The Tense of Abstract Nouns

Abstract

This chapter talks about a Classical Age, at the birth of its second incarnation, and the publication of Leon Battista Alberti&s;s De Re Aedificatoria . Naming is not a limitation or diminution of subjective consciousness, as seeing is forgetting and other modern rhetoric implies, but both its founding action and its resulting product. Naming is proof of consciousness. Propositions are to individual words what a given language is to its propositions; and a language is to one of its propositions what thought is to a given language or system of representation: a structure that clarifies what is at stake. The act of design is the verb and the physical properties of resulting forms, materials, and borrowed elements are nouns laid out upon a malleable surface of context. The individual elements of a physical language thus resemble nouns in the way physical language as a whole resembles a grammar.