Awaiting Binary Communication

This is part of a series of blog posts that is inspired by our baby daughter, Miru.
Every infant starts out in this world with a one-word vocabulary, the content of which we (from the perspective of our infinitely nuanced expressive apparatus) then interpret as crying. I don’t know how the baby herself experiences the crying, but let’s assume she does it to express her evolving desires. At first, she cries for milk; then she cries because she wet her diaper; then she cries for attention and a hug. But all is expressed in the same cry, that we have to decipher by first touching her lips to see if she is hungry, then checking the diaper, and finally hold her and pat her on the back. With a unary language, she is not able to express anything beyond the basic fact of her longing, which is the fact that she is alive.
Soon, that will all change. We know that the first smiles are simply reflexes of her parent’s and grandparent’s friendly grimaces inserted into her crib, and reflexes are no language. So I am awaiting the moment when she begins to smile spontaneously, for that would mean that she has invented her second word, and moved into the realm of binary communication. In theory, she would be able to express everything.
1-0-1-1-0-0-1 cry-smile-cry-cry-smile-smile-cry.
Luckily, she won’t have to revert to this Morse-style communication, as she would have invented many more words by the time she feels the need to express concepts that require multiple digits. What she will be able to do with her newly found binary alphabet however, is to give her parents positive feedback as well as negative feedback, which, I am sure, will boost their morale.

Carried Away By No Photo

Here's the scandal:

My baby is three weeks old and the photo of my baby is still not all over the Internet, despite the fact that the most common reaction is

-"Congratulations! Photos?"

Of course as a healthy-grumpy-cynical philosopher I recognize how mindless this reflex is, and how we as members of a predominantly visual culture cannot really help it. What I miss of course is a degree of reflexivity, self-irony (for which, by the way, you can be sent to prison in the current protofascist Netherlands).

The reason I don't 'share' photos with the wider public is that I don't know her privacy preferences yet. And here we are. That reason will inevitably be mistaken for a joke. A baby with privacy preferences, are you kidding me? Do you see how this works? Do you see how the system disqualifies arguments that give a voice to the voiceless as jokes? The alleged privacy preferences of an infant, the human rights of refugees, the inherent value of natural beings - our culture structurally reduces all of this to jokes, which excludes them from the discourse proper, and it does so in a way that they can never be included again because they are never completely ignored. They are a sort of aura and precisely this aural quality is what prevents it from becoming part of the discourse.

So, if you know me personally, and you're curious what my baby looks like (viz. if she has a big head to accommodate the next generation's subversive thinking) - send me an e-mail and I'll respond in due time.

March 13. Providence.

Friday the thirteenth. I am in a café where the waiter has bloody eyes and under the glass plates of the tables are roasted and unroasted coffee beans. Santiago de Chili is a magnificent city, a metropole with many faces. I've been here for a couple of days now and moved about the center enough to get a first impression. A lively, colonial city, the people seemed a little bit more relaxed than in Argentina, though street vendors and shoe polishers were everywhere. A grand network of square blocks constitutes the heart of the city, the part where restaurants and shops await their visitors and most of the money flows. Walking on those streets makes a European feel like he never left home.

From the hill "Cerro San Cristobal" (you don't need to write that down, you won't miss it in Santiago) the view of the city is impressive. Its multifariousness is even more noticeable from here: under the thick cover of smog that cannot escape over the surrounding mountains we see the commercial district with its high-rise glass-facade buildings but also the wide cuadros of low colonial houses. Tourist instincts awoke as we walked up to the Maria statue. The Virgen is popular here. I could look up why but I only want to play. Taking a picture with the sun behind her head like a halo. On our way down we discovered two new functions in Silvia's camera: baby1 and baby2. The camera was able to keep track of the age of the baby when a picture was taken in baby1-mode. This could be done for more than one baby, too. That's where baby2 kicks in. Having more than two babies simultaneously is not advisable for technical reasons. I volunteered to be baby1 and baby1 was 30 years, two months and 1 day old. It's not very young for a baby.

The park was huge and included a botanical garden, some cultural centers, a cablecar, a beautiful swimming pool and many barbecue spots. We walked down through the botanical garden that displayed species from all over the 4200 km long country of Chile and then exited the park. We trodded down the hot Avenida Providencia where a trumpet player let us take a picture of him, pointing knowingly at the "Providencia" street sign.

The meat I bought and prepared that night was really bad. A writer should have an eye for details and this is not a detail.