general extension

Randolph Dible General Extension Page � of �1 51

General Extension

or

Extension and Dimensional Continuity in General: From Whitehead’s Theory of

Extension, Through Postmodern Philosophy and Cybernetics, to a New Framework

for Dimensionality

"Prof. Ed Casey’s Nature Seminar

Prof. Ed Casey’s Text and Image

Stony Brook University

Randolph Dible

December, 2013

There are a variety of ways through the vast field of intellectual discourse to

the subject of the nature of extension and its correlates of dimensionality and

continuity, however hidden they may lie. Chief among these are ways are those of

mathematics and metaphysics. But we must be as careful as possible in deciding

on a path to this kind of meditation. The nature of extension must often be wrested

away from the nature of our particular unfolded framework of three dimensions of

space and one of time. To truly understand extension we must proceed from a

sophisticated idea of pre-extensional actuality in order to sympathetically re-enact

it in imagination.


I will be selecting perspectives from far afield, not only for the sake of a

proper survey of theoretical and systematic thought, but also for the synthesis of

the undercurrents implied in their relations. For example, Kristeva’s, Derrida’s and

Ricoeur’s projects of post-modern philosophy are of a different nature than

Whitehead’s systematic and, by birthright, modern philosophy, as we shall see.

Both of these modes of discourse are themselves altogether different from the

cybernetics and iconic mathematics of G. Spencer-Brown we will be turning to.

The benefits of a syncretic approach are tremendous, and indicate much that is as

yet unforeseeable. In this meditation, we will be focusing on a select few of the

many possibilities in the areas of thought accommodating the subject of extension

and dimensional continuity, but first let us go briefly over some reasons for their

selection.

For our reflections in the area of direct discourse I have selected the

metaphysics of extension found in Whitehead’s Process and Reality because of its

unique handling of nature in philosophy. The speculative system of Whitehead’s

theory of extension was built with the express intention of knowing both the

concrete experience of continuity as well as the abstract extrapolation beyond our

natural experience to the mathematical reality of possibility through the explication

of process. Whitehead’s metaphysics has also enjoyed a considerable influence on

later thought, both in philosophy and cybernetics.


Indirect discourse is also necessary in our post-hermeneutical age. For this

we will not find as magnificent a system of philosophy dedicated to dimensional

extension, but instead will pull together the post-metaphysical, and perhaps

magnificently post-systematic, projects of Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida, as

well as aspects of the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Paul Ricoeur. These will

not lead to a determinate system like Whitehead’s non-metrical geometry of

vectors, but instead reinforce a movement from classical logics (Aristotle and

Hegel being the prime examples) to novel onto-topologies, such as Derrida’s

grammatology, Kristeva’s semiotic chora, and Peirce and Spencer-Brown’s iconic

metaphysics.

In the end we will have reason to return to the naiveté of our pre-critical

intuitions of the nature of dimensional extension and continuity. Our more strictly

philosophical detours consist of a critique of traditional thought and also a

development of speculative schemata, both processual and post-modern. Our

detour through the philosophy of mathematics will show the way from linguistic,

symbolic discourse to a more primitive and direct kind, incorporating the

Derridean critique of phonocentrism, as well as the Ricoeurian critique of symbolic

logic. The mathematical philosophy represented by the work of Peirce and

Spencer Brown is often labeled “iconic logic,” but we would be more correct to

point out that the non-classical, non-Aristotelain logic is only an interpretation of

this primordial method of expression. Instead, the shorthand for Spencer-


Brownian “iconic logic” interpreted for philosophy is “second-order cybernetics,”

though even this refers to a developed field extraneous to the Spencer-Brownian

philosophy we will analyze at the end. It should be clear that a non-linguistic

expression of mathematical relations can afford a direct evidence of truth and

reality that the way of symbolic mediation fundamentally and necessarily lacks.

Indeed, not only does such a language show more than words can say —a picture

says a thousand words —but it also offers itself to a reading whose depth we will

have primed by the reflection on a more strictly linguistic philosophical discourse

in preparation for a certain “zone of the fundamental,” as Merleau-Ponty might call

it.

"Part I: Whitehead’s Theory of Extension

" In the Introduction to Process and Reality (Process and Reality, xii), Alfred

North Whitehead states that in Part III— “The Theory of Prehensions”— and Part

IV— “The Theory of Extension”— his “condensed scheme of cosmological ideas”

is “developed in terms of its own categoreal notions.” This means that

Whitehead’s “Essay in Cosmology” is ultimately an essay about prehension and

extension. The “Categoreal Scheme” is only the basis for the exposition of Parts

III and IV, and the “Final Interpretation” is a sort of afterword. The simplest way

to construe the technicalities of the organic philosophy is in the distinction of


prehension and extension. Here, the morphological theory of Part IV, the theory of

extension, will come into focus. It is into the determinate matrix of abstract and

objectified nexus, into the “regions” which are the terms of Part IV’s analysis, that

we shall place Part III’s genetic analyses of the actual entities and their constitutive

processes. After a brief illustration of these central notions, we will consider their

connection to the more cosmological aspects of this metaphysics, to avoid being

one-sidedly lost in the privacy of the merely genetic and meta-physiological cell-

theory.

The philosophy of organism is a holism that is determinate with regards to

the universe’s interdependent, final actualities of experience, and in-determinate

and free with regards to the constitutive novelty of the creative advance. Actual

occasions are mutually transcendent in regards to their intrinsic realities, and

mutually immanent in regards to their extrinsic realities. As Jorge Luis Nobo puts

it in the beginning of his book, Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension and

Solidarity, “…the final actualities of the universe cannot be abstracted from one

another because each actuality, though individual and discreet, is internally related

to all other actualities” (Nobo, 1). Actual entities or actual occasions are “the final

real things of which the universe is made” (Process and Reality, 18). Whitehead

quotes William James for an illustration of these “final real things:” “Either your

experience is of no content, of no change, or it is of a perceptible amount of

content or change. Your acquaintance with reality grows by buds or drops of


perception” (Some Problems of Philosophy, Ch. X; Process and Reality, 68). We

are these droplets of experience, in our mutual transcendence, but we are also the

primordial ocean of the universe, “in our primordial nature,” as Whitehead would

say. Some have ventured to hammer out the relation of Whitehead’s cosmology to

certain Buddhist doctrines, specifically that of ‘pratitya samutpadah’ (co-dependent

origination or conditioned coproduction, which we will later find to be “expansion

of reference”) illustrated by the metaphor of the reed which cannot stand alone

(John Cobb, Charles Hartshorne, Thomas McFarlane, etc.) Granted this, these

droplets could be seen through the lens of the Mahayanic and originally Vedic

metaphor of Indra’s net, where each jewel, eye, node, or actual crossing of warp

and weft is an axial point of the whole matrix. On this point, the Buddhist doctrine

of emptiness agrees with Whitehead’s doctrine of perpetual perishing, which he

calls an expansion of a line from the Timaeus, “But that which is conceived by

opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of

becoming and perishing and never really is” (Process and Reality, 82). In

systems- and organization-theoretical terms, the nodes become “bifurcation

points,” and the Whiteheadian doctrine of perpetual perishing, taken from Locke,

becomes what Ilya Prigogine and Isabella Stengers, whose philosophies of science

are inspired by Whitehead’s, call “dissipative structure theory.” In fact, in his

chapter “Organisms and Environment,” long before Bertalanffy’s General Systems

Theory, Whitehead puts ‘system’ first on the list of central terms of the philosophy


of organism, even above ‘process’ (ibid, 128). To be fair, “the theory of

pretensions,” Whitehead states, “embodies a protest against the ‘bifurcation’ of

nature,” and of actualities (ibid, 289).

In Part II (Ch. IV, section X, and Chapter X, section V) of Process and

Reality we learn that there are two species of organism and process: microscopic

and macroscopic. Whereas actual entities are microscopic (ibid, 128, 214), the

entities of everyday experience are macroscopic complexes of actual entities: they

are the nexus of the actual and already-become world given as data. In the

philosophy of organism, the central term is the actual entity— the subject-superject

— but its relationship of transcendence and immanence to the universe, its nexus,

is paramount. The categories of the “many” and the “one,” formulated in the

categoreal scheme (ibid, 21,) are essential to this. Whitehead’s principle of

extensional solidarity (“that the extensive regions embodied by actual entities…

are modally immanent in one another,” Nobo, 379,) of the “mutual, or reciprocal,

immanence of the universe’s final actualities,” is his cosmological solution to the

problem of the solidarity of the universe in its actuality, that is, the problem of the

solidarity of reality. Whitehead writes, “The world expands through recurrent

unifications of itself, each, by the addition of itself, automatically recreating the

multiplicity anew” (Process and Reality, 286). This view of the creative advance,

the advent of novelty, is basic to the organic cosmology. The student of Whitehead

whose philosophy we will be examining later, Spencer-Brown, similarly states:


“…in respect of its own information, the universe must expand to escape the

telescopes through which we, who are it, are trying to capture it, which is

us” (Laws of Form, 86). In Whitehead, the problem of the one and the many is

approached in this way:

"Creativity is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the

universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the

universe conjunctively… The ultimate metaphysical principle is the

advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than

the entities given in disjunction… The many become one and are increased

by one… This Category of the Ultimate replaces Aristotle’s category of

‘primary substance’ (Process and Reality, 21).

" We consciously prehend the contemporary world as a continuum of

extensive relations in the mode termed “presentational immediacy.” This is the

perceptive mode in which there is clear and distinct consciousness of external

relations. In this mode, we atoms, cells (“The philosophy of organism is a cell-

theory of actuality,” Process and Reality, 219), droplets, consciously prehend the

external species of eternal objects. These eternal objects in the objective mode of

ingression belong to other atomic singularities (actual entities,) which in their

privacy are subjects just like us, in their various states of self-enjoyment. Our own

eternal objects in the subjective mode of ingression are “element[s] in the


definiteness of the subjective form of a feeling” (ibid, 291), just as other actual

entities enjoy their own inner states. The sum of eternal objects in every actual

entity provides a settled, already-become world of general potentiality. But in the

conscious prehension of other contemporary actualities in the mode of

presentational immediacy, their actuality is objectified. The objectified eternal

object is taken as a datum for the primary phase in the process constituting an

actual entity, a datum for creativeness beyond that standpoint. Thus appropriated,

the objectified eternal object offers a “real potentality,” conditioned by the data of

the actual world. “General potentiality is absolute,” he writes, “and real

potentiality is relative to some actual entity, taken as a standpoint whereby the

actual world is defined” (ibid, 65). An eternal object of the objective species can

only function relationally, that is, as an agent of externality:

"“…by a necessity of its nature it is introducing one actual entity, or nexus,

into the real internal constitution of another actual entity… Eternal objects

of the objective species are the mathematical Platonic forms. They concern

the world as medium” (ibid, 291).

" “Continuity,” writes Whitehead, “concerns what is potential; whereas

actuality is incurably atomic… Our direct perception of the contemporary world is

thus reduced to extension” (ibid, 61). The contemporary world is a nexus of

mutually transcendent atomic actualities, but it is transduced and appropriated as


one datum for contemporary actuality, continuous and divisible but not divided.

Actual entities are atoms which express the genetic unity of the universe. But in

their complex functioning as efficient cause they express a specific order as a

morphological system of concrete occasions. For the extensive analysis of this

system, it is defined by an extensive region, or quantum, in which it is housed.

“The atomic unity of the world, expressed by a multiplicity of atoms, is now

replaced by the solidarity of the extensive continuum,” writes Whitehead (ibid,

286), for we are now dealing with the “entity as concrete, abstracted from the

‘process of concrescence;’ it is the outcome separated from the process” (ibid,

84.)

Whitehead uses the term “cosmic epoch” to mean “that widest society of

actual entities whose immediate relevance to ourselves is traceable” (ibid, 91.)

Our present cosmic epoch is a society that consists of “electrons, protons,

molecules, and star-systems” (ibid, 66), “electronic and protonic actual entities,

and yet more ultimate actual entities which can be dimly discerned in the quanta of

energy” (ibid, 91). Our present epoch is characterized by a spatio-temporal

continuum of four dimensions— three of space and one of time— but such givens

as these “point to the wider society of which the electronic cosmic epoch

constitutes a fragment” (ibid, 92). Whitehead’s theory of extension, indeed the

whole philosophy of organism is a metaphysical system designed not only to

explain the nature of the universe, but to evolve, in reference to the ultimate nature


of things, to include “entities with new relationships, unrealized in our experience

and unforeseen in our imaginations… introducing into the universe new types of

order” (ibid, 288). “So far as mere extensiveness is concerned,” Whitehead writes,

“space might as well have three hundred and thirty-three dimensions, instead of the

modest three dimensions of our cosmic epoch” (ibid, 289). Whitehead goes on in

Part IV to develop a non-metric geometry with which to investigate the

morphology of nexus, and the forms of extensive connection, including, point, line,

surface, volume, flat loci, and strains. But Whitehead recognizes that his system,

perhaps any system is not complete: “A precise language must await a completed

metaphysical knowledge” (ibid, 12).

"Part II: Derrida, Ricoeur, Kristeva, Merleau-Ponty. Section 1: Derrida

" In the interview in Positions, Saussure and Husserl are the two figures

through whom Derrida is critiquing the Western metaphysical tradition. Their

respective sciences of signs carry deep and damaging covert metaphysical

presuppositions. As far back as Pythagoras there are the traces of phonocentrism

in his practice of teaching his disciples from behind a veil. In Aristotle’s Organon,

Ricoeur writes, “interpretation is any voiced sound endowed with significance -

every phone semantike, every vox significativa,” and “the complete meaning of

hermeneia appears only in the complex enunciation, the sentence, which Aristotle


calls logos” (Freud and Philosophy, 21). A genealogical line of philosophers

representative of Western philosophy gets cited twice in the interview - Plato,

Aristotle, Rousseau, Hegel, and Husserl - and names a handful of metaphysical

relays of the charges of logo-phono-ethno-centrism. Each held an explicit

privileging of the spoken word over the written word, and when writing was

considered, a privileging of phonetic-alphabetic script. Their reasons for this, in

turn, were a privileging of the presence of consciousness to itself in the self-

presentation of subjectivity and a privileging of the expression of meaning,

lexically, in discreet semantic units associated with predicates. In all of the

philosophers mentioned above, these metaphysical presuppositions are made

explicit by Derrida. They even attempt to exclude writing from linguistics “as a

phenomenon of exterior representation, both useless and dangerous” (Positions,

25). Derrida calls this “the reduction of the exteriority of the signifier,” or “the

reduction of writing” (Positions, 22). This act is part and parcel of logo-phono-

ethno-centrism. This is also called the “representativist conception of writing” and

it goes along with an “expressivist” conception of meaning.

To deconstruct this metaphysical centrism, Derrida employs a neographism,

which he says is neither a word nor a concept: “differance.” The difference

between difference and differance (spelled with an a rather than an e) is not a

phonetic difference (it cannot be heard,) it is purely graphical (Margins of

Philosophy, 3). Derrida takes Saussure’s differentially-structured linguistics (“in


language there are only differences without positive terms,” Saussure tells us) and

replaces the sign with “differance,” (the one with an a,) a play of differences that

erases its traces. Semiology thus becomes grammatology.

In Speech and Phenomena, Derrida cites Husserl in pointing out an

ambiguity of the two senses of the word “sign:” it means both expression and

indication. Husserl begins to sharpen his concept by first stripping the “indicative

sign” of meaning and sense. It is evident to Derrida from such stipulations as

“logical meaning is an expression,” that “Husserl wants to grasp the expressive and

logical purity of meaning as the possibility of logos” (Speech and Phenomena, 20),

despite the admitted entanglement or interweaving of expression and indication.

Derrida goes as far as to call the representation of language as “the expulsion of the

intimacy of an inside” (Positions, 28) a “transcendental illusion” of which

“Western metaphysics constitutes a powerful systematization” (ibid). What is at

stake in all this is the meaning of meaning. His critical project is to explicate the

far-reaching shortcomings of the semiological and phenomenological conception

of meaning as expression. Husserl’s “purely logical grammar,” as much as

Leibniz’ “mathesis universalis,” is symptomatic of this logocentrism. But

Derrida’s genial stroke assures us that “the presumed interiority of meaning is

already worked upon by its own exteriority… It already differs (from itself) before

any act of expression… Only on this condition can it “signify”” (ibid, 29). It

indicates what it is and what it is not. It demarcates a region and implicates all


other regions. Such a notion of the “sign” as the “trace” of productive self-

differentiation in both a temporal and spatial sense is the kind of textuality of

which Of Grammatology is the science. It is a wholly new concept of writing.

The temporality of writing is different than the temporality of speaking.

Whereas speech privileges the present, it is with writing that we may first perceive

time. As Derrida writes in Of Grammatology: “Origin of the experience of space

and time, this writing of difference, this fabric of the trace, permits the difference

between space and time to be articulated, to appear as such, in the unity of an

experience… This articulation therefore permits a graphic (“visual” or “tactile,”

“spatial”) chain to be adapted, on occasion in a linear fashion, to a spoken

(“phonic,” “temporal”) chain. It is from the primary possibility of this articulation

that one must begin. Difference is articulation” (Of Grammatology, 66). Nietzsche

writes that consciousness cannot be trusted to know its own functioning. The

manifest operating system is not necessarily conscious of its own machine

language. Derrida is indebted to Nietzsche for this suspicious hermeneutics, and in

many respects Of Grammatology is modeled on Nietzsche’s Geneology of Morals.

In his book The Time of Our Lives, David Hoy explains that the trace leaves

behind the traditional metaphysics of presence in the kind temporality it entails.

“Unlike metaphysics,” he writes, “which thinks of its basic concepts as self-

contained units of meaning, Derrida’s concept of the trace is not such a unit. There

are no such units but only contrastive relations in a system of differences. These


differences are both spatial and temporal. Spatial relations are said to differ

whereas temporal relations are deferred. He points to Freud’s notion of the

deferred effect— nachtraglichkeit— as an example of a temporality that disrupts

the usual conceptualization of time as involving the moments of past, present, and

future” (The Time of Our Lives, 81). In addition to a Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the

trace, perhaps still mired in a Bergsonian privileging of the present, and the

Levinasian-Heideggerian genealogy of the Derridean “trace,” the trace also goes

back to Freud’s “Note on the Mystic Writing Pad,” on which psychical content is

represented through a nonphonetic writing, a “text whose essence is irreducibly

graphic,” even to “slips of the pen” (Writing and Difference, 199, 230). Although

incomprehensible within the logocentrism it deconstructs, the trace “requires the

logic of presence, even when it begins to disobey that logic” (Of Grammatology,

77) but still, it “cannot be grasped by metaphysics, and thus puts us beyond

metaphysics” (The Time of Our Lives, 77).

"Part 2. Section 2: Paul Ricoeur’s Notion of the Symbol Contra Symbolic Logic

"Deconstruction, in its semantically-oriented critical capacity, is also a project

parallel to other post-structuralist philosophies of meaning and value. To bring

attention these parallel aims, I will highlight Paul Ricoeur’s semantic problem with

symbolic logic. The metaphysical critique is the same for Derrida and Ricoeur


(both being post-structuralists generally, but also in the specificities of their

respective projects), for instance, in the invocation of the Leibnizian mathesis

universalis, an “alphabet of human thought,” and the project of a “purely logical

grammar” in Husserl (Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology, 161-174). In

the Introduction to Symbolism of Evil, Ricoeur indicates his progressive direction

in contradistinction from both modern symbolic logic’s Leibnizian genealogy and

Husserl’s notion of signification, when he asks:

"Is it necessary to say that the sort of symbol which will be in question

here has nothing to do with that which symbolic logic calls by the same

name? Indeed it is the inverse of it. But it is not enough to say so; one must

know why. For symbolic logic, symbolism is the acme of formalism.

Formal logic, in the theory of the syllogism has already replaced “terms” by

signs [my emphasis] standing for anything whatever… In symbolic logic

these expressions are themselves replaced by letters, or written signs, which

need no longer be spoken and by means of which it is possible to calculate

without asking oneself how they are incorporated in a deontology of

reasoning. These, then, are no longer abbreviations of familiar verbal

expressions, but “characters” in the Leibnizian sense of the word - that is to

say, elements of a calculus. …In this sense [the symbol] is the absolute

inverse of an absolute formalism. One might be astonished that the symbol

has two such rigorously inverse uses. Perhaps the reason should be sought

in the structure of signification, which is at once a function of absence and a

function of presence: a function of absence because to signify is to signify

“vacuously,” it is to say things without the things, in substituted signs; a


function of presence because to signify is to signify “something” and finally

the world. [Husserl, Logical Investigations, “Expression and Signification”]

Signification by its very structure makes possible at the same time both total

formalization - that is to say, the reduction of signs to “characters” and

finally to elements of a calculus - and the restoration of a full language,

heavy with implicit intentionality’s and analogical references to something

else, which it presents enigmatically (Symbolism of Evil, 16-18).

"In Imagination and Chance, Leonard Lawlor suggests that both Derrida and

Ricoeur agree that “thought cannot achieve self-knowledge by means of intuitive

self-reflection, that thought has to externalize and mediate itself in repeatable

signs, and that linguistic mediation disallows the possibility of a “complete

mediation” whereby the origin would be recovered in all of its

determinations” (Imagination and Chance, 1-2). In light of these particular

affinities, Lawlor says that Derrida’s work and Ricoeur’s are “almost

indistinguishable” (Reading Derrida and Ricoeur, 4). The above selection from

Symbolism of Evil makes evident that in addition to general affinities, there is a

more or less complete agreement between the two thinkers in respect to the

formulation of meaning and more specifically the critique of the sign.

"Part II. Section 3: Julia Kristeva’s Revolution


Kristeva’s project is also a sort of semiology, “a semiology of paragrams", a

paragrammatology. A program is a form of word play wherein a letter in a word is

modified. Derrida’s paragram - the word-play of the ‘a’ in ‘differance’ - is itself

the point of the letter in the line of a text that, like Kristeva’s phenotext, is always

more than lexical, precisely, of a higher order than the syntagmatic relations of

words; it expands in a volume beyond local voice. The semantic expansion of

Kristevan and Derridean ‘text’ through the practice of poetry, magic, myth, and

other paradigm shifting (as with Kuhn) epistemic crises (as with Foucault) as

found in the works of Valery, Atraud, Beckett and Mallarme is a baptism by fire, a

divine comedy of the subject. In Ricoeur’s early opus, The Philosophy of the Will,

as well as Kristeva’s, Revolution in Poetic Language and especially Black Sun,

comedy is reached in discourse and myth only through tragedy. As she writes:

" “The postmodern is closer to human comedy than to abyssal discontent.

Has not hell as such, throughly investigated in postwar literature, lost its

infernal inaccessibility and become our everyday, transparent, almost

humdrum lot - a “ nothing” - like our “truths” henceforth made visible,

televised, in short not so secret as all that…? The desire for comedy shows

up today to conceal - without for that matter being unaware of it - the

concern for such truth without tragedy, melancholia without purgatory.

Shades of Marivaux and Crebillon” (Black Sun, 259)

"


This process is like a Shamanic rending of static, ossified significance to reveal

through dynamic, even diabolic novelty. Kristeva likens these textual practices,

these “unlimited and unbounded generating process” (Revolution in Poetic

Language, 17), and to political revolution itself in her 1984 book Revolution in

Poetic Language.

Before Kristeva, Heidegger and Derrida have appropriated Plato’s notion of the

receptacle— khora or cora. We will focus on Kristeva’s account. But first let us

start with Plato. In his account of the universe according to necessity, in the

Timaeus, Plato tells us that we must keep in mind the comparison of the things

which come to be to the offspring of a father, who is a model or source and of a

mother, which is that in which the things that come to be do indeed come to be.

His account of the elementary bodies which comprise the universe is one of four

elements— fire, water, air and earth— which are in fact certain three dimensional

forms, respectively: tetrahedron, icosahedron, octahedron and cube. The fifth

element is a dodecahedron, and “this one the god used for the whole

universe” (Timaeus, 54d). All bodies are three-dimensional and hence bounded by

surfaces. Surfaces are bounded by straight lines and straight lines are divisible into

triangles. Plato seems to imply that though the “wetnurse of becoming” receives

all things that enter it, and its nature is to be “available for anything to make its

impression upon, and it is modified, shaped and reshaped by the things that enter

it” (ibid, 50c), it “has never in any way whatever taken on any characteristic


similar to any of the things that enter it” (ibid). Chora is “devoid of any inherent

characteristics of its own” but is nonetheless shaped. The receptacle is thus space.

Kristeva uses the term to mean the space in which the drives of psychoanalytic

energetics enter language. The semiotic chora is the matrix (womb or mattress)

that conditions the possibility of signification through the rhythms behind

language, which Mallarme called “the song behind the text” in which language is

embedded. The ‘genotext’ is the underlying drive force in language that “organizes

a space in which the subject is not yet a split subject that will become blurred,

giving rise to the symbolic” (Revolution in Poetic Language, 86). It is language’s

underlying foundation. Whereas the genotext is an incalculable topological space,

the phenotext is grammatically structured, and can be calculated in an algebra. The

phenotext is the universe, but the genotext is, like the semiotic chora, “a

continuum” (ibid, 28). But Kristeva’s semiotic chora is brought into language to

lead to a “second degree thetic,” that is, “a resumption of the functioning

characteristic of the semiotic chora within the signifying device of language. This

is precisely what artistic practices, and notably poetic language,

demonstrates” (ibid, 50).

Like Derrida, Ricoeur, and the Merleau-Ponty of “Indirect Language and the

Voices of Silence”, Kristeva’s project aims at breaking through the confines of

form to unleash the infinite surplus of meaning, Nerval’s “black sun”. The black

sun lies behind the logos-heilos, behind the sol, in the “signifying soil” Sartre


speaks of, a “semantic thickness” according to Ponge (“Indirect Language and the

Voices of Silence,” 112). The creative advance can only be the “fruit of our

toil” (ibid.) In this general aspect, these projects are one and the same enterprise,

launched, perhaps, by the death of God: Kristeva tells us that Valery’s nihilistic

“disaster concerning the spirit” stems from this event, when the atomic physicist of

the First World War observes “in a kiln heated to incandescence: if our eyes

endured, they would see nothing. No luminous disparity would remain, nothing

would distinguish one point in space from another. This tremendous, trapped

energy would end up in invisibility, in imperceptible equality. An equality of that

sort is nothing else than a perfect state of disorder” (Black Sun, 222). From such

darkness, both Kristeva and Ricoeur seek to find the profound novelty of poiesis.

The power of originary affirmation— creation in the largest sense— is tied up with

existential difference for Ricoeur, just as the, for Kristeva, the generation of

significance is tied up with thetic rupture. Indeed, in “Imagination in Discourse

and Action”, Ricoeur speaks of “the thesis of the world” as merely the “negative

condition for the release of a second-order referential power… the power of

affirmation unfurled by poetic language… second-order reference, which in reality

is the primordial reference… Every icon is a graphism that re-creates reality at a

higher level of realism. This “iconic augmentation” proceeds by abbreviations and

articulations, as is shown by the careful analysis of the principal episodes of the

history of panting and the history of all types of graphic inventions” (From Text to


Action, 175). Here we find resemblances to the texts of Derrida, Merleau-Ponty,

and even cybernetics, with regard to poetic inscription. But Ricoeur’s discussion is

here about semantic innovation, and his general formula is that of the “use of

bizarre predicates…predicative impertinence, as the appropriate means of

producing a shock between semantic fields” (ibid, 172) as a semantic resumption

of his earlier abandoned project of the Poetics of the Will. Both Kristeva and

Ricoeur practice a Nietzschean, anatheistic theurgy in their probings of the the

fundamental, both in its good and evil aspects. Merleau-Ponty too has sought to

elucidate a philosophy of meaning in his critique of structuralism, “Indirect

Langauge and the Voices of Silence,” through a poetics of signification he

developed from the critique of Saussure’s structural linguistics— similar to aspects

of Derrida’s project. In his essay “Eye and Mind”, Merleau-Ponty’s poetics, like

Kristeva’s “second-degree thetics” takes on the form of a “secret science”, which

will take us from postmodern philosophy to cybernetics, in our staking out a zone

of the fundamental.

"Part II. Section 4: Merleau-Ponty’s Secret Science of “Eye and Mind”

"Art is not construction, artifice, the meticulous relationship to a space and a

world existing outside. It is truly the ‘inarticulate cry,’ as Hermes

Trismegistus said, ‘which seemed to be the voice of the light.’ And once it is


present it awakens powers dormant in ordinary vision, a secret of

preexistence. When through the water’s thickness I see the tiled bottom of

the pool, I do not see it despite the water and the reflections; I see it through

them and because of them. (“Eye and Mind,” 142)

" In “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty proceeds through a critique of the

operationalism of modern empirical science and cybernetics, and an affirmation of

a “secret science” (“Eye and Mind,” 123) to find a “zone of the

‘fundamental’” (“Eye and Mind,” 149) in painting, in drawing, and in philosophy.

In his critique of modern painting, drawing, and philosophy, he gives expression to

a post-modern phenomenology and hermeneutics of those genres. He recasts the

philosophical ruminations of the artists into the philosophical context by

performing an iconology, like that of Panofsky. What Panofsky does for painting,

Merleau-Ponty does for philosophy. Merleau-Ponty shows that the Cartesianism of

empirical science and cybernetics can be reconfigured through the logic of the eye

and the mind, which reaches for an ontology beyond (behind, or between) the

phenomenology of these genres. This iconology begins with a description of

(Descartes’) modern philosophy, proceeds through the philosophical and even

occult connotations to a more fundamental ontology.

Merleau-Ponty begins with a characterization of the scientific method as a

vivisection of “the real.” The operationalist paradigm of the modern conception of

the scientific method freezes, and kills the organs of, thought and expression in the


arts and sciences. Beginning with the objectification of the parts of the continuum

of reality, and later, the logician's assignation of injective relations between those

parts, operationalist thinking breaks the continuity of life. Operationalism forces a

solitary meaning (a semantic depletion), to these parts of reality, effectively

reducing the once-whole objectivity to a logistical f-utility for "cybernetic"

ideology (Merleau-Ponty seems to be driving at Heidegger's "empty optimization

imperatives"). He uses the metaphor of a “slender twig” or a “net” of “gradients”

cast away (“out to sea,” out to the wilderness) (“Eye and Mind,” 122). The notion

of “operationalism” that Merleau-Ponty invokes to characterize his idea of

cybernetics retains the sense of the first wave of cybernetics: the drive to control,

mastery, or instruction— “kubernetes” means government and steersmanship—

whose titanic totalizing power Heidegger so feared, and lost the original sense of

the Greek Oceanid Metis— skill, cunning, wisdom— leaving us in the foundering

and shipwrecked state—Schiffbruch, Scheitern— which Jaspers was fond of

deciphering.

“Eye and Mind” begins, “Science manipulates things and gives up living in

them” (“Eye and Mind,” 121). Even the very activity of thinking has been

cheapened by the scientific method, Merleau-Ponty thinks, having been converted

into thinking “operationally.” He calls the scientific method an “absolute

artificialism,” clinging to facticity in an operationalist paradigm at the expense of

semantic innovation, at the expense of the creative function--poiesis and


extemporaneity--found, for instance, in painting. He calls for science to return to

the life of reality, and to “once more become philosophy....” (“Eye and Mind,”

123). He calls for science to once more become philosophy. This kerygmatic cord

which clothes painting is a “secret science,” a secret science that calls for a science

from the heart of art. “What is this fundamental of painting, perhaps of all

culture?” he asks, at the close of the first section.

The science of painting may be secret because, as Cezanne says, echoing

Heraclitus, “Nature is on the inside” (“Eye and Mind,” 125). The visible and the

voluntary give to the artist a figural science, an iconology consisting of an eidetic

(the signified painting, its essential form) and a hermeneutic (the semantic

painting, its inimitable meaning). This artist capax is a scientific genius in its own

way, a secret scientist, able to articulate a consciousness (art) with a sentience of

natural grace (method). In order to explain the mechanism by which the secret

science comes to exist, Merleau-Ponty cites the freedom of movement found in the

organ of sight, which hints of this secret and sacred science. The classical scientific

method tried to make explicit this secret science, but thereby profaned it. In midst

of the current “koinos kosmos,” the common and unclean order, the disarray, the

work of art is seen as scattered into a network of granulated “holes” that were

once, and might once again, become whole, become the “idios kosmos,” the order

to be restored. Ironically, the element lost in the ex-action of profane and explicit

science is the “being” which empirical science calls “bias,” even in the


spontaneous iconology of free expression. Like the organ of its sight, the reality

behind agency and knowledge, at the root of both epistemology and work, rules its

shadowy realm by an unimaginable, unthinkable pre-figural method: a secret

science.

This secret science, this “sight without light,” vision without division, which

conjures the imagination of a universe of primordial painting, or even in the

drawing up of distinctions: “We shall see that the whole of painting is present in

each of its modes of expression; there is a kind of drawing, even a single line, that

can embrace all of painting’s bold potential” (“Eye and Mind,” 132). This “ur”-

drawing is posited prior to reflection, and provides to “the round eye of the mirror”

its enigmatic light (“Eye and Mind,” 129). The painter’s universe is a worship of

Lux-Cipher (enigmatic light). The cunning Oceanid Metis, the serpentine

inspiration (Bergson’s serpentement, “sinuous outline” (“Eye and Mind,” 143))

first spirals out from the eye balls and rolls into the world and upon touching it (the

classical Spheres of heavenly bodies, Emerson’s Circles, the ouroboros) effects the

voluntary order. The freedom of the Prime Mover is inscrutable in the positive

reality of a mythical Being prior to the figuration of a philosophy whose own roots

are conjured from a mythical play of titanic freedom:

"My movement is not a decision made by the mind, an absolute doing which

would decree, from the depths of a subjective retreat, some change of place


miraculously executed in extended space. It is the natural sequel to, and

maturation of, vision. I say of a thing that it is moved; but my body moves

itself; my movement is self-moved. It is not ignorance of self, blind to itself;

it radiates from a self... (“Eye and Mind,” 124)

" From the apple of the eye to the brain-stem, the simultaneity of vision

(knowledge) and motor projects (between good and evil) gives the human the

functional illusion of autonomy, of the practical faith in voluntary control. This

naive cybernetics is implicit to the scientist and painter. But this faith leads to a

religion called science, which, like its Christian analogue, steers clear of true

Nature-worship. To quote the first theologian, St. Paul, “Your body is not your

own.” As a religious ritual devised to heal the “rent beings” (“Eye and Mind,”

149), the observer creates a body to traverse the imagined distance between itself

and the visible horizon, becoming like a god in becoming human. This

transcendence immanent to the adventure of thought-forces (primordial vision

prism/ vision-prison) is like a resurrection, an insurrection of geological forces to

create egological form:

" A human body is present when, between the see-er and the visible, between

touching and touched, between one eye and the other, between hand and

hand a kind of crossover occurs, when the spark of the sensing/ sensible is

lit, when the fire starts to burn that will not cease until some accident befalls


the body, undoing what no accident would have sufficed to do... (“Eye and

Mind,” 125)

" The arc of the promised autonomy of science (science’s own “Ark of the

Covenant”) starts the fire of a distinctly human life, situated as it is at the heart of a

productive imagination. We are open to distinctly human conduct because of the

spark of the promise. When the scientists (the sinners) are washed away by the

deluge of the ocean, outer space, or alien invasion, a humbling second Copernical

revolution will humiliate the exaction of the pretentious sciences, and we will once

again have to discover/ invent fire (Klee’s metaphor), that is to say, harness nature,

fall with grace in learning to walk, paint with a secret science (an ars poetica) to

yoke the paints, the cattle, to learn the secret yoga:

"Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us, are there only because

they awaken an echo in our bodies and because the body welcomes them

(ibid).

" Thus painting, for Merleau-Ponty, as an occult iconology, is a secret science,

an oneirism, reminiscent of alchemy and magic. But, for him, it takes place

through a post-critical, phenomenological reflection that alludes to Kant, Husserl,

and Heidegger. Kant’s inauguration of phenomenology, his notions of the

productive imagination, and a secular theology of the promise, are hinted at.


Husserl’s eidetic method of pure description of essences is echoed, and there is an

implicit critique of his egology. Heidegger’s analyses of Being and Time, his

charges against the operationalist thinking of naive cybernetics, and perhaps

negatively, his opposition of science and poetry, also appear in the immediate

background. The “imaginary texture of the real,” he clarifies (“Eye and Mind,”

126), is no mere tracing or copy, but the original constitution of phenomena. The

eyes are just the tips of icebergs, at the helm of ice-breaker arctic destroyers,

Eniacs of the world, or perhaps its Enigma Machines (“...our fleshly eyes... they

are the computers of the world…”, “Eye and Mind,” 127), sending codes to the

hand at the helm, to navigate the bodies of the Nautonnier.

Merleau-Ponty tackles the divine science behind the production of vision

from the angle of Descartes’ haptic model of vision in the Dioptrics, itself heavily

influenced by the medieval science of perspective. The blind man’s staff takes on

the carnal geometry of intromission, as described in the Dioptrics. The blind, says

Descartes, like our primal painter Cezanne, “see with their hands” (“Eye and

Mind,” 127). Merleau-Ponty thinks that although the form of science appears

through its instruments, epitomized by the blind man’s cane, the meaning of

science could be better achieved by the artist’s brush and pen.

"The secret of the art of drawing is to discover in each object the particular

way in which a certain flexuous line, which is so to speak, its generating


axis, is directed through its whole extent. -Leonardo da Vinci (“Eye and

Mind,” 142)

" Merleau-Ponty’s Cartesian geometric phenomenology continues not as a

mere adumbration of Descartes’ position, but as an implicit critique of the thought

at the time. This thought is also found, for example, in Renaissance painting,

which always begins with the perspectival point, and then through imaginary lines

of sight, that is, it begins with an extensive continuum or dimensional matrix

before painting the contents of realistic paintings. For Renaissance realism, the

painting is independent of the world outside the painting, and the figures are in the

space of the painting, just as for Descartes, the objects of our experience are

contained in his metaphysical notion of space:

"What I call depth is either nothing, or else it is my participation in a Being

without restriction, first and foremost a participation in the being of space

beyond every particular point of view.... Space is in itself; rather, it is the in-

itself par excellence. Its definition is to be in itself. Every point of space is,

and is thought as being, right where it is-- one here, another there; space is

the self-evidence of the ‘where.’... Space remains absolutely in itself,

everywhere equal to itself, homogenous; its dimensions, for example, are by

definition interchangeable (“Eye and Mind,” 134).

"


But Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Cartesian phenomenology is not Cartesian

philosophy: “Space is not what it was in the Dioptrics...” (“Eye and Mind,” 138).

Both Descartes’ philosophy and the perspectival techniques of Renaissance

painting are congruent with the perceived, visual world we commune within by

convention, but there is more to the world than meets the eye. The world of the

mind encountered, for instance, in the hermeneutics of Panofsky, demonstrates that

the breaking of the lines of linear perspective is a way of progressing beyond “our

attempts to survey [space] from above” (“Eye and Mind,” 135). The history of

painting from this era up to the present bears witness to the break with the

pretensions of visual justice in favor of a more imaginative ontology. The

crucifixion of the ideal philosophical concept of space becomes even more

pronounced as Merleau-Ponty continues:

"...a being which thought transcribes in its entirety onto three right-angle

axes--so that subsequent thinkers could one day experience the limitations of

that construction and understand that space does not have precisely three

dimensions, (as an animal has either four or two legs), and that dimensions

are taken by different systems of measurement from a single dimensionality,

a polymorphous Being, which justifies all of them without being fully

expressed by any (“Eye and Mind,” 134).

"


Descartes, in the Dioptrics, knew, as well as Oedipus in Thebes standing

before the Sphinx, that the third leg between the two and four legged animals

symbolized the overplay of technological implementation and wisdom, but it

seems to be an aside for Merleau-Ponty at this point. The important point is that

distinctly modern philosophy began with Descartes, and Merleau-Ponty is offering

up the ghost to the contemporary zeitgeist. Moreover, the “polymorphous

Being” (“Eye and Mind,” 134) is a poly-vocal symbol, and thus an instance of the

“surplus and thickness of meaning,” (“Eye and Mind,” 139) behind or beneath its

manifest content, the openness of form necessary for semantic innovation. He

continues, “Descartes was right in liberating space: his mistake was to erect it into

a positive being, beyond all points of view, all latency and depth, devoid of any

real thickness” (“Eye and Mind,” 135). But our operationalist philosophy of

science and our hermetic hermeneutics (‘secret science’) are not sufficient: “Our

science and our philosophy are two faithful and unfaithful offshoots of

Cartesianism, two monsters born of its dismemberment” (“Eye and Mind,” 138).

We must navigate our enterprise between a critique of the operationalist

interpretation of cybernetics and the secret science of the artist’s technique if we

are to reach a zone of the fundamental in philosophy. There remains the possibility

of a remembering of the wounded cogito that goes beyond abstract and idealist

reflection (philosophical idealism) and yet stops short of the illusionary reverie of

speculation (the illusionism of pre-modern painting). The body of work and the


audience which interprets it form a complete circle-- the hermeneutic circle--

which is also a feedback-loop which, when set upon itself in philosophical

reflection, amplifies or deepens the vision of philosophical speculation on the

world to be still further prospected:

"Art is not construction, artifice, the meticulous relationship to a space and a

world existing outside. It is truly the ‘inarticulate cry,’ as Hermes

Trismegistus said, ‘which seemed to be the voice of the light.’ And once it is

present it awakens powers dormant in ordinary vision, a secret of

preexistence. When through the water’s thickness I see the tiled bottom of

the pool, I do not see it despite the water and the reflections; I see it through

them and because of them (“Eye and Mind,” 142).

" This Ray-Res, this light and line of the real, this voice proceeding from an

“inarticulate cry,” is a generative poetics of the line. The line in its “constitutive

power” (“Eye and Mind,” 143) as the “generating axis” and “blueprint of the

genesis of things,” is not the line seen. As Bergson says, “[it] could be no one of

the visible lines of the figure... no more here than there... ” (“Eye and Mind,” 143),

but by Klee’s method, “indirect” or “absolute painting” could be expressed by an

elusive “network of lines so entangled that it could no longer be a question of a

truly elementary representation” (ibid). The line which is seen is only a

representation of the line of presence, an indication of a necessary being. It is not


of the order of description in the sense of any phenomenology, but rather a

necessary beginning, around the absolute angle or absolute corner of perspective

and perception. Furthermore, the depiction of movement in painting is taken up by

these post-modern, post-representationalist painters by the power of paradox.

Matisse’s and Klee’s drawings employ paradoxical simultaneity of opposed

positions to create a living, breathing experience of movement:

"The picture makes movement possible by its internal discordance. Each

member’s position, precisely by virtue of its incompatibility with that of the

other’s (according to the body’s logic), is dated differently or is not “in time”

with the others; and since all of them remain visibly within the unity of one

body, it is the body which comes to bestride duration. Its movement is

something conspired between legs, trunk, arms, and head in some locus of

virtuality, and it breaks forth only subsequently by actual change of place

(“Eye and Mind,” 145).

" The painted picture, unlike the ordinary photograph, presents imperfections,

impossibilities, whose degrees of bizarre predication or semantic impertinence may

be calculated by the painter, according to what da Vinci called a “pictorial

science,” what Rilke (apropos of Rodin) calls a “silent science” that places on the

canvass the form of things “whose seal has not been broken” (“Eye and Mind,”

146). To understand the eye as the window of the soul means to recognize in it a

different logic than the logic of appearances under the sun. The visual world is


projected due to incongruities in the mind, like the painted picture. It arises as a

dimension, Merleau-Ponty tells us (“functions also as a dimension”), according to

the proto-logic of Being, “given as the result of a dehiscence of Being... Vision is

the meeting, as at the crossroads, of all the aspects of Being” (“Eye and Mind,”

147). The dimension of drawing therefore arises from a certain crossing of

distinction of aspects of primordial being. It is as if the whole world collapses and

converges upon the eye, or as if the mind is a fire, as Merleau-Ponty quotes Klee,

“a certain fire wills to live; it wakes. Working its way along the hand’s conductor,

it reaches the canvas and invades it; then, a leaping spark, it arcs the gap in the

circle it was to trace: the return to the eye, and beyond” (“Eye and Mind,” 147).

The eye, the observer, is thereby the very active agent of experience, engaged in

psychophysical feedback. This is the very focus of second-order cybernetics, a

species of cybernetics Merleau-Ponty did not get to know. Merleau-Ponty takes

this artist’s claim ontologically. For Merleau-Ponty, the ark or feedback-loop of

the artist’s connection to art is not limited to the application of technique to a

canvass: “There is no break at all in this circuit; it is impossible to say that here

nature ends and the human being or expression begins. It is, then, silent Being that

itself comes to show forth its own meaning” (“Eye and Mind,” 147). This circuit is

the feedback-loop of cybernetics, and also the hermeneutic circle of Panofsky’s

iconology, which amplifies or deepens the meaning of the art. But it also points


philosophy in the direction of reinstating the hidden congruence of the meaning

and form of expression; its iconicity.

To conclude “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty returns to the “hidden

historicity,” this time as a hidden cybernetics, different from the one he began with

so critically. This adventure of painting as “commanding and overseeing all our

useful activity,” is painted by Panofsky. “Commanding” and “overseeing” are

activities of steersmanship, the root metaphor of cybernetics. Here Merleau-Ponty

performs his own “iconology” modeled after the tripartite science of Panofsky, and

echoed in the very movements of his own “Eye and Mind.” The first of the three

strata in Panofsky’s Studies in Iconology is the primary or natural subject matter,

apparent to a first naiveté; the basic facts of the work of art, and it responds to the

question “What is the matter?” This is analogous to the eidetic movement of a

pure description of essences in phenomenology. The second strata is the

iconography, which proceeds to interpret the basic facts of the matter in the depth

of its socio-cultural connotative space, enriching the primary or natural subject

matter with the pertinent allusions. This second movement is analogous to the

decryptive movement of hermeneutics, as well as C. S. Peirce’s secondness,

seeking the elusive reality behind the manifest content, reading into the work,

between the lines. The third strata of Panofsky’s iconology is the iconology

proper: tertiary or intrinsic meaning or content; the concrete universal immanent

to the work in its impure, existential objectivity. Iconology ultimately responds to


the “Why?,” i.e. to the question of motivation: “What does it all mean?” or as the

philosopher asks, “What is the meaning of being?” This “hidden historicity” (“Eye

and Mind,” 148) is finally revealed to be the “secret science,” the cipher-netics,

which both the painter and the philosopher used in the first place to decide on his

project, and in so doing to both determine and create it, albeit imperfectly, and

never conclusively:

"...that the figurations of literature and philosophy are no more settled than

those of painting and are no more capable of being accumulated into a stable

treasure; that even science learns to recognize a zone of the ‘fundamental,’

peopled with dense, open, rent beings of which an exhaustive treatment is

out of the question— like the cybernetician’s ‘aesthetic information’ or

mathematico-physical ‘groups of operations’; that, in the end, we are never

in a position to take stock of everything objectively or to think of progress in

itself; and that the whole of human history is, in a certain sense, stationary:

What, says the understanding, like [Stendhal’s] Lamiel, is that all there is to

it? Is this the highest point of reason, to realize that the soil beneath our feet

is shifting, to pompously call ‘interrogation’ what is only a persistent state of

stupor, to call ‘research’ or ‘quest’ what is only trudging in a circle, to call

‘Being’ that which never fully is? (“Eye and Mind,” 149)

" The motivating discontent is also the call to passion of the enigmatic

promise that no reality is ultimate, no corner of the imagination is forever, and, as

ends the essay “If creations are not permanent acquisitions, it is not just that, like


all things, they pass away: it is also that they have almost their entire lives before

them” (“Eye and Mind,” 149). This is inspiring, but also energizing! This is the

same productive aporia found in Whitehead’s line of the Timaeus— “…and never

really is” (Process and Reality, 82) and the inverse of Spencer-Brown’s “…and so

on, and so on you will eventually construct the universe…” (Laws of Form, 86),

but at the same ontological depth of wonder— Peggy Lee asks the same question

about love, “Is that all there is?” Like the “secret science,” like the “hidden

historicity,” the “silent science” and “pictorial science,” the fact that the work of

philosophy is unfinished is what makes it already fundamental. It is unlike

Merleau-Ponty’s first and public sense of science, and his first and pedestrian

conception of cybernetics, unlike the fundament sought by Descartes and Cartesian

science, and unlike the completion and perfection sought by da Vinci and Cezanne.

This “zone of the ‘fundamental’” (“Eye and Mind,” 149) is there for the

philosophical adventure, in search of revolutionary innovation and progress in

thought, ways of being, and God knows what else. The problem of the imagination

is not limited to the surface image; all of reality originates in the generative

primacy of imagination through semantic innovation, even the most sedimented

icons and idols. “The imaginary texture of the real” (“Eye and Mind,” 126) that

Merleau-Ponty speaks of does not mean to indicate that the real is unreal, but

instead, that the actual was once potential and does not have the last word; no act is

final. This is the promise that arises from the “zone of the ‘fundamental.’”


Perhaps since the time Merleau-Ponty wrote “Eye and Mind” our culture has

learned to cope with and even overcome the motivating concerns of “Eye and

Mind.” Perhaps the essay was merely a move from conflict to convergence and

conciliation between the different philosophical temperaments. Merleau-Ponty’s

basic concern was a concern with the domination of culture by an operationalist

way of life. Thus he called for a “secret science” which would unleash a hidden

power of iconicity dormant within empirical science, as had been unfurled by

contemporary arts. In the arts scene he saw a way of overcoming the domination

of imagination by the post-Cartesian paradigm, and he expressed this in

philosophy. With philosophy catching up with the arts, Merleau-Ponty hoped

science and the rest of culture would follow the trend. Indeed, post-structuralist

trends have since shaped our philosophy of science and even cybernetics itself has

grown with post-structuralism. Even so, “Eye and Mind’s” last words, “[creations]

have almost their entire lives before them” (“Eye and Mind,” 149,) are unsettling

in a good way. No trend has a last word, no act is final. Structures are sedimented

and give form to expressions which thereby lose sight of their original and

generative meaning, but this blindness gives rise to revolutionary ways of being

and original vision returns.

"Part III: From Philosophies of Language to Philosophies of Iconicity

"


The cornerstone of the contemporary cybernetics movement, George

Spencer-Brown’s “calculus of indications” contained in his book Laws of Form, is

a simple calculus of the consequences of the injunction, “Draw a distinction,” a

notion thoroughly imported into Niklas Luhmann’s use of “Differenz,” which is

explicitly meant to connote Spencer-Brown’s use of “distinction” as much as

Derrida’s use of “differance.” The calculus of indications is developed into a

primary or non-numerical arithmetic of the two constants, the marked state and the

unmarked state, and by the introduction of variables to stand for these two

constants, a primary algebra. Like Charles Sanders Peirce’s “Existential Graphs,”

the calculus of indications is a purely graphical, diagrammatic, or iconic system,

like Venn and Euler Diagrams. But it is a whole mathematics and philosophy that

comes from a completely fresh start, and literally begins with a blank slate.

In the interview in Positions, Derrida tells his interviewer, Kristeva, that:

“The effective progress of mathematical notation thus goes along with the

deconstruction of metaphysics, with the profound renewal of mathematics itself,

and the concept of science for which mathematics has always been the

model” (Positions, 30). This interview occurred one year before Laws of Form

was published. The realm of iconic “language,” where what you see is what you

get— much like the pre-linguistic world of actual experience— is a pre-historical

world, a world of the trace, drawing, and arche-writing. Iconic, non-phonetic

mathematical notation could be said to pick up a tradition more primordial than


that of the Western metaphysics of phono-logo-centrism, as Derrida is keen to

point out (Positions, 30), and we shall refer to Merleau-Ponty to designate it: “The

first cave drawing founded a tradition only because it had received one— that of

perception” (“Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” MP 1993, 107).

George Spencer-Brown was a student of Whitehead, Wittgenstein and

Russell, as well as a good friend of R. D. Laing. Himself a psychotherapist in

addition to being a mathematician, Spencer-Brown says in the introduction to Laws

of Form that in arriving at proofs he has always been struck by “the apparent

alignment of mathematics with psycho-analytic theory,” with regard to the play of

ignorance and revelation behind their forms of consciousness. “In each

discipline,” he writes, “we attempt to find out, by a mixture of contemplation,

changes in presentation, communion, and communication, what it is we already

know. In mathematics, as in other forms of self-analysis, we do not have to go

exploring the physical world to find what we are looking for. Any child of ten,

who can multiply and divide, already knows for example, that the sequence of

prime numbers is endless. But if he is not shown Euclid’s proof, it is unlikely that

he will ever find out, before he dies, that he knows” (Laws of Form, xvii). The

computative parts of proofs as distinct from the limitations of reasoning (imposed,

as Derrida would write, by the tradition of metaphysics), can stand as a threat to

further progress, Spencer-Brown tells us (ibid). As a case in point, Bertrand

Russell and Whitehead wrote Principia Mathematica, which contains the famous


“Theory of Types.” This theory excludes from ordinary logic equations of the

second-degree, and thus it excludes from ordinary reasoning a truth value for self-

referential statements, such as “This statement is false,” or “This is not a pipe.”

Laws of Form, both in its iconic notation as well as in its account of the emergence

of time from “the third dimension of representation with equations of degree

higher than unity,” or “the fourth departure from the primary form (or the fifth

departure, if we count from the void)” (Laws of Form, xix), begins with the notion

of the first distinction, and develops the laws according to which this first

difference proceeds to trace forms of different kinds and degrees, and becomes a

way of showing how self-reference is basic to our experience in a way we all

already know, consciously or unconsciously, in our capacity as reflective subjects,

not only reflective of objects and other subjects, but of being itself. This operation

is called the ‘re-entry’ of the form into itself. It is an immanent feedback. Positive

feedback remembers, negative feedback oscillates. Second-order equations,

equations with explicit re-entry, imply dimensional extension, and extension is

implied in such a notion of primary self-reference.

Sun-Joo Shin, author of The Iconic Logic of Peirce’s Graphs, and The

Logical Status of Diagrams, highlights the fact that there is indeed a phonetic-

alphabetic prejudice against diagrams operant even within mathematics:

"


“Despite the great interest shown in diagrams, nevertheless a negative

attitude toward diagrams has been prevalent among logicians and

mathematicians. They consider any nonlinguistic form of representation to

be a heuristic tool only. No diagram or collection of diagrams is considered

a valid proof at all. It is more interesting to note that nobody has shown any

legitimate justification for this attitude toward diagrams. Let me call this

traditional attitude, that is, that diagrams can be only heuristic tools but not

valid proofs, the general prejudice against diagrams” (The Logical Status of

Diagrams, Introduction)

"Shin’s comments on the status of diagrams in mathematics and logic, along

with many other strains of philosophy, agrees with Derrida’s critique of the

metaphysics of presence, as well as the Spencer-Brownian critique of the

Russellian “Theory of Types.” “It is clear,” Derrida writes, “that the reticence, that

is, the resistance to logical-mathematical notation has always been the signature of

logocentrism and phono centrism in the event to which they have dominated

metaphysics and the classical semiological and linguistic projects…. A

grammatology… must in effect liberate the mathematization of language, and must

also declare that “the practice of science in fact has never ceased to protest the

imperialism of the Logos, for example by calling upon, from all time, and more

and more, non phonetic writing” (Positions, 29, Of Grammatology, 3). In its very

playfulness, the magic spelling of “differance” liberates our understanding of

mathematics, science, and even of logic from the metaphysical bounds that are in


the strict sense of the word, self-imposed. Derrida’s “deconstruction,” as well as

Kristeva’s “revolution in poetic language,” and Ricoeur’s “second Copernical

Revolution,” indeed our very species both of thought and life could be said to be in

their infancy, in something like cosmology’s high-inflationary period or the

Tibetian densely-packed region. In this respect, the tendency to deconstruct the

metaphysical sediment is a lesson in lessening our metaphysical mass and gravity,

and a setting free of the letter, that it might once again “let.”

The first section of Derrida’s Of Grammatology is called “The Program.”

What this term means is first to invoke the kind of writing the biologist speaks of,

“in relation to the most elementary processes of information within the living

cell” (Of Grammatology, 9). But of course biology does not exhaust the field of

Derrida’s “pro-gram.” Instead, he asserts that “the cybernetic program will be the

field of writing” (ibid). “If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all

metaphysical concepts,” he writes, “it must conserve the notion of writing, trace,

gramme [written mark], or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical

character is also exposed…” (ibid). Thus Derrida saw in cybernetics the notion of

writing as difference, the kind of writing which covers all experience at the origin

of all meaning itself. In this way, there is nothing outside of the text. A primordial

analog of “machine language” is this writing as difference in which all the

experiences of characters in the Matrix are written. It is the language in which

information is coded in our DNA. It is the language of nature.


Heidegger once said that philosophy has come to an end, and all that is left

is cybernetics. Cybernetics, he says, is a “supreme danger” because it unifies the

human and natural sciences into a single totalizing framework, but he also thinks

that it harbors in itself a saving power, poiesis. Merleau-Ponty too critiques

cybernetics, as we have seen. In “Eye and Mind” he offers in its place a “secret

science” which would unleash a hidden power of iconicity dormant within

empirical science. The first wave of cybernetics began with figures such as

Norbert Wiener, Ross Ashby, Warren McCulloch, John von Neumann, Claude

Shannon and Warren Weaver, and Alan Turing, and was the cybernetics of which

Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty were critical. Contemporary cybernetics is

cybernetics of the second wave, marked by figures such as Humberto Maturana

and Francisco Varela (creators of autopoietic theory), Gregory Bateson and

Margret Mead, and Heinz von Foerster. The ‘new cybernetics’ is called ‘second-

order cybernetics,’ and the defining step beyond first-order cybernetics is the

operation of re-entry of the system into itself. This operation is also called

observation in the literature of the new school of cybernetics. Laws of Form is the

spiritual instruction manual read by all the figures of second-order cybernetics,

written by the godfather of the movement— a fact that becomes more clear in

Spencer-Brown’s later reflections:

"


“Confronted with the apparent universe, we all asked the question, ‘What

is it?’ We then looked for the answer in exactly the wrong direction. We all

searched for a set of descriptions of what it looked like. The proper way is

to discover the instructions how to make it. Of course we cannot follow

these instructions, we cannot carry out the act of creation they decide,

without becoming identical with what is created. When the creator identifies

with what is created, the creation must appear miraculous… The principle,

conditioned coproduction operating through the laws of form, can never be

different from what it is… But whenever it appears, it appears different, each

time like a first time, pristine, new, delightful, because this is how time is

made.” (A Lion’s Teeth, 134)

"Laws of Form begins with the instruction “draw a distinction,” or, as he puts

it in the notes, “let there be a distinction,” (similarly, “Every thing perceived in the

world of a given being is in the image of that being,” A Lion’s Teeth, 132) and an

otherwise unmarked state becomes a marked state. “So, if nothing could change

nothing, we have, inevitably, the appearance of a first distinction, and the rest,

including the ineluctable appearance of “all this”, inevitably follows” (A Lion’s

Teeth, 150). The marked state is called the ‘cross,’ the crossing of the first

distinction, marked by a mark of any form. The primordial form is the first

distinction, but the indication of it may be imagined to be an infinitesimal atomic

actuality, but any and all form is the form it takes in the reality we experience. It

is, like Whitehead’s actual entity, “the universe conjunctively” (Process and


Reality, 21), but more abstract since in the first place the universe is not yet

developed into a complex nexus of conjunctive-disjunctive relations. The

notational convention for the unmarked state is the blank page, just like Peirce’s

‘page of assertion’ in the Existential Graphs, and the various beings are drawn

from a beginning of a mere mark, the indication of distinction. From this is

developed a primary or non-numerical arithmetic of these two constants (marked/

unmarked), and then by introducing tokens of variable form (a, b, …) is developed

a primary algebra. The later chapters cover equations of the second-degree and

re-entry into the form. What all this means is that the universe, “all this” (A Lion’s

Teeth, 148), comes about as a consequence of just having drawn a distinction, or

better, “if a distinction could be drawn, then the appearance of “all this”, what we

call a “universe” or “cosmos”, would inevitably follow” (ibid). Only nothingness,

for Spencer-Brown, is unstable enough to give rise to all this, and “like an

infinitely sensitive photographic film enough to be influenced by a stimulus so

weak that it didn’t exist” (ibid.) Perhaps the “nothingness” is in reality— that is,

in ultimate reality— better conceived as a “surplus of meaning,” like the

Levinasian idea of Infinity. In any case, the form and the course it takes in Laws

of Form, is a journey through the zone of the fundamental, and leaves a map of the

regions and properties of the continuum useful to philosophy.

Reading Laws of Form makes one into a nautonnier of the eternal regions,

and following the rules of the text can draw out one’s own kubernetes. As we take


it in, “we begin to see in fact how all the constellar principles by which we

navigate our journeys out from and in to the form spring from the ultimate

reducibility of numbers and voidability of relations. It is only by arresting or

fixing the use of these principles at some stage that we manage to maintain a

universe in any form at all, and our understanding of such a universe comes not

from discovering its present appearance, but in remembering what we originally

did to bring it about” (Laws of Form, 84). It is in this respect psychedelic.

If the world could be drawn up from a distinction that could be drawn, then

it would proceed in a definite way, starting from an undivided state. “So, if

nothing could change nothing, we have, inevitably, the appearance of a first

distinction, and the rest, including the ineluctable appearance of “all this”,

inevitably follows” (A Lion’s Teeth, 150). The appearance of a universe

maintained by the appearance of an organism and a codependent, coherent and

corresponding unfolded dimensionality is held together in the metabolic act just

“managing to maintain itself” (Laws of Form, 84), and just managing to keep the

dimensional framework open, not only for itself and its kind, but for all its order.

In this we also keep at bay three hundred and thirty three dimensional monsters

and the like. But their place is our final frontier. John Lilly called Laws of Form a

“guidebook into other universes”, and Spencer-Brown corrected him saying that it

is in fact a way back to this one. This Jacob’s ladder has a diagrammatic shape—

perhaps a diagrammatological ontopology— and in the Laws of Form the angle of


the first step is given as a picture. The angle, in the convention employed an

inverted capital “L” or a right-angle bracket, could best be represented on the

‘page of assertion’ as a series of arrows deficient in actuality indicating a

singularity of the acts purus, the “cross”. The imaginary arrows themselves

indicate the non-reality of the phase space of the page of assertion, which does not

really have two dimensions like the paper used to indicate it. Indeed, by strict

necessity, the true unmarked state is dimensionless, but more than that it is a sort

of “nothing at all”, a “pure and radical nothingness”, were it not an ontologically

strict impossibility. The radical singularity of the first distinction is perhaps a

thought accessible to all actual entities, human and otherwise, and however

dimensioned. How ever did this first distinction ever get drawn? Perhaps it never

did, not as ultimate reality at least. By that token it might have only ever been as a

pen-ultimate reality, as the point where the pen strikes the page is to the drawing.

Ante-pen-ultimate reality can now be defined. The first extension of the first

distinction is the first dimension. And so on. Frameworks and forms differentiate,

and eventually you have a completely encompassing experience, a masterpiece of

creation, generated in the eternal regions by this ontological procession of

dimensionality. Given to consciousness in the mode of presentational immediacy,

any given scene is only the tip of the iceberg. The stage is set by a conspiracy of

forms, a conspiracy of consciousness.

"


Works Cited

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Press, 1982. Print.

—. Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1967.

Print.

—. Positions. London, UK: Continuum, 1972. Print.

—. Writing and Difference. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978

Print.

Hoy, David. The Time of Our Lives. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Print.

Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1989.

Print.

—. Revolution in Poetic Language. New York, NY: Columbia University Press,

1984. Print.

Lawlor, Leonard. Imagination and Chance: The Difference Between The Thought

of Ricoeur and Derrida. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,

1992. Print.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Eye and Mind.” “Indirect Language and the Voices of

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Ed. Galen A. Johnson. Trans. Ed. Michael B. Smith. Evanston, Illinois:

Northwestern University Press, 1993. Print.

Nobo, Jorge Luis. Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity. Albany,

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Pirovolakis, Eftichis. Reading Derrida and Ricoeur: Improbable Encounters

Between Deconstruction and Metaphysics. Albany, NY: State University of

New York Press, 2010. Print.


Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Trans. Dennis

Savage. Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press, Inc., 1970. Print.

—. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II. Trans. Kathleen Blamey

and John B. Thompson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,

1991. Print.

—. Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology. Trans. Edward G. Ballard and

Lester E. Embree. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967.

Print.

—. Symbolism of Evil. Trans. Emerson Buchanan. Boston, MA: Beacon Press,

1967. Print.

Shin, Sun Joo. The Iconic Logic of Peirce’s Graphs. Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 2002. Print.

—. The Logical Status of Diagrams. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University

Press, 1994. Print.

Spencer-Brown, George. Laws of Form. London, UK: George Allen and Unwin

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—. A Lion’s Teeth. Leipzig, Germany: Bohmeier Verlag, 1971. Print.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. London, UK: Collier

Macmillan Publishers, 1929. Print.

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