, but that dysfunctional environment
seems a lot the one in which you put together a television
show. Especially a relatively highbrow show that lacks
support from the network.
Maybe the reason no one has pointed this out before is that over
time the metaphor was presented in more and more blatant ways, making it seem obvious. The
most famous intrusion is at the beginning of the third season (which
was cut from 22 episodes to 13), where it's revealed that the company
had a contract to build 22 houses but it's been cut to 13. As the
show's fortunes got worse and worse, more and more of its fans'
anguish and desperate, doomed attempts to save the show bled into
the fiction as attempts to save the real estate company. But I think
the basic metaphor (Bluth company = Arrested Development,
building houses = producing television) was there from the very
beginning. ![[Comments]](/nb//themes/Default/comments.png "2 comments")
(2) Wed Sep 13 2006 21:22 Arrested Development as Self-Referential Metaphor:
There's no news hook for this, but I've been meaning to write this for
a while so now's as good a time as any. I like Arrested
Development because it's obsessed with continuity and what I can
only call intratextuality (see entry not yet written on The Colbert
Report). But what I haven't seen anyone point out is that the plot
of the show is a metaphor for the production of the show, and for television in
general.
