Divide and Compress

August 2nd, 2006 Fred McVittie

Two competing or complementary operations are at work in the formation of memory, awareness, and identity. These forces are expressed by the action of Dividing and the action of Compressing.

Dividing is the making of distinctions, as described mathematically by Spencer Brown in ‘The Laws of Form’, and artistically/anarchically by KLF in the philosophy of ‘Divide and Kreate’. It is also the impetus that is behind the success of reductionist approaches to science and technology, the strategy of taking things apart, reducing events, materials, etc to their compositional element/organs/moments. The strategy relies on a sensitivity to difference and to boundaries, to the break points in phenomena and the transitional stages in processes. To divide is to focus on the individual links in chains of causality, to see the trees and not just the wood.

Compression is the opposing tendency in which we look for ways to generalise experience and reduce difference. To compress is to seek out and eliminate redundancy, to step back and try to see the big picture, to find shortcuts and commonality, to strive for singularity and holism. We see this in our search for unifying theories of science, in the use of symbols and metaphor and synecdoche in poetry and the arts, and in the psychology of archetypes, stereotypes, and narrativisation.

This paper will argue that these competing/complementing tendencies are key elements in the construction of human awareness and the construction of human cultures. In the spirit of Bateson, these two forces form one of the ‘pattern that connects’.

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L.O.F. and Kabbalah

May 17th, 2007 Fred McVittie

The ground on which the figure of this circle is marked, in this case the screen of the monitor you are looking at, represents the potential which precedes all action and all existence. Without the screen, or the potential, there could be no making of marks and, as a parallel, without the substrate of ‘nothingness’ there could be no something. This idea is part of a number of mystical and religious traditions, as well as featuring is some of the creation myths which we call science. Within Kabbalah for example, the creation of the world proceeds through the ten sephirot which mark God’s divine methodology (and also mark the steps that must be retaken by the mystic to achieve divine union). A significant aspect of the kabbalistic diagram this cosmology, the ‘tree of life’ symbol as it is sometimes called, is that the blank surface on which the diagram is drawn also has a name. This emptiness, the metaphorical blank screen which exists before the making of the mark describing creation is the ‘ein soph’, the universe ‘without end’ upon the the stages of the creation can be created.

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