Laws Of Form/Writing

[MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu]

Following this very interesting thread on Laws of Form, and it seems
 to me that this notion of the *mark*--the stroke of demarcation--is
 also a way of describing WRITING in its deepest sense, the sense,
 I believe, in which Derrida can claim that writing is not subsumed by speech.
  The initial *mark* can be a vocalization as well as a grapheme,
 the act of *demarcation* remains the same.  It is here that the
 universe starts, for our purposes, and perhaps the self as well,
 or the sense that the two are *different* (a thought that always
 for some reason cracks me up).

It's the ur-metaphor, at the same time a gesture of supplication and a
 transgression against the all-consuming ungrid Earth mother. 
The price we pay for evolving a consciousness which knows,
 sadly and above all else, its own Cartesian hum. 
 Hmmmmmm?

A bit loopy, but not completely off the wall?

john m
******************************

>"To rule forever," continues the Chinaman, later, "it is necessary only
>to create, among the people one would rule, what we call...Bad History.
>Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than
>drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt,
>through the midst of a People, - to create thus a Distinction betwixt
>'em, - 'tis the first stroke. - All else will follow as if predestin'd,
>unto War and Devastation.
>
>Compare with the first sentence of Laws Of Form:
>
>We take as given the idea of distinction and the idea of indication, and
>that we cannot make an indication without drawing a distinction.
>
>Further on in LOF - although this probably falls under the rubric of
>Kute Korrespondences - it's interesting to note Spencer-Brown's use of
>the term "state."  As in "let a state distinguished by the distinction
>be marked with a mark ( | ) of distinction."  This strikes me as exactly
>the kind of thing that would catch TP's eye.  It is a State boundary
>after all that our heroes are demarking.