Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 40, No. 68.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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[1] From: Tim Smithers <tim.smithers@cantab.net>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 40.67: repetition's point? (102)
[2] From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 40.67: repetition's point? (12)
[3] From: David Zeitlyn <david.zeitlyn@anthro.ox.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 40.67: repetition's point? (29)
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2026-06-22 10:20:01+00:00
From: Tim Smithers <tim.smithers@cantab.net>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 40.67: repetition's point?
Dear Willard,
You ask ...
"Who, by the way, writes most insightfully about
repetition?"
The one who keeps writing about repetition, I suppose.
Sorry! I just couldn't resist. ... But I promise not to
repeat this. ... So that it's not confused with insight.
In the context of computation there is, I would say, a
difference between repetition and iteration. Repetition is do
the same action again. Iteration is do the same action to the
outcome of the previous application of the action. (Okay, we
may say iteration is a kind of repetition, but I don't see we
gain much from doing this.)
Might we see signs of a different kind of intelligence in the
small variations and "anomalies" [whatever these are?] in
some iterative process? No, I would say not? If there is any
intelligence to talk about here, it would be, I suggest, in
the recognition by the iterator to stop iterating, 'cos it's
not doing anything useful any more. Or, in the recognition by
the iterator not to start iterating in the first place, 'cos
it ain't worth it.
This kind of recognising to iterate or not is what's hard to
make computers do well. We, the supposedly intelligent ones,
have to introduce external arbitrary bounds or limitations on
how much iteration gets done.
Philip Glass doesn't do repetition. Glass does lots of things
different, but in a way that may sound the same, unless we
listen carefully. But you have to be a seriously good
composer to make this work well, I think, and Glass does make
it work well, and Steve Reich and Michael Nyman too, for my
ears. So called AI generated music doesn't, no matter how
many anomalies we may think we can hear in it. [Nor does a
Super Collider programmed version of Steve Reich's Drumming,
take listeners to the same place as a live performance of
Drumming does, I would assert. See and hear this one
<https://youtu.be/uDhwFTw4VnI?si=VTtEVnMMZVURLX4G>, for
example.]
-- Tim
> On 22 Jun 2026, at 10:31, Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
>
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 40, No. 67.
> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
> Hosted by DH-Cologne
> www.dhhumanist.org
> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
> Date: 2026-06-22 08:06:10+00:00
> From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
> Subject: repetition
>
> Malcolm Bull, writing in a 1995 review of Roberto Calasso's The Ruin of
> Kasch (LRB 17.2), notes this author's anatomy of repetition:
>
> "The crucial question is whether ... [repetition of ideas] reinforces or
> diffuses their significance. Calasso distinguishes between two types of
> repetition: that which ‘converges toward a single meaning...’, and that
> which eventually ‘makes it lose all meaning and leaves it at our feet
> like the opaque shell of a sound’."
>
> In another piece from the London Review of Books (I cannot find it), its
> author asks if repeating something again and again may be the only way
> to get to its truth. Then there's Philip Glass, who remarked somewhere--
> I think in his memoir, Words Without Music--that those who listen closely
> will hear the slight variations in his repeated musical phrases, and so get
> what he is doing.
>
> Our smart machine is of course all about iteration, endless iteration.
> Might there be an analogous point to be made about paying attention to
> the odd slips, the anomalies (a.k.a. 'hallucinations'? Of course the machine
> is up to what its programming tells it to be up to. But as it gets more and
> more human discourse to iterate, might not those anomalies reward us with
> a glimpse of a different kind of intelligence?
>
> And then there's biological repetition...
>
> Who, by the way, writes most insightfully about repetition?
>
> Comments?
>
> WM
>
> --
> Willard McCarty,
> Professor em., King's College London;
> www.mccarty.org.uk
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2026-06-22 17:15:14+00:00
From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 40.67: repetition's point?
I think it's possible that machine repetition when working from human
corpora can give us insight into human intelligence, because it is
processing human words, but not into its own, because it has none in any
sense comparable to human being.
Kierkegaard in *Repetition *writes well about repetition, but I don't think
he goes in a direction productive to understanding this topic. Repetition
as a subjective experience within time is impossible: you can't repeat your
first kiss or the first time you heard that song.
Jim R
--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2026-06-22 09:46:27+00:00
From: David Zeitlyn <david.zeitlyn@anthro.ox.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 40.67: repetition's point?
> Willard,
> on repetition
one way to go might be Gabriel Tarde and imitation/mimesis => repetition
I quote Tim Jenkins 2007 on comparison Tarde vs Durkheim
{Tarde} begins his account with the notion of imitation or mimesis,
which generates series not of identical but of resembling forms.
Concepts of distinction and identity are introduced only in the second
element, that of opposition; we might suppose that the standard
classificatory forms of distinct species organized into separate genera
are only transitional stages, ephemera developed with a contextual and
polemical purpose. And he concludes his account with the process of
adaptation, in which entities experience neither metamorphosis (as in
the series of imitations) nor distinction (as in the structures of
opposition), but take on properties in an asymmetrical fashion through
interaction with other entities, in a fashion that is neither fusion of
essence nor exchange. To use a Deleuzian description, these are the
pathways of becoming. 65
JENKINS, T. 2007. One or Three: Issues of Comparison. Cambridge
Anthropology 27, 58-66.
--
Professor David Zeitlyn ORCID: 0000-0001-5853-7351
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (ISCA), University of Oxford, 51
Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PF, UK.
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