The Great Divide

[andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk]

Michael McAulay writes:
> I've been looking for an opening for this for a while now...check page
> 616 of M&D where there is a clear reference to G. Spencer-Brown's Laws
> Of Form.  In LOF the fundamental operation of thought is identified as
> drawing-a-line, which operation is explicitly identified with naming.

Wow! Thanks for a beauty of a footnote.

Interesting to know what place naming takes in Spencer-Brown's scheme
of things. Particularly given naming's overprominence in accounts of
language and thought as promulgated by those in the British and
American schools of philosophy (proper names identify individuals,
common names identify classes (or ideas), verbs/verbal phrases
identify predicates and relations, but essentially all language is
viewed as denotation). If the key misapprehension of politics and
history is to regard delineation (aka naming) of territory as the
necessary basis for power over it and thence others, then there is a
root misconception here over the power of language in its broadest
sense, i.e. over the power of concepts to regulate the world.

For what our acts of delineation are supposed to do is reflect the
nature and articulation of things (picture them) and hence give us a
abstract handle on them in a formal (verbal or mathematical) calculus.
But what we usually seem to achieve is a projection of our own
prejudices onto the territory, carving it up and warping it until it
fits our expectations. We make the territory fit the concept rather
than the other way round, the way it is supposed to work. And I
suspect Pynchon would add that we do this as much out of opportunism
and selfishness as out of error or stupidity.

> So is TP saying that dehumanization is inherent in cognition?

I don't think so, he may be. But I think he definitely *is* saying
that cognition has its dangers and its pitfalls and so far we don't
seem to have done a very good job at avoiding them.


Andrew Dinn
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We drank the blood of our enemies.
The blood of our friends, we cherished.