disjecta membra

1. Gregory Bateson - "digital versus analogic"

Bateson describes the speech of cats (and dolphins, and others) in
terms of something called μ-functions, which are communicational moves
that describe relationship. "Mew" means "dependency"!

But more generally an analogue *depicts* relationship, does it not?
ἀναλογία : "proportion"...

And I think it's safe to say that communication *of* the relationship
is concomitant in maintaining the relationship. If the cat said, "and
don't forget to take out the trash," then we would not only be
surprised, but more than mildly offended.

For Bateson, humans are unique among animals in their digitality,
which provides the ability to refer to discrete things rather than to
take part in "voicing" the relationship.

(Are you with me so far?)

2. Georges Bataille - sacrificial economy

Bataille considers variations on the theme of "potlatch". His idea is
that that expenditure is at the root of our economic systems. This is
taken up by Jean Baudrillard who argues that the *symbolic* order
comes directly from expense and destruction. In the first place, the
"sacred" is whatever is sacrificed. But it goes further than that.

Economics in these regimes is about maintaining relationships -
between the chiefs and those they lean on, and among the chieftain
class itself. Economics achieves a certain form of analogue
communication. A potlatch demands a return potlatch. A sacrifice to
the ancestors puts one into direct relationship to the ancestors.

The "symbolic" is therefor, roughly speaking, the world of
μ-functions: and of course, within this space there are all manner of
relational things that can be communicated, e.g. "I am your senior
adult male, you puppy!" (among wolves).

This adds some depth to a statement like this one:

"'Symbol' becomes a trope for a component of social practice rather
than the hinge for a theory of meaning."

3. Terrence Deacon - emergent orders

Now, it no coincidence that expenditure and destruction is the
fundamental form in "primative" societies, because it is the
fundamental form in general. In "civilized" societies, we have simply
become more efficient at it. What might this mean?

(a) First, according to Baudrillard, we have largely destroyed, or at
least neutralized, the symbolic order. What this means is that
everything is "coded" or digital. Disjecta membra rather than relata
refero perhaps (scattered fragments, as with the limbs of a dead poet
-- versus referring to things related, if only to highlight their
strangeness). In terms of Deacon's theory, what does this mean? It
means a new higher-order constraint that insists on thingness,
indexicality, graspability, familiarity, fungibility, usability, and
intelligibility.

Virtual reality triumphs over the vision quest.

(b) And so things are accelerated. Instead of mixing sugar and water
and waiting for the sugar to dissolve, one drinks Coca Cola.^*
Nevertheless, the concern with this sort of emergence is that it will
ultimately destroy itself. The whirl-pool is the fastest way to drain
the tub. According to Deacon's theory, life is supposed to put in
*additional* higher order constraints to allow the heightened form of
entropy to be sustained. Because no one has time to wait an entire
generation for change anymore, we invent things like peeragogy.

But apart from the question as to whether "we" (or anything) will
survive, there is another interesting question to ponder in the mean
time: is there hope in any of this for a neo-primitivist order, a new
symbolism, real relationship, etc.?

4. Martin Heidegger - whither relationship?

Mathematical things are "things, insofar as we learn them; things
insofar as we take cognizance of them as what we already know them to
be in advance, the body as the bodily, the plant-like of the plant,
the animal-like of the animal, and so on."

"And so on" means -- the human-like of the human, and the very
mathematical of the mathematical itself.

And this mathematical of the mathematical is the one thing that is
essential to the proper functioning of emergent orders. This is the
function we call "learning." And what is this? ...... Is it perhaps a
strange sort of μ function?

The way Heidegger puts it, learning is a kind of "taking where he who
takes only takes what he basically already has." It is a form of
direct seeing in the world -- a way of relating to the world as it is.
I think it would be OK to say, optimistically: a way of relating to
the world AS relationship, a way of apprehending the world itself as
an emergent order.

(One acknowledges that this is somewhat strange feature to observe in
something that went digital long before digital was cool.)

5. William Burroughs - language is a virus

In this note, I have traced the evolution of language from the cat's
meow to modern mathematics -- in a very schematic form, to be sure.
The question that remains is whether there are relationships within
the particular μ function that is mathematics, whether we can find
*within* this form further "endogenous" μ-functions. Are there
mathematical forms that voice their relationship with other
mathematical forms, to us, or to anything else?

One naive answer would be "category theory." But there is another
more interesting answer, which is that mathematics is, in effect, the
entire "DNA" of what we have learned. Except, this is not quite
right. It would be better to say that *we* are *its* RNA. We
replicate it, and expand it, and unfold it. We give voice to it in
the same way that "mew" gives voice to the relationship between cat
and human. In brief, yes, there are μ functions within mathematics:
for mathematicians, they are, quite literally, the stories of our
lives.

*: Bergson: "Though our reasoning on isolated systems may imply that
their history, past, present, and future, might be instantaneously
unfurled like a fan, this history, in point of fact, unfolds itself
gradually, as if it occupied a duration like our own. If I want to mix
a glass of sugar and water, I must, willy nilly, wait until the sugar
melts."