For some time now I’ve been tormented by G. Spencer-Brown’s theory of distinctions. Anyone who has attempted to read his Laws of Form will know what I’m talking about. Spencer-Brown’s thesis is that in order to indicate anything we must first draw a distinction (depicted to the right above). The bar that cleaves the space is the distinction. The unity of marked and unmarked space with respect to a distinction is what Spencer-Brown calls a distinction. What falls under the bar is what can be indicated once the distinction is drawn. Insofar as every distinction cleaves a space (whether conceptual or otherwise), the unmarked space of the distinction is what becomes invisible when the distinction is drawn. Every distinction thus has two blind spots. On the one hand, every distinction contains the unmarked space that disappears when the distinction is drawn. With a distinction, a boundary is drawn, but that which lies on the other side of the boundary disappears. However, on the other hand, the distinction itself disappears when drawing a distinction. When a distinction is drawn what comes to the fore is the marked space or what is indicated, not the distinction itself. The distinction, as it were, withdraws into the background.
In light of the foregoing, we can thus call distinction the transcendental and what is indicated under a distinction the empirical. If distinction is the transcendental, then this is because no indication can be made without a prior distinction. Distinction is the condition under which indication is possible. Indication, of course, can be anything. It can be what we refer to in the world, how we sort things, what we choose to investigate, etc. In order to indicate or refer to any of these things, I must first draw a distinction. As a consequence, the distinction is prior to whatever happens to be indicated. For example, if I wish to investigate the pathological, I must cleave a space (conceptual or otherwise) that brings the pathological into the marked space of the distinction. It is only on the basis of this distinction that I will be able to indicate the pathological. Part of what is interesting in all of this is that the marked space of the distinction– and recall it’s always withdrawn from any and every indication such that it’s invisible –is like a Mobius strip, attached to its unmarked space in much the same way that the front of a page implies its back. The pathological never innocently indicates the pathological, but rather presupposes an unmarked space of the “normal” that structures and organizes the pathological. In other words, the conditions under which any observations are possible are those of a prior distinction.
read on!
The key point not to be missed is that every distinction is contingent or capable of being otherwise. All distinctions are motivated, but there is nothing in reality that motivates any particular distinction. In other words, distinctions can always be drawn otherwise. As Canguilhem showed us, for example, it is always possible for the distinction between the normal and the pathological to be drawn differently. And here, following Laruelle, we need to take great care in attending to the examples theorists use in the development of their theory as symptoms of the distinctions that they’ve drawn. It is for this reason that Spencer-Brown’s theory of distinction provides us with the formal matrix of all deconstructive thought (a point which Luhmann makes to great effect in his essay on deconstruction in Theories of Distinction, and that Cary Wolfe develops in great detail in What is Posthumanism?).
Following the arguments of Luhmann and Wolfe, deconstruction amounts to second-order observation. What deconstruction observes is not indications, but rather the distinctions through which observations become possible. Let’s return to the example of the normal and the pathological. A deconstructive analysis does not get involved in the debate of whether x is truly pathological (the mark of naive realism), but instead investigates the transcendental or distinctions which allow this sort of observation to be made at all. Where a first-order observations will get in a debate about whether or not x is truly criminal or pathological or good or scientific, etc., a second-order observation will be an observation of “how the observer observes” or the distinctions that allow the observer to indicate in this particular way.
In engaging in second-order observation or the observation of how observers observe rather than what observers observe, the second-order cybernetician will thus reveal two things: the blind spot of the distinction or the other side of the mobius strip (the unmarked space that structures the marked space), and the contingency of the distinction or the fact that it can always-already be drawn otherwise. In the process, it will open an interrogation of what motivates the distinction. If, for example, one endlessly talks about crime, sin, truth, heterosexuality, values, norms governing discourse, etc., we will now be able to ask not whether these positions are right or wrong, true or false, scientific or unscientific, but rather what might motivate one to cleave the world in this way. Here we will be discussing something that precedes indication or the very thing that renders these indicates possible. Given that other distinctions are possible, we might ask what desire or frame motivates this way of indicating or drawing distinction. What we get here is a sort of Husserlian transcendental epoche. It’s also worth noting that every foundationalist project of knowledge and every self-grounding epistemology here encounters its ruin. If these projects are structurally impossible from the outset, then it is because any critique they might offer or develop, any project they might unfold, already presupposes a prior distinction that they cannot themselves ground, that they must presuppose, that they cannot domesticate or swallow, governing the project in which they engage. If this is so, then it is because the distinction upon which any indication is possible is always already contingent and necessarily ungrounded. One can always attempt to ground such distinctions, yet such will only be possible on the grounds of a further distinction that is itself ungrounded and contingent. This, no doubt, is why we always sense the jouissance of anger and frustration among all epistemologues, as they somewhere realize that their positions can only ever be founded on interpellation rather than grounding. Hence the air of policing– and subtle rhetorical violence –that always accompanies such inquiries.
One will now wonder why an avowed realist might write about something as anti-realist as a constructivist theory of distinction based on contingency and the absence of all grounds. In Tarrying with the Negative Zizek argues, following Wagner, that we are healed by the spear that smote us. In other words, the very thing that we saw as a limitation and the impossibility of realism is the solution to realism. Where someone like Laruelle argues for a Real and One beyond all determination, my move is instead to argue that distinction is the very reality of objects. What we must not forget is that the system drawing a distinction is itself something. We have focused on how systems “see”, ignoring that there is something that sees. To be a being is to be a system or object is to be a being that has evolved a particular way of drawing distinctions. Without this the entire thesis of second-order observation falls into incoherence. The consequence is that what is observed cannot be reduced to a mere construction, but rather withdraws from the manner in which any other entity comes to indicate it. As Harman would argue, every entity caricatures every other entity and truth can only ever be alluded to. As in the case of Lacan’s discourse of the master, we get a realism of the residue or excess, where every entity withdraws from every other.
March 19, 2011 at 11:45 am
“Knowledge, the product of judgment,is not the ground of morality, but is in its origin moral, the precipitate of perpetual evaluations of the world, assessments of our interests and investments in it, what counts for us, matters for us, or does not”
st.cavell
March 19, 2011 at 6:00 pm
You say: “What we must not forget is that the system drawing a distinction is itself something. We have focused on how systems “see”, ignoring that there is something that sees. To be a being is to be a system or object is to be a being that has evolved a particular way of drawing distinctions.”
This distinction between utterance/information or self-reference/external reference is central to this dualistic process that is both contingent and open to a temporal forms of difference. The most difficult question Luhmann informs us is “how to define the operation that differentiates the system and organizes the difference between system and environment while maintaining reciprocity between dependence and independence” (OC, 1426).
It seems you are tiptoeing around the central task of defining what ‘subjectivity’ or ‘self-reference’ is; and, what it is that performs this distinction to begin with: is it a subjectivity, a self-reflexive process within all systems that perform decisions on memory functions as a part of an ongoing collaboration between those two pole of system and environment; or, is it something else altogether, what Paul de Mann and Derrida would have termed the ‘incommensurability’ of praxis itself – the resistance to theory that shows forth the undecidability of all rhetoric whatsoever because it founds itself on language which is never stable and always mutating and contingent?
March 19, 2011 at 6:05 pm
[…] Taking off from G. Spencer-Brown’s theory of distinction. HERE. […]
March 19, 2011 at 7:29 pm
Very cool article. I had some questions about an earlier part.
“The key point not to be missed is that every distinction is contingent or capable of being otherwise. All distinctions are motivated, but there is nothing in reality that motivates any particular distinction. In other words, distinctions can always be drawn otherwise.”
1. Why is every distinction contingent? i.e. Why can’t there be necessary distinctions?
2. Why can’t something in reality motivate some distinction?
3. Are distinctions supposed to be contingent *because* they are motivated, or are distinctions contingent *and* motivated?
With 1-3 I’m particularly thinking of the distinction between true and false. Could that distinction be otherwise?
March 19, 2011 at 9:10 pm
Fantastic Möbius strip!
March 19, 2011 at 9:20 pm
Christian,
Something in reality cannot motivate a distinction because a distinction must already be operative for something in reality to influence an object. The indication cannot precede the distinction. Any motivation already presupposes a distinction.
March 20, 2011 at 1:05 am
I agree with Graham. This is a treatise. Just posted on it briefly.
March 20, 2011 at 5:28 pm
Perhaps the notion of a bifurcation from chaos theory could describe the distinction of form here.
The invisibility of the unmarked state and the receding of the distinction may perhaps be viewed as elements of courses or as the vaporized residues of bifurcation?
You are making a stance that the unmarked state exists as an aspect or structure of ‘something’. You are also claiming an ontological status for the distinction. To be clear: the distinction conjures the transcendental, or the distinction ‘is’ the transcendental?
The indication is the empirical. There is a complicated grammatical process here, whether to use ‘indicated’ or ‘indication’; because the process of distinction seems to ‘reveal’ an indicative, such that the indicated appears to precede distinction.
At any rate, this post is frickin awesome, Levi!!!
March 23, 2011 at 5:53 pm
[…] depending on the perspective that is taken. Perhaps all distinct boundaries are conceptual (and this is a great related post from Levi Bryant, whose blog has been a key drinking hole of late). But the […]
March 10, 2014 at 2:37 am
This discussion is fabulous. Can I just throw in an iconological perspective on it? My big question is: how strong is the image of “drawing” a distinction? Does it operate as an image or an algorithm? A figure or schematism?
FIGURES AND GROUNDS
A distinction is drawn by arranging a boundary with separate sides so that a point on one side cannot reach the other side without crossing the boundary.
–Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form (1969), 1
There is an Outside spread Without, & an Outside spread Within
Beyond the Outline of Identity both ways, which meet in One:
–William Blake, Jerusalem (1804)
We Germans have no lack of systematic books.
–G. E. Lessing, Laocoon: On the Limits of Poetry and Painting (1766)
“First, draw a distinction.” This remark by Niklas Luhmann might be taken as the fundamental mantra of modern systems theory, as important to contemporary social and natural sciences as the Cartesian cogito, “I think therefore I am,” was to early modern science. But it is also a foundational moment for iconology, the science of images. An iconologist is bound to notice the figurative expression hidden in the notion of “drawing a distinction,” and then to insist on taking it literally, as a visual, graphic operation of drawing a distinction. The philosopher or sociologist might say that it merely means to “make” a distinction, to provide a definition that distinguishes one thing from another—truth from falsehood, good from evil, clarity from obscurity, this from that, here from there. Or, more commonly, to draw a distinction between two things that otherwise might be confused—art and life, meaning and significance, expression and imitation. In any case, in either case, the iconologist’s attention is drawn to drawing, to the inscription of a boundary, the marking of a form in space, the contrast between a thing and the environment in which it is located. In short, between the figure and the ground.
Of course, drawing a distinction between figure and ground is only the beginning. In systems theory it marks the boundary between a system and its environment and the form and the medium in which the form appears. It inevitably leads to third things such as the boundary or border between an inside and an outside, the frame in which an image appears, the outline that curves in upon itself, drawing the beholder into a vortex of self-reference–the Mobius strip. And the distinction between the inside and outside of the boundary can so easily be reversed, as Gestalt theory showed long ago, so that the ground becomes a figure, and the figure becomes the ground. The thing that was marked becomes unmarked, and the previously unmarked suddenly emerges as remarkable.
From the standpoint of image science, then, systems theory ceases to be abstract. It takes on a body, and locates that body somewhere. It becomes visible, graphic, and even palpable. And it puts into question its own Cartesian moment of drawing, because after all, is drawing really all there is to images? What about color? Does it not obey a different logic, one that spills over boundaries, shades into an infinite spectrum of infinitesimal differentiations and vague indeterminacies? Is it not the ultimate ground out of which every figure must emerge? And isn’t color precisely the phenomenon that defies the fundamental gesture of systems theory, insofar as every distinction that is drawn between one hue, one tonality and another, always generates an intermediate possibility, a mixture of the two colors being distinguished, the grey zone of the everyday?