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General Extension or Extension and Dimensional Continuity in General: From Whiteheads Theory of Extension, Through Postmodern Philosophy and Cybernetics, to a New Framework for Dimensionality

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Prof. Ed Caseys Nature Seminar Prof. Ed Caseys 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.

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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, Kristevas, Derridas and Ricoeurs projects of post-modern philosophy are of a different nature than Whiteheads 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 Whiteheads Process and Reality because of its unique handling of nature in philosophy. The speculative system of Whiteheads 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. Whiteheads metaphysics has also enjoyed a considerable influence on later thought, both in philosophy and cybernetics.

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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 Whiteheads 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 Derridas grammatology, Kristevas semiotic chora, and Peirce and Spencer-Browns iconic metaphysics. In the end we will have reason to return to the naivet 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-

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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.

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Part I: Whiteheads Theory of Extension

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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 Whiteheads 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

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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 IVs analysis, that we shall place Part IIIs 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 celltheory. The philosophy of organism is a holism that is determinate with regards to the universes 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, Whiteheads 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

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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 Whiteheads 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 Indras 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 Whiteheads 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 Whiteheads, call dissipative structure theory. In fact, in his chapter Organisms and Environment, long before Bertalanffys General Systems Theory, Whitehead puts system first on the list of central terms of the philosophy

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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. Whiteheads 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 universes 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:

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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:

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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 Aristotles category of primary substance (Process and Reality, 21).

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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 celltheory 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

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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:

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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).

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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

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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). Whiteheads 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

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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).

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

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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 Aristotles 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

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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 selfpresentation 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-phonoethno-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 Saussures differentially-structured linguistics (in

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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. Husserls purely logical grammar, as much as Leibniz mathesis universalis, is symptomatic of this logocentrism. But Derridas 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

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other regions. Such a notion of the sign as the trace of productive selfdifferentiation 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 Nietzsches 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 selfcontained units of meaning, Derridas concept of the trace is not such a unit. There are no such units but only contrastive relations in a system of differences. These

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differences are both spatial and temporal. Spatial relations are said to differ whereas temporal relations are deferred. He points to Freuds 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-Pontys 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 Freuds 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).

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Part 2. Section 2: Paul Ricoeurs Notion of the Symbol Contra Symbolic Logic

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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 Ricoeurs semantic problem with symbolic logic. The metaphysical critique is the same for Derrida and Ricoeur

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(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 logics Leibnizian genealogy and Husserls notion of signification, when he asks:

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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

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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 intentionalitys and analogical references to something else, which it presents enigmatically (Symbolism of Evil, 16-18).

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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 Derridas work and Ricoeurs 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.

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Part II. Section 3: Julia Kristevas Revolution

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Kristevas 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. Derridas paragram - the word-play of the a in differance - is itself the point of the letter in the line of a text that, like Kristevas 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 Ricoeurs early opus, The Philosophy of the Will, as well as Kristevas, Revolution in Poetic Language and especially Black Sun, comedy is reached in discourse and myth only through tragedy. As she writes:

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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)

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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 Platos notion of the receptacle khora or cora. We will focus on Kristevas 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

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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 languages 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 Kristevas 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, Kristevas project aims at breaking through the confines of form to unleash the infinite surplus of meaning, Nervals black sun. The black sun lies behind the logos-heilos, behind the sol, in the signifying soil Sartre

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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 Valerys 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

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Action, 175). Here we find resemblances to the texts of Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, and even cybernetics, with regard to poetic inscription. But Ricoeurs discussion is here about semantic innovation, and his general formula is that of the use of bizarre predicatespredicative 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 Saussures structural linguistics similar to aspects of Derridas project. In his essay Eye and Mind, Merleau-Pontys poetics, like Kristevas 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.

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Part II. Section 4: Merleau-Pontys Secret Science of Eye and Mind

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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

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present it awakens powers dormant in ordinary vision, a secret of preexistence. When through the waters 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)

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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

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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 stateSchiffbruch, 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

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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

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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 paintings bold potential (Eye and Mind, 132). This urdrawing is posited prior to reflection, and provides to the round eye of the mirror its enigmatic light (Eye and Mind, 129). The painters universe is a worship of Lux-Cipher (enigmatic light). The cunning Oceanid Metis, the serpentine inspiration (Bergsons 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, Emersons 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:

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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

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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)

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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:

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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

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the body, undoing what no accident would have sufficed to do... (Eye and Mind, 125)

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The arc of the promised autonomy of science (sciences 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 (Klees 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:

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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).

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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. Kants inauguration of phenomenology, his notions of the productive imagination, and a secular theology of the promise, are hinted at.

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Husserls eidetic method of pure description of essences is echoed, and there is an implicit critique of his egology. Heideggers 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 mans 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 mans cane, the meaning of science could be better achieved by the artists brush and pen.

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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

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axis, is directed through its whole extent. -Leonardo da Vinci (Eye and Mind, 142)

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Merleau-Pontys 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:

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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 initself 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).

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But Merleau-Pontys 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:

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...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).

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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 artists 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

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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:

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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 waters 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).

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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 Klees 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

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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. Matisses and Klees drawings employ paradoxical simultaneity of opposed positions to create a living, breathing experience of movement:

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The picture makes movement possible by its internal discordance. Each members position, precisely by virtue of its incompatibility with that of the others (according to the bodys 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).

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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

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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 hands 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 artists claim ontologically. For Merleau-Ponty, the ark or feedback-loop of the artists 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 Panofskys iconology, which amplifies or deepens the meaning of the art. But it also points

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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 Panofskys Studies in Iconology is the primary or natural subject matter, apparent to a first naivet; 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. Peirces secondness, seeking the elusive reality behind the manifest content, reading into the work, between the lines. The third strata of Panofskys 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

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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:

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...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 cyberneticians 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 [Stendhals] 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)

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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

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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 Whiteheads line of the Timaeus and never really is (Process and Reality, 82) and the inverse of Spencer-Browns 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-Pontys 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.

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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-Pontys 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 Minds 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.

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Part III: From Philosophies of Language to Philosophies of Iconicity

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The cornerstone of the contemporary cybernetics movement, George Spencer-Browns 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 Luhmanns use of Differenz, which is explicitly meant to connote Spencer-Browns use of distinction as much as Derridas 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 Peirces 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

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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 Euclids 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

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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 selfreferential 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 Peirces Graphs, and The Logical Status of Diagrams, highlights the fact that there is indeed a phoneticalphabetic prejudice against diagrams operant even within mathematics:

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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)

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Shins comments on the status of diagrams in mathematics and logic, along with many other strains of philosophy, agrees with Derridas 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

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the strict sense of the word, self-imposed. Derridas deconstruction, as well as Kristevas revolution in poetic language, and Ricoeurs second Copernical Revolution, indeed our very species both of thought and life could be said to be in their infancy, in something like cosmologys 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 Derridas 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 Derridas 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.

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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 secondorder 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-Browns later reflections:

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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 Lions Teeth, 134)

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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 Lions 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 Lions 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 Whiteheads actual entity, the universe conjunctively (Process and

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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 Peirces 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 Lions 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 didnt 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 ones own kubernetes. As we take

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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 Lions 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 Jacobs ladder has a diagrammatic shape perhaps a diagrammatological ontopology and in the Laws of Form the angle of

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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.

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Works Cited

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Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Chicago, IL: Chicago University 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 Silence. The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. Ed. Galen A. Johnson. Trans. Ed. Michael B. Smith. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993. Print. Nobo, Jorge Luis. Whiteheads Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986. Print. Pirovolakis, Eftichis. Reading Derrida and Ricoeur: Improbable Encounters Between Deconstruction and Metaphysics. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010. Print.

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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 Peirces 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 Ltd., 1969. Print. . A Lions Teeth. Leipzig, Germany: Bohmeier Verlag, 1971. Print. Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. London, UK: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1929. Print.