As Featured in The True Isn’t the Rational

The Map Is Indestructible (Part III)

Korzybski’s (In)sanity, Gödel’s (In)consistency, Barfield’s Rainbow, Leibniz’s Monads, Žižek’s Hegelian Ideology, and Pynchon’s Mad Love

Photo by Alex Azabache

VIII

If reality is relational, we cannot escape maps, but the same also holds if reality is ultimately abyssal and/or “lacking,” which leads us to the work of Žižek. Now, a “relational reality” and “essentially lacking reality” are not necessarily exclusive positions, and it’s possible that we experience an “essential lack” precisely because we must always lack “the other” to which we relate: in other words, perhaps we are always “passing over” into an otherness (A/B) that we cannot access. In fact, if “things don’t exist” and yet we must experience things “as if “ reality consists of things (Understanding, A/A), that alone suggests an “essential lack,” for we lack the capacities to experience reality like it actually “is” (perhaps “Fundamentally Nonlocal,” as Kaufman discusses, or “Dialectically Material” like Žižek considers). Ultimately though, if models of Relational Metaphysics are wrong and hence it doesn’t follow that “maps are indestructible” for that reason, we might be able to establish another ontological reason for “indestructible maps” if Žižek is right and humans can’t handle a Real without maps. If that was so, reality would consists of “maps we cannot destroy without a psychotic break,” which would mean “maps are (practically) indestructible,” returning us to our dilemma.

Žižek is a major inspiration for my personal thinking on maps, and we should note how Glyn Daly described his position in Conversations with Žižek: ‘reality itself is always constructed as an attempt to establish a basic consistency against the disintegrative effects of the Real. Just as being may be understood as being-towards-madness, reality is always reality-towards-the-Real.’¹²³ By “Real” we are thinking Lacan, which means that reality consists essentially of a traumatic Real that we cannot naturally face (especially not “all at once”) without being self-effaced (we could think Love(craft) here, suggested by the quote: ‘[w]hile the Real, by definition, cannot be directly represented, it can nonetheless be alluded to in certain figurative embodiments of horror-excess […] it is alluded to in the monster from Scott’s film, Alien, whose blood literally dissolves the fabric of reality’) (reality requires the Real which dissolves it).¹²⁴ Now, like “releases” in Philip Rieff, as discussed in Belonging Again (Part I), ‘the Real should not be identified exclusively as an explicit force of negation; it also plays a more implicit and evanescent role in the construction of our everyday forms of social reality.’¹²⁵ Without “releases,” we would not be free, completely controlled and organized by “givens”; likewise, without the threat of “The Real,” we wouldn’t have any social direction of what we should or shouldn’t do; social interactions might be chaotic and dysfunctional. “Lack” can be good, then, for it can create incentive and motivation for social interaction (if no one was “lacking,” more like god, we might all be alone, incapable of “network effects,” social coordination — we might be impoverished gods). But “lack” and “The Real” at the same time are also dangerous, for if we face them “too much” we can be self-effaced; hence, we need “a filtration system,” something like a map. ‘What ideology offers the symbolic construction of reality — the ultimate fantasy — as a way to escape the traumatic effects of the Real. Reality is always a ‘virtual’ take on the Real; a virtualization that can never fully overcome the Real or achieve homeostatis.’¹²⁶ Does this mean we are self-deceived? It means we are risk of that, yes, but it is more like that to live we must look toward the sun; if there are no clouds and if we cannot blink, we will go blind.

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‘Today,’ for Žižek, ‘we live (in) the tension designated by Hegel even more than people did in Hegel’s own time,’ which consists of an encountering of the reality that we must avoid “The Real” as we must use maps.¹²⁷ Can we be aware of this and the personal and social mechanisms not fail (is it enough to ‘no longer ‘really believe’ […] just follow […]’)?¹²⁸ ‘Ideology not only constructs a certain image of fulfilment […] it also endeavors to regulate a certain distance from it,’ but if we know that will the mechanism still work?¹²⁹ If not, “The Real” isn’t any more faceable (‘we do not come too close to it’); reality, any less situational (A/B).¹³⁰ And so it must still be there if we’re still here, even if it doesn’t work: “the map is indestructible.” Might we be tempted then to say that “nothing is real,” a total disavowal that treats all of realty as an illusion? Ah, but ‘if external reality is ultimately just an ephemeral appearance, then even the most horrifying crimes eventually do not matter’ (“no exit”) (every road is hard, for the easy roads are dangerous).¹³¹ Alternatively, if we do not deny the existence of everything or seek a detachment strategy, we can maintain maps through desires that we then use to avoid the Real: perhaps like “certainty deterrence,” as Žižek writes:

‘[T]he (ideological) trick, therefore, is to keep the object at a certain distance in order to sustain the satisfaction derived from the fantasy ‘if only I had x I could fulfil my dream.’ Ideology regulates this fantasmatic distance in order to, as it were, avoid the Real in the impossible […]’¹³²

Indeed, so it goes in keeping the map away enough from the territory so that we don’t have to experience “the map not being the territory” all while we know it isn’t (that’s hard enough, but at least we can create a feeling of freedom like “releases”). But unfortunately, a map that denies facing the reality that it isn’t the territory (or “The Real”) is vulnerable to “autonomous rationality,” which suggests the wisdom in ‘Chesterton’s aim [to] thus […] save reason through sticking to its founding exception: deprived of this, reason degenerates into blind self-destructive skepticism: in short: into total irrationalism’ (autocannibalism and self-effacement).¹³³ We should make clear that “the map” and “the territory” do not share in a dualistic, cleaning-divide relationship: the map comes from the territory and is itself part of it (reflexivity is integrated in, as Gödel understood). This also suggests another reason why “the map is indestructible,” precisely because “the territory is indestructible” (unless we don’t exist) and the territory (essentially) emerges to maps. The way Žižek describes “The Real” could be useful here: ‘The Real is thus simultaneously the Thing to which direct access is not possible and the obstacle that prevents this direct access; the Thing that eludes our grasp and the distorting screen that makes us miss the Thing.’¹³⁴ So it is with the territory: it is what we cannot access, and that which consists of and generates the maps which keep it inaccessible. And where there are maps, there are opportunities for self-deception, ever-deferring desire, totalization…(‘the idea of overcoming is sustained as a deferred moment of reconciliation without having to go through the pain of overcoming as such’).¹³⁵ To live is to live with fire…¹³⁶

If “maps were destructible,” in some sense, it would seemingly mean that we could do away with maps and interact directly with territories, which first off isn’t possible because we are finite and cannot comprehend territories all at once (and instead through a process of saturation seem to naturally generate maps at a sufficient point of saturation, alluding to Alex Ebert’s work), but second it could also be the case that because the territory essentially entails maps, which means “maps aren’t the territory and yet are in it.” With Hegel, Žižek, ‘to arrive at the Absolute, what one has to add to the object order is its appearance itself […] a necessary moment.’¹³⁷ Our very capacity to “make appear” is essentially part of the territory (for it consists of a “Real” that is “directly inexperienceable,” and hence requires meditation and appearance), and yet this process of appearance is contradictory and “lacking” (similar to how theology might say God exists as necessarily a being we cannot experience, and yet because there is a God we cannot experience, there is experience at all (“of” that being even, at least analogously)). This of course suggests a contradictory process, for it suggests experience is possible from and of what cannot be experienced (and yet nevertheless experience must be “toward” the unexperienced as if experiencing it were possible), which brings to mind Žižek’s thoughts on ‘the relationship between ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ universality’; he writes:

‘in a first move, universality has to be asserted in its negativity, as exclusive of all particular content — that is to say, not as an all-encompassing container, but as the destructive force which undermines every particular content […] [And yet] [i]t is only […] when universality, as it were, loses the distance of an abstract container, and enters its own frame, that it becomes truly concrete.’¹³⁸

The universal suggests a certain inadequacy in every particularity (in a particular not being the universal itself), and yet the universal is meaningless if it doesn’t “enter into” particularity and hence inadequacy; thus, we can say that the universal, if meaningful, consists of inadequacy (“lack,” incompleteness, A/B…). This move into and consisting of inadequacy is essentially part of universality if suggesting a meaningful movement of thought (we can consider here how ‘[b]oth Christianity and Hegel transpose the gap which separates us from the Absolute into the Absolute itself’), and so it goes with “appearance.”¹³⁹ “Appearance” necessarily negates the “(w)hole” of what appears, as a map necessarily isn’t the territory, and yet that very negative act is necessarily part of the territory if appearance itself is somehow essential (‘a gesture of taking away, which is in itself giving’); otherwise, we’re not dealing with a real movement of thought, so are we even thinking?¹⁴⁰ Perhaps not.

Rex Butler sees in Žižek a realization that ‘[a]ll significant philosophical systems […] introduce a certain gap or void into what is — a gap or void that we would call the subject.’¹⁴¹ Subjectivity generates appearance, and if appearance is essential (even while ‘there is no necessary relationship between reality and its symbolization’) while subjectivity entails a void, then essence entails void — the question is only what might be the quality of this void, say as a void in the sense of what a “situation” or “relation” must be to a “thing” which cannot comprehend anything but “things?”¹⁴² I personally lean in this direction, which in a way might sound “positive” and apophatic, but please note that I think relations are hard and indeed Real: to say “the void follows from relations and situations” is not for me to necessary positivize it (for from relations, there is “no exit”). It depends, but I certainly don’t think relations can be maintained without facing “The Real”: there is a certain “crucifixion” required, like Dante’s road to Beatrice, as might be required for “Real Materialism.”¹⁴³ Nothing short of this will ultimately realize ‘the role of critical thinking [as] to open up another choice.’¹⁴⁴

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A point of clarification is warranted here, which is the odd fact that though “The Real” is that which we cannot experience, Žižek stresses that ‘[t]he point is that [we] can encounter the Real, and that is what is so difficult to accept.’¹⁴⁵ Doesn’t that contradict everything we’ve been saying? It seems that way, but really “we can encounter that which we cannot encounter,” as “we can experience that which we can’t experience” — that’s the whole problem. When we suggest “The Real cannot be experienced,” we mean to say that the Real is that which undermines our worlds; in a sense, the “game” is to avoid the Real (we could say that “the rule of the game/symbolic” is “the Real can’t be experienced,” bringing to mind how ‘ideology […] functions as a way of regulating a certain distance with such an encounter [and] sustains at the level of fantasy precisely what it seeks to avoid at the level of actuality’).¹⁴⁶ As Žižek puts it:

‘So, to be clear, the Real is impossible but is not simply impossible in the sense of a failed encounter. It is also impossible in the sense that it is a traumatic encounter that does happen but which we are unable to confront.’¹⁴⁷

This is the tricky balance that must be kept in mind when we discuss “The Real” as that which can’t be encountered yet can — that’s the whole problem (with our ‘Real which is all too possible, and that is what is traumatic’).¹⁴⁸ “The Real” arises in ruptures of reality that can’t be reality in being ruptures of it, and yet at the same time the ruptures are only possible because there is a reality, so they are in some sense part of reality — if relations are real, so are ruptures, we might say, bridging Korzybski and Žižek (furthermore, “lacks are not nothing,” as Thomas Jockin discusses). In a way, the ruptures of ‘the Lacanian Real [are] precisely ‘more real than reality,’ ’ in the sense that they unveil more of what is fully possible in reality, unveiling that we what we thought was “realest reality” wasn’t at all (but how could we have thought otherwise and functioned?).¹⁴⁹ Reality is surprising, and yet “surprises” can’t be regular to be themselves, so what do we regularly experience? Something less than reality? Well, ‘the Real happens — [we] cannot justify or explain it’ (miraculous?).¹⁵⁰ And yet this does not mean reality isn’t real: ‘[t]he point is not that there is no reality outside our mind, the point is rather that there is no mind outside reality. The distortion of reality occurs precisely because our mind is part of reality.’¹⁵¹ Because we are, “lack” is (A/B) — which means there is nothing to stop us from acting as if “lack is nothing” (A/A, self-effacing) (‘the most horrible thing to encounter for a human being is this abyss of free will’).¹⁵²

We have spoken much in O.G. Rose of “Encounterology” and the notion that “reality is found in surprises” (or “limits” alluding to Alex Ebert), and I would associate Žižek’s “rupture” and “Real” here with those topics. Furthermore, I am of the opinion that we do not really have a relationship until it surprises us, which necessarily entails a “Real rupture,” and on those grounds I would consider Korzybski, Gödel, Hegel, Whitehead, Barfield, Leibniz, Ebert, and Žižek together, for I believe a “relational ontology” isn’t relational until it is Real (which might impact possibilities and evolutions for monads). Bringing Heidegger to mind, Žižek says:

‘I am more and more convinced that consciousness originates with something going terribly wrong — even at the most personal level. For example, when do we become aware of something, fully aware? Precisely at the point where something no longer functions properly or not in the expected way.’¹⁵³

So I think it goes with relations: they (meaningfully) “are” when they are Real, and if we require “maps” to handle the Real, this suggests relations require maps (emotionally, psychologically, epistemologically, and ontologically). Hence, if society is to be possible, we require maps, and if humans require society, where humans are, maps are indestructible. At the same time, we should be clear that maps don’t perfectly represent the Real, even though the Real forces humans to use maps. As Glyn Daly writes:

‘[T]his intangible Real could be said to function like the ‘vanishing point’: i.e. something that cannot be represented but which is nonetheless constitutive of representations. In quantum physics, by contrast, the Real would be the curvature space: something that cannot be dimensionally determined but which creates the conditions of possibility for dimensionality as such.’¹⁵⁴

To put it another way, ‘the Real is present in terms of the constitutive paradox whereby a system is able to establish its forms of internal coherence and unity only insofar as it cannot systematize its own principles of constitution.’¹⁵⁵ This suggests Gödel, and it means that the Real is present in a map to the degree that it makes the map that which avoids the Real, as a territory is present in a map to the degree that the map exists precisely because it isn’t the territory and yet is needed because of the territory. This is odd, but it suggests why A/A is insufficient for humans, and why Korzybski is right that we require something like A/B to keep sanity: stuck in A/A (as under “givens”), we would treat the Symbolic and map as equal to the Real and territory, making us radically unprepared for the ruptures of the Real that would likely occur (especially under Pluralism and Globalization), at which point we could psychologically break.¹⁵⁶

“The map is indestructible” not necessarily in the sense that it literally can’t be destroyed, but in the sense that destroying it has consequences; furthermore, there’s a sense in which we can’t destroy maps any more than we can destroy negativity, for maps are what makes possible “tarrying with the negative” precisely in their function to defend us from negativity.¹⁵⁷ We must live with poetry, we might say, for ‘poetry obfuscates the hole, making it palpable and simultaneously tolerable.’¹⁵⁸

VIII

Žižek notes that ‘the Real […] resists full symbolization, but it is at the same time an excess generated by the process of symbolization itself. Without symbolization, there is no Real, there is just a flat stupidity of what is there.’¹⁵⁹ “The Real” is only itself because of the symbolization it denies ever being fully symbolized in, like a territory that only exists because it isn’t its map. Alluding to thoughts on “surprise” in O.G. Rose, we could say that the Real requires surprise, and hence it requires consistency and regularly to be possible; thus, a map. But the Real itself cannot be a consistent state, but rather it must be a rupture, which means it requires something to rupture, ergo a Symbolic and/or map. ‘[W]hen reality dissolves and the only thing remaining is the abyss of subjectivity,’ we encounter the Real, but we cannot experience “an abyss” from nothingness (paradoxically); rather, we require something (a map) so that “an abyss” (the territory) can be experienced.¹⁶⁰ Yet this means “the abyss” (as distinct from “nothingness”) arises precisely with symbolization, which is very odd, but it means the subject is “always already” constituted by “a symbolization/abyss,” we might say — and never shall the two part (or else we are self-effaced). As odd as this sounds, it is arguably common knowledge (at least subconsciously) (‘even the mass media is aware of the extent to which our perception of reality, including the reality of our innermost self-experience, depends upon symbolic fictions’).¹⁶¹

There is a history of believing that ‘self-consciousness renders self-present and self-transparent the ‘thing’ in me which thinks,’ but Žižek opposes this view, as Korzybski warns of this “identification” as a source of insanity.¹⁶² This tendency has been part of a long history of a ‘metaphysic[al] endeavor[] to heal the would of the ‘primordial repression’ […] by allocation to the subject a place in the ‘great chain of being’ — but this medicine entails side-effects.¹⁶³ We through this history could habituate ourselves into a blindness to the role of the Symbolic, and hence become vulnerable to ideology and “maps” in ways that contributed to totalization, “the banality of evil,” oppression, and worse; furthermore, we could make ourselves mentally fragile, as unveiled with Pluralism and Globalization, when A/A-logic could not prove sufficient, and so sanity has broken down (“free from givens”). In a world where my neighbor is profoundly different from me, I must more so also see the difference in myself — ‘every tension between Notion and reality […] already implies a minimal notional determination of this ‘otherness’ ’ — breaking down A/A and leaving me in need of something else for life.¹⁶⁴ If A/B isn’t available, I stay broken down (“I am (not) what I am”), for I have no means by which ‘to live a certain difference.’¹⁶⁵

‘For Hegel, identity is the most radical form of difference, difference brought to its self-reference, not just in the obvious sense that a thing’s identity is defined by the difference from all other things but above all in the sense that ‘identity’ names the difference of a thing with itself, a thing’s difference from all its particular properties (each of which can be shared by other things): a thing ‘is’ not its properties, it ‘is’ a unique receptable of its properties.’¹⁶⁶

This does not mean that there is no truth to the notion of “identity” or “A”; after all, ‘difference is by definition difference between identities, without identities the flow of differences becomes a chaotic flow, a formless One […]’¹⁶⁷ Rather, it means identity is that “which passes over into otherness,” which means it is always “situated.”¹⁶⁸ What we need for Korzybski’s sanity is to see this, which requires a new Symbolic (A/B), which we can associate with “the parallax view” of Žižek, which he describes as ‘the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight.’¹⁶⁹ ¹⁷⁰ The classic example is if I hold up a finger and close one eye, then the other: my finger will move, yet I won’t. The shift is entirely in the observational field (with only the slightest physical shift of an eyelid), which we can associate with a change in Symbolic for Korzybski, which seems like “nothing happens” and yet in that “nothing happening” sanity becomes gainable and sustainable (precisely through an act that can seem silly, please note, perhaps like God dying…). In Žižek’s parallax, like in Korzybski, there is a ‘reflexive twist [in which] I myself am included in the picture constituted by me,’ hence generating a “situation” (A/B), but please note that this “shift in perspective” is itself not empirically viewable: it can look to outsiders (and even to ourselves) like “nothing happend.”¹⁷¹ But indeed, that is what we all need: for “nothing to happen” (which means we “go through nothing” versus “go from negativity,” a move akin to Žižek’s “Christian Atheism”) (please also note that parallax might describe shifts between and in monads).

Considering Karatani’s Transcritique (even if Karatani isn’t radical enough for him), Žižek considers how entities are ‘discernible only via the irreducibly antimonic character of our experience of reality,’ which is to say through accepting that “things are not what they are” (but instead “situation”) — which is a parallax shift (A/A to A/B) and necessary for Korzybski’s sanity.¹⁷² This “situation” though is not something to be overcome, but something integrated with as evidence that the subject ‘always has what [it] is looking for’ — and ‘[t]his is what ‘negation of negation’ is: the shift of perspective which turns failure into true success’ (insanity into sanity, sanity into insanity…)¹⁷³ I would associate the move between A/A to A/B with a parallax shift (which is critically not a matter of ‘hav[ing] two perspectives’; rather, ‘we have a perspective and what eludes it’), and also note that a parallax can seem to require an “Absolute Choice” (as discussed throughout O.G. Rose), which for our purposes here can simply be understood as a choice that has no basis which can justify it beyond the choice itself (it is “absolute”).¹⁷⁴ As discussed in The Absolute Choice, we could associate this choice with “The Buridan’s Donkey,” which is where a donkey is caught between two equally-sized piles of grain and starves because it cannot make a rational decision. All the donkey can do is make a nonrational decision, but if that’s not a category in its thinking, it might be doomed; similarly, we might consider parallax not something we can rationally choose (for “in experience” there seems to reason for A/A just as much as A/B, especially before we think about it), but something that must be nonrationally accepted (perhaps “The Absolute Choice” itself is all we can hope for as a ‘truth [which] remains the same in all possible worlds?’).¹⁷⁵ If so, this suggests something comical where Korzybski’s sanity is thanks to something that will “seem” irrational (as “nonrationality” can) — hence a need to face negativity (and “go through it” versus “from it”).¹⁷⁶

As we’ve discussed, for Hegel, ‘reality itself […] appears as an expression of inner essence,’ and if reality is contradictory, then there is reason to think reality is essentially contradictory — but nothing will force us to “see” things this way.¹⁷⁷ Yes, we might accept that ‘consciousness is a strictly relational phenomenon,’ but if consciousness appears such and makes the world appear such as well, this would for Hegel suggest that things “are” such (to split “appear” and “are” is a mistake), but again we have to choose to undergo this parallax.¹⁷⁸ The concepts of “Parallax Shift” and “Absolute Choice” are deeply connected here for me, but how can we choose something we can’t see or “get” until we choose it? It seems to possibly be because we all seem born with a sense that something is “lacking” — we don’t know what or how, but something feels “off,” and so we can be looking for something that we can’t put into words, identify, etc. We sense a mystery and seek it (like “The Weight of Glory” of Lewis), which hardly makes sense, but doing something that “hardly makes sense” (nonrational) seems to be the only way to deal with this paradox of seeking something we don’t see or trying to see something we don’t know we’re seeking. Is this “situation” we find ourselves in why we might have hope against maps and ideology? Perhaps, as it also might provide for us a reason to encounter “limits we don’t know our limits,” which for Alex Ebert is needed if we are to experience the “limit(less)” and undergo sublation/negation, the failure to do of which means we are stuck in A/A versus A/B and could suffer self-effacement. This case is elaborated on in The Absolute Choice, particularly the paper “Limits Are Limitless” (see also #161), but the point is that we seem to need “a sense of something lacking” if we are to have any hope of making an Absolute Choice for what we can’t identify, undergo a Parallax Shift to see the (in)visible differently, to encounter limits we don’t know are limits (which are “true limits”), and so on — would we have any hope of addressing these paradoxes without “a sense of lack?” Perhaps not.

Anyway, ultimately, in my view what Korzybski, Barfield, Leibniz…encourage of us is not simply “a change of view” but, more precisely, a parallax (which again requires an Absolute Choice, because a parallax must happen in us — it can’t really be caused externally, even if we might be externally influenced to make the Absolute Choice). The justification for the parallax can be found by considering Hegel, where we see “appearance as real” and note that if “what appears to us” consists of contradiction, why couldn’t essence itself be contradictory (A/B instead of A/A)? If identification is impossible in appearance, perhaps this is because “everything is situation all the way down” (“the monad”)? The fact that we seem to “lose sanity” as Korzybski warns without A/B only strengthens the case, meaning we need to accept the reality is A/B if we are to avoid insanity. But that means we must work with maps, as we require maps to avoid facing “The Real” too much too quickly — hence, “the map is indestructible” — but maps could move us into ideology and trouble — and prove indestructible. Does this mean “relational ontologies” entail “The Real?” I think so, which is a great challenge if what Kafka wrote applies: ‘I cannot live with you, and I cannot live without you.’¹⁷⁹ (“The map is indestructible” or we have been destroyed.)

IX

Maps are indestructible as a general concept because reality is relational/situational (Leibniz), “excessive” (Ebert), and/or “lacking” (Žižek), and if we aren’t dealing with maps, we aren’t dealing with reality, which brings about pathology (as we are at risk of in dealing with maps…). To treat the world as Algebraic instead of Geometric is not the way, but to accept Geometry is to accept a complex work. Furthermore, “maps are indestructible” also in the sense that their points of weakness can be aligned with “essential incompleteness,” and hence not seen as evidence deconstructing them, maintaining strength. Considering Gödel, ideology necessarily entails inconsistency, so if I find inconsistency, I don’t necessarily have to leave the ideology. I can stay, whether the ideology be true or false, because I can interpret that inconsistency as an essential part of the consistency (perhaps as a “mystery,” “something to be discovered in the future by science,” an axiom, etc.), versus an inconsistency contradicting the consistency of the ideology, as I am so able because thought is “groundless” (thought “A” is “read upon” phenomenon-A, rather than phenomenon-A “give us” or “force upon us thought-A”). And if to save my ideology, I need to read “B” upon phenomenon-A (if I need to define DNA as the ground of humanness versus consciousness, for example), I can do that: phenomenon-A cannot stop me. In other words, the “groundlessness” of language, perception, and thought can work in favor of ideology, for whenever ideology is threatened, it can simply reorder the system of thought by which the ideology operates, and as long as the ideology maintains its internal consistency, the ideology can continue without missing a beat (I have that power, power that seems irrational not to use).

If we are not aware of the inherent and inescapable “groundlessness of being,” we won’t realize that all ideology will entail a “space” to redefine and protect itself, not because it is necessarily true, but because it is ideology. A map and/or ideology is that which is “(in)consistent” (“inconsistent in its consistency”), while an idea is that which is either “consistent” or “inconsistent” relative to an (“(in)consistent”) ideology. Hence, that which is actually an ideology (as opposed to “a bad idea”), is that which is consistent, and hence that which cannot, within itself, readily be found to be false. But recall that a reason I would leave an ideology is because I found it was inconsistent (as opposed to essentially inconsistent), as a result of reflecting on it because of “the other.” But if the ideology I am in is totally consistent (“(in)consistent”), then any possible manner in which I reflect on it as a result of “the other” will easily stand up to the scrutiny (my “you” will find nothing inconsistent, and hence no reason to abandon the ideology as not an ideology). Because the ideology is “groundless,” nothing but myself can challenge it, but anyway I challenge it, the ideology will easily stand, increasing my confidence that I am right to stand with it (even if the ideology is actually false).

Considering Wittgenstein, the more consistent the ideology is, the more “certain” I can become that I don’t need to challenge it, and even if I did, if the ideology is truly an ideology, I would (seemingly) find I was right to be “certain” that I didn’t need to challenge it, for the ideology would stand to scrutiny. The more consistent our ideology becomes — the more our ideology realizes it is actually an ideology — the more “certain” we can become about it (which is to say “establish certainty deterrence”), when how consistent an ideology is doesn’t necessitate that it is truer. A system, map, and/or ideology could be true relative to its axioms and rules of interference, yet false. But if certainty is ultimately impossible, what else do we have to garner a sense of “what could be true” than by consistency? We seemingly must think the more consistent an ideology is, the truer it is, but we might achieve a completely flawless and consistent “being rational” erected upon a “being true” that is entirely false.

Given that “the map” usefully depicts “the territory,” the more consistent an ideology and/or subjectivity (which we have control over protecting and maintaining), the more certain we can become that it is proper for the ideology/subjectivity to (necessarily) “strike us” as objective and/or axiomatic, when the level of consistency of an ideology doesn’t necessarily increase how objective/axiomatic the ideology is: a consistent or “complete” ideology could be absurd. The more “objective” the ideology strikes us, the more we can feel no need to “critically think” about it, when what needs to be questioned is precisely that which doesn’t seem to us that it needs to be questioned. Additionally, we can simply define those points as the essential inconsistencies of the ideology (perhaps as the necessary axioms that cannot be proven or disproven), and furthermore form “certainty (deterrence)” over those weak points, making them true because they must be true for anything to be true (I have that power).¹⁸⁰ Surely maps are not indestructible though, for don’t people leave Christianity, abandon Conservatism…and so on? Has there never been change? A very fair counter, but it should be stressed that I am not arguing people can’t change, but that in an ideology nobody must necessarily change. Also, if people do change, it is doubtful that the change is a result of a purely rational process: they probably also had emotional experiences that change “the stickiness” of their ideology (as discussed in “Compelling” by O.G. Rose). People can work to avoid these experiences though, keeping their maps strong, and ultimately this means that if people are unwilling to move beyond their maps (versus say try to deconstruct them), nothing must necessarily change them.

If it really is the case that “the map is indestructible,” what hope do we have in our Pluralistic Age? If according to “indestructible ideology A,” ideology B is to be erased from the face of the earth, and vice-versa, there is little hope for A and B to live in peaceful community unless say ideology A “betrays itself.” And who, in good conscience, would do this, considering the existential angst this would necessarily cause (considering Pierce), and considering that the ideologies don’t necessitate this abandonment within themselves, precisely because they are consistent? Perhaps our only hope is to “step into” an ideology and find an inconsistency that isn’t essential, but contradictory in such a way that the ideologue cannot interpret the inconsistency as essential, but must necessarily admit that the inconsistency “unveils” the ideology to not be an ideology but a bad idea or problematic notion? But it is on this point that “The Pynchon Risk” must be noted — the risk and Kafkaesque joke that makes the challenge of ideology so great.

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In Thomas Pynchon (Modern Critical View), edited by Harold Bloom, Bloom disuses the work of Pynchon as Kabbalistic. Bloom particularly loved ‘the story of Byron the light bulb in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow,’ seeing it as a supreme parable of our ‘age of plastics and paranoia, dominated by the System’ (and unfortunately ‘Fascism always lurks where plastic dominates’).¹⁸¹ ¹⁸² Byron is ‘[a] living reminder that the System can never quite win […] [but] the System also can never quite lose’; likewise, though maps can never become territories, they never get quite destroyed either.¹⁸³ Here, we will focus on The Cry of Lot 49, which is relevant I think because we might think of Oedipa as on the path to end up like Byron (as will need to be explained). Anyway, we can consider a “Pynchon Risk” living like Oedipa (and risking becoming Byron), who is ‘confronted with riddles and with the obligation to discover an order’ (as Frank Kermode puts it).¹⁸⁴ Likewise, we find ourselves “thrown” into a territory and “situation” that we are forced to think about to survive, and so we are obligated to generate a map (that we treat as more “realized” than “created”). Like life, The Cry of Lot 49 ‘is crammed with disappointed promises of significance, with ambiguous invitation to paradigmatic construction, and this is precisely Oedipa’s problem’ (and ours).¹⁸⁵ ‘Is there a structure […] or only deceptive galaxies of signifiers? Like California itself, the text offers a choice: plenitude or vacuity. Is there a hidden plot […] which makes sense, whether evil or benign, of the randomness of the world’ (A/A or A/B)?¹⁸⁶ Even if there isn’t a conspiracy or organized plot like Oedipa considers, we will still have to make a map to survive, and in this sense might have to “practically live” as if some conspiracy is true (that we plot against ourselves…?). “No exit.”

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Language, thought, and ideology, weaved together as a map, as long as they are “(in)consistent,” function well enough that we are prone to confuse “the signifier” with “the signified,” and yet are “groundless,” which is to say that living with words and thoughts is to live in a world similar to Oedipa’s (it’s just not until the internet that we could be connected to everything to end up like Byron — though more on that at another time). Following Alfred Korzybski, as S.I. Hayakawa writes, ‘[t]here is no necessary connection between the symbol and that which is symbolized,’ and this ultimately makes ideology indestructible and us at risk of seeing something when there is nothing: the “situation” in which we are positioned like Oedipa cannot be destroyed.¹⁸⁷ And the very human condition that puts us in this situation — thought, language, signification, relation — is also what makes us prone to end up seeing things illusions, mad, in what Hayakawa calls “semantic confusion,” for reasons Hayakawa suggests well when he writes that ‘the word ‘rattlesnake’ [for example] and the actual creature are felt to be one and the same thing, because they arouse the same feelings.’¹⁸⁸ The memory which makes signification possible also brings with it emotion and experience that makes the signifier “seem like” the signified, possibly and gradually training us into a “semantic confusion” in which we are then unprepared to be in Oedipa’s situation, too prone to see fake connections — and yet it is the very signification which can so wrongly habituate us that puts us in this situation in the first place.

S. I. Hayakawa

We are always at risk of seeking to learn about things that we invent in the process of seeking them, perhaps precisely because “it is relations all the way down” and the world is conditioned by us (perhaps following Barfield, Leibniz, Hegel, etc.) — those whom can ‘plot [(against)] reality.’¹⁸⁹ Because reality is A/B not A/A, we can interpret it as A/A and furthermore always be vulnerable to the reality that ‘[t]o discover […] may be the same thing as inventing […].’¹⁹⁰ Furthermore, we are at risk of this because we must invent and create signifiers in order to “get at” the present territory (whatever that is), and yet though ‘[s]ymbols and things symbolized are independent of each other; nevertheless, all of us have a way of feeling as if, and sometimes acting as if, there were necessary connections’ (does Baudrillard’s “Death of the Real” amplify this problem? Is that a real/false connection?).¹⁹¹ We must: if we really believed and acted as if “the map wasn’t the territory,” we would not function (as a bad actor cannot forget his or her self in the character), and yet “the map isn’t the territory” (“the actor isn’t the role”). Hence, in a sense, to function in this world we must act crazy. Oedipa is practical. Sanity is (in)sane.

‘Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness […]’¹⁹² Hence, “the practical” is located in the space between truth and fiction, but sanity is possible because Lacan is right and “the truth is structure liked a fiction” (which sounds insane). ‘What Oedipa is doing is very much like reading a book,’ Frank Kermode tells us, and so the same applies to us in following maps (aren’t words on a page guiding our eyes?): “following maps” and “reading books” is similar (both are ways to “read signs,” we might say).¹⁹³ A “good interpretation” is “like” the book we are reading, even if not equivalent to it, and yet if we treat an interpretation as “just an interpretation,” it would have no power or authority; similarly, if Oedipa treated the connections she thought she saw as “just possibilities,” they couldn’t inspire her actions — and then she might be ill-prepared and in danger. That’s the rub: if we dismiss our thoughts as “just thoughts,” we must be at risk of not being able to navigate our lives, not being able to protect ourselves from possible plots against us (as we discuss with David Hume), not being able to learn the deeper truths of reality — to avoid risk is to avoid life. Where there is no possibility of ‘the normal hermeneutic activity [ending up] in disease,’ we are in danger.¹⁹⁴ “No exit.” Always possibly ending up in ‘socially segregated subuniverses of meaning, as Berger and Luckmann [discuss].’¹⁹⁵ If we are “always already” in a situation, we are “always already” in a situation (A/B)…

‘What concerns us [in The Cry of Lot 49] is precisely the existence of what seems to be systems that could transmit meanings, as in the account of San Narciso, the town which looks like a printed circuit, ‘an intent to communicate’ ’; likewise, what concerns us are “maps’ and “situations” from which meaning emerges (‘a revelation tremble[s] […] in progress all round […]’).¹⁹⁶ And we are “always already” in situations, which means we are all living “as if reading books.” To read is to be “toward” meaning, and to “situate” is similar. “The map is not the territory,” but all of us require maps, which means we are all in a position and so habituated to consciously or subconsciously feel ‘[t]he need of a revelation, the sense that such [situations] exist to transmit sense […]’¹⁹⁷ Should we follow that feeling and trust it? Give ourselves over to it? ‘Everything can be legitimated, systemized’ — yes/no?¹⁹⁸ ‘[We] risk a kind of madness, which is the ultimate human cost of holding everything together in a single design,’ which is what a map must function to do.¹⁹⁹ To think is to risk madness. Sanity is (in)sane. Or so we are invited to find out as ‘[a] speaking animal’ who must approach a ‘world in which [we] have introduce[d] [our] communication systems.’²⁰⁰

Where there are no maps or Symbolic, we are overwhelmed by “The Real,” exactly as Lacan and Žižek warn, and yet where there are maps we find ourselves “situated” to end up like Oedipa, ready to see ‘another mode of meaning behind the obvious’ which functions as a possible source of hope, meaning, and/or madness, which at the same time can draw us toward a Real or Beauty for which we are easily not prepared (Love(craftian)).²⁰¹ Furthermore, the map we live according to might be one we were trained, tricked, etc. into “absorbing,” perhaps from institutions, families, religions, governments, etc. — ‘the result of deliberate conspiracies to confuse and control.’²⁰² Even when we experience a ‘manifestation of the sacred,’ what arguably ‘The Cry of Lot 49 dramatizes’ (alluding to Mircea Eliade) — that too might be a trick.²⁰³ Choose. Absolutely Choose. Regardless:

‘something, therefore, which we call ‘a chair’ […] may be expressed or described by words; yet, the situation is not altered, because the given description or expression will not be the actual objective level which we call ‘a chair’ […]’²⁰⁴

‘However obvious these facts may appear at first glance, they are actually not so obvious as they seem except when we take special pains to think about the subject. Symbols and things symbolized are independent of each other; nevertheless, all of us have a way of feeling as if, and sometimes acting as if, there were necessary connections.’²⁰⁵

Whatever we choose, things will be what things are, which are not equivalent to our understandings of, and yet the act of trying to understand what is can change what is (if indeed “relations are all”).²⁰⁶ We must fail, but the effort at which we fail changes what “is” — like a creative. Faulkner fails at describing Caddy, and yet the world which includes his failure is better for it. Even if we make a wrong choice, the world can nevertheless be better because we are in it choosing. And yet bad choices can be made.

Harold Bloom tells us that ‘Oedipa’s quest is to discover how and why to read the story in which she finds herself. Pynchon’s Oedipa is not always a good reader, but she deserves her first name: like Sophocles’ Oedipus she unceasingly seeks the truth.’²⁰⁷ Again, Bloom tells us Pynchon is Kabbalistic, and Bloom also tells us ‘[the] emphasis upon interpretation is finally what distinguished Kabbalah from nearly every other variety of mysticism or theosophy, East or West.’²⁰⁸ This all in mind, in our age of maps and ever-pluralizing maps thanks to the internet, Globalization, Pluralism, etc. (which we refer to as “the problem of internally consistent systems”), we might say that we are all Kabbalistic now, trying to “read the signs of the time,” though Bloom notes ‘reading is always a defensive process.’²⁰⁹ Is this a reason the world feels fragile? Everyone is fearfully and defensively “reading” and trying to make sense of everything? Forced to work with maps like Oedipa in this world of “situation” (A/B), without which we will suffer “The Real” and be self-effaced? (“The map is indestructible.”)

Alan Friedman and Manfred Puetz claim that ‘Thomas Pynchon is an author in search of a metaphor’ for that which no metaphor seems able to capture; likewise, we search for a map that cannot be the territory.²¹⁰ Bringing Yeats to mind, Molly Hite explains that ‘[t]he trope of the absent center supplies the motive for making patterns out of language’ in Pynchon, which we can associate with “absent territory” motivating us to make maps; Hite further writes that ‘human beings try to construct meanings because the premise that the center did not hold constitutes an original loss’; likewise, our experience of a “loss of the territory” an “original loss” that colors every moment of map-making.²¹¹ Hite also tells us that ‘the search for meaning could not occur if the searchers were not aware of the possibility of enlightenment,’ and similarly we would not bother with maps if there was no chance of them being “like” the territory — so why couldn’t they “equal” it?²¹² If they can be “like” it, doesn’t that mean semblance is possible, so why not “entirely possible?” Indeed, why not? And so there is reason to end up like Oedipa…Why not? Are we to be nonrational?

‘But the search must articulate connections, in the dual sense of setting such connections apart and of speaking them. The condition of articulation, which governs the secular worlds of the novels, guarantees that the indivisible, silent center will remain always out of reach. Language can only divide, recombine, violate the perfection of silence with the noisy incompleteness of always saying. Yet saying means.’²¹³

Indeed, awareness of this is necessary for the art of map-making, which means we must learn what Hayakawa, Korzybski, and the like teach us in this world of “situation” and “relations.” Just by being, we are always at risk of Pynchon, but the “Pynchon Risk” is where we face this risk versus run from it. The very ‘fact of language seems to point back to an original Creation, an original named’ — the very use of a map seems to point back to a (lost) territory — and it is impossible to “mean” without this feeling.²¹⁴ To overcome it, we can be tempted to act as if “the map is the territory,” for that way we can begin working to convince ourselves that we’ve lost nothing at all, thus addressing and erasing the feeling. To allude to Hayakawa, ‘human survival […] revolve[s] around a different kind of fitness from that of the lower animals,’ and part of that fitness is proving able not to give into this temptation, which means we know “the map isn’t the territory” and yet use “indestructible maps” all the same, aware of the risks outlined in Pynchon.²¹⁵ Our fate is tied to our relation with the Symbolic and maps, which is to say finding the proper ‘assumptions about the relationship of language to reality,’ the very work of which tempts us to fall into temptations Hite describes in Pynchon, for ‘the drive to make meaning out of the world can easily, and almost imperceptivity, turn into the compulsion to make the world totally coherent and explicable’ — the autocannibalistic mistake of “autonomous rationality” which Gödel with “incompleteness” can save us from, but only in the context of a “situation” in which Pynchon is a risk.²¹⁶ ²¹⁷

In our ‘semantic environment,’ like a Pynchon novel, how should we live?²¹⁸ A/B instead of A/A, for one, as we learn in Korzybski and Hegel, suggesting that ‘to understand the symbolic process is to be able to use it to our advantage; not to understand it is to remain forever its victim.’²¹⁹ ‘[People] need to be systematically aware of the powers and limitations of symbols, especially words, if they are to guard against being driven into complete bewilderment by the complexity of their semantic environment.’²²⁰ Oedipa seems to be an example of someone who is not “systematically aware of the powers and limitations of symbols,” but are we any better even if we know of these dangers? How can we change our lifestyles? There’s no way to escape the danger entirely, no, but if we are aware that we must play with fire, then we will focus on mastering the craft versus trying to put the fire out or acting foolishly. We are in danger. Knowing this, in response, we must choose how we will live. A/A or A/B? Childlike or not?²²¹ The A/B of reality that makes possible recognizing maps (as “not the territory,” and hence not A/A) is also what makes them indestructible, but that does not mean we must be doomed. We simply must adjust. We simply have to Absolutely Choose anew.

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Humans would likely not have maps or Symbolics if they did not have language, hence a reason why psychoanalysis focuses so much on language, a study of which can help us understand how ideology works through Symbolics (in light of the Real) — as Žižek brilliantly helps us realize. Why is language so unique? S. I. Hayakawa helps us approach that question, noting that ‘[l]anguage, in short, can be about language. This is a fundamental way in which human noise-making systems differ from the cries of animals.’²²² Likewise, human images can be about something other than the images themselves, and humans are able to see images in their imagination that aren’t “there” before them. Additionally, ‘animals struggle with each other for food or for leadership, but they do not, like human beings, struggle with each other for things that stand for food or leadership, such things as our paper symbols of wealth […]’²²³ ‘We live in an environment shaped and largely created by hitherto unparalleled semantic influences […],’ so much so that for humans, ‘it is often more important to have the symbol than what it stands for,’ though this would never be the case for animals.²²⁴ Humans are willing to die for symbols; we’ll die for an idea of food even if we can’t see it. This is our blessing and curse.

‘The semantic problems of correct symbolism underlie all human life. Incorrect symbolism, similarly, has also tremendous semantic ramifications and is bound to undermine any possibility of our building a structurally human civilization.’²²⁵ To be in A/A versus A/B makes a world of difference, as Korzybski dedicated his life to elucidating, and according to him ‘sanity is connected with correct symbolism’; unfortunately, thanks to ideology and “consistency,” we can go a long time, being “sane in being insane” — and then one day things break.²²⁶ ‘We read unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use,’ and likewise we unconsciously read into the world the ideology we live by, which can work for a very long time, and perhaps easily for a lifetime before Globalization and Pluralism.²²⁷ But times have changed and “givens” broke, and now we must increasingly face the reality of maps, which puts us at risk of ending up like Oedipa, precisely in realizing that maps exist and hence that we can be deceived or guided toward “the territory.” We see that humans can connect the world together, but also that what we connect together might be false. We are held together by truths structured like fictions or fictions structured like truths — is there a difference? “Connection” is a word of love and madness. “Passion.”

‘Persistent training,’ Korzybski wrote, ‘seems the only way to acquire this special structural sense for proper evaluation, and the habit of feeling when identification, or the confusion of orders of abstractions becomes particularly dangerous.’²²⁸ In other words, if we are going to live according to A/B and Reason versus A/A and Understanding, we have to regularly work at it (suggesting the need for a “gym” where we can so regularly train, perhaps like the Liminal Web, as discussed notably in II.2). In this gym, our goal would not be ‘to change the symptom directly, but, by the understanding of its main mechanism […] try to change the patient’s standards of evaluation, of which the symptom is only a consequence.’²²⁹ Reminiscent of psychoanalysis, the hope is to understand more than solve, for we need to address a way of life we cannot escape versus find a way to escape it (interestingly Korzybski emphasizes ‘visualization’ as notably helpful for overcoming identification, given ‘its special semantic importance,’ and yet he also critiques ‘allness’ as problematic).²³⁰ ²³¹ The issue strongly rests in how we evaluate the world, and Korzybski considers ‘[c]hildren and many idiots’ to help frame his “science of sanity,” and notes they often struggle with ‘any choice which involves meanings and evaluation’; unfortunately, most adults evaluate according to identification, and that contributes to insanity.²³² ²³³ And if our problem rests in evaluation, it rests in the question of if we operate according to A/A or A/B (a “metajudgment,” as II.2 discusses), and for Korzybski it is critical that we ‘live by non-identification.’²³⁴ This seems simple enough, but the challenge is great:

‘when non-identity is pointed out, even a moron will ‘agree,’ or wonder at the silliness of any author who fusses about it; yet, because all of us were trained in a linguistic and semantic system based on identity, that infantile identification will unconsciously play havoc [on us] the rest of our lives, unless this semantic blockage is counteracted.’²³⁵

We are hence in trouble under ‘our present education systems, and evolutional systems.’²³⁶ We speak often in O.G. Rose about the problem of “Trivia(l) Education,” inspired by Neil Postman (who first brought Alfred Korzybski to my attention), and here we can say that we are trained by the “trivia(l)” to associate A/A and identification with “being education” and intelligence, risking self-effacement (which is made all the worse by what seems to be a natural tendency toward the A/A and Kafkalike, as discussed in II.1). “Triva(l)” emphasizes identification (A/A), while Dialogos and “Liminal Education” would emphasize process and relation (A/B), and if the first would help us with sanity, we are currently educating and training the world toward insanity. Hence, we have an ‘infantile society’ (A/A): madness is not a mistake but a feature — rational.²³⁷ (‘[W]hy our destines should be dependent on the accidental and primitive structure of the language we use, is beyond […] comprehension […]’)²³⁸

Globalization connects the world, but in another sense, it helps us realize the connections which were always present. Reality is A/B, “situational” and “relational” all the way down, and this truth can be found suggested in the Kabbalah up through Hegel, Whitehead, Pynchon, and others. As the world globalizes and “givens” fail, the more following the Symbolic of A/A will lead to pathologies, exactly as Alfred Korzybski warned, which means we must “realize” the A/B-ness of the world that has “always already” been the case and negate/sublate into an A/B Symbolic to align with actuality. Following Hegel, we collectively and historically easily had to go through A/A before we could be ready for A/B, but now if we don’t negate/sublate into A/B when the age calls for it, we will continue to suffer self-effacement. We have reached a “fullness of time,” we might say, which we could also frame as “when everything is connected.” But in living in such a world, which is connected technologically, socially, metaphysically, economically — will we go mad or love? Will we be Oedipa or Childlike? The choice is made in the same “situation”…

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Looking ahead to The Absolute Choice by O.G. Rose, it should be noted that Emancipation After Hegel by Todd McGowan, which emphasizes “contradiction” in Hegel over “rationality” (as traditionally emphasized), is a stress which aligns with what we have argued in this paper, and we might say that the more our world has Globalized and Pluralized, the more we have found “contradiction” (which is to say A/B) an essential and unavoidable dimension of social existence. ‘What Hegel calls spirit (Geist) is just this capacity of thought to apprehend contradiction rather than merely succumbing to it as the natural world does,’ which means humans can respond and address contradiction — not that we do.²³⁹In fact, it could be argued that much of history is a story of trying to avoid contradiction, while Hegel would have us focus on contradiction to develop history and thought: rationality does not so much develop by avoiding contradiction and deeming it “irrational” (hence “othering” it), but by facing and reconciling with it.²⁴⁰ In Globalization and Pluralism, we might say we’ve run out of ways and “plausible deniability” to avoid contradiction within A/A, and so now we have to face what was “always already” the case (A/B), and so we require a “social coordination infrastructure” like the Liminal Web to so help us face and manage that reality (both Childhood and Oedipa can result from the same “situation” — the difference is orientation and training). Otherwise, our “sanity” will continue to suffer. ‘Contradiction is even more important to Hegel than he himself thought,’ and so it is to us as well: let us “other” it no more, a mistake which orients us to seek a ‘unity’ against contradiction versus ‘a reconciliation with it.’²⁴¹ ²⁴²

‘The subject’s ability to recognize contradiction distinguishes it from objects in the world,’ McGown tells us, and so it goes with our ability to recognition “monads,” “situations,” and “rainbows” (RCRs).²⁴³ This recognition is necessary for our “sanity,” and yet again we often use this recognition to remove and ignore contradiction versus reconcile with A/B — hence the need for “a negation/sublation of logic” from Aristotle to Hegel (as stressed at Philosophy Portal). For Hegel, a value of ‘formal thinking [is using it] as a foil not to be perverse but to show how thought is always at odds with itself’; similarly, Korzybski uses “identification” to show its incompleteness, as Leibniz uses Algebra to show a need for Geometry.²⁴⁴ ‘Hegel accepts misidentification as the only possible form that identification could take,’ and yet this seems like Madness, while at the same time it can sound romantic, avoiding objectification, honoring, and Loving to say we can never fully know our lover (for example).²⁴⁵ We might avoid such a Hegelian realization because it can feel like everything is unknowable and unintelligible, but ‘[t]he ability to feel life being damaged points toward the end of life, but, at the same time, it is life.’²⁴⁶ It can feel like it is breaking down our minds to think, but “everything is connected” (that we experience), for “everything is situation.”²⁴⁷ Faced with the notion “everything is connected” while equipped with A/A instead of A/B, we use a Symbolic that is inadequate, which as Korzybski warned leads to madness. In a Globalized world where we are increasingly forced by history to realize “everything is connected” and “everything is situation” (A/B), we increasingly require a Symbolic of A/B, or otherwise the mismatch will increasingly prove self-effacing: we will experience “everything is connected” as Madness more than Love.

A great insight of Pynchon is that the phrase “everything is connected” describes both a world of Love and a world of Madness (One or Zero, as discussed in Gravity’s Rainbow), and where there is the potential for Love there is also the potential for Madness (which I capitalize here to suggest their Pynchonian sense). Which side of this coin we realize will be up to us and how prepared we are for the “Absolute Choice,” which ultimately is the question of if we will be Children, which begs the question, “What kind of map will we use?” Do all maps equally depict connections as matters of Love or Madness? It’s hard to say (especially without Hegel), for fundamentally maps “connect things” together, and in this sense all a map is makes us “toward” Love/Madness. To map-live and map-make is to connect and establish consistency, which suggests a map can habituate us consciously or subconsciously toward experiencing “everything as connected” (just like “dream-equality” from II.2, suggesting we are doubly trained), but can maps help us experience Love or Madness? Are the two so easily separated? Don’t we experience Love as a Madness and even Madness as a form of Love?

Perhaps the historic connection between Love and Madness — and even their inescapability — is precisely a result of our map-lives, which is inescapable precisely because reality is “situational” and without maps “The Real” overwhelms us? We said that we must believe in our maps for them to work, as we must also trust them and be willing to “give ourselves over to them,” all of which is like a Love relationship, but at the same time “maps aren’t the territory,” and to treat them like they are is in a way Madness. We must see connections that we believe “are” there and yet we can’t know with certainty they are, and yet we “practically” can’t think that without proving dysfunctional. Madness/Love is required for functioning, which is odd and a truth that maps can help us avoid facing and subconsciously habituate us from experiencing. At the same time, maps habituate us “toward” experiencing “everything as connected,” which means maps can shield us from Madness/Love while at the same time leading us toward it. A trap? Like Love(craft)? It could be, but that will depend on us, and yet if we increasingly become pathological as we approach the realization “everything is connected,” this could function as a warning sign of a need for some “Absolute Choice” (from A/A to A/B) or precisely be our fate. In this way, like Purgatory, pathology and suffering could be a grace or (a continuation of) Inferno.

What is our “Absolute Choice” as we realize “everything is connected,” a state of Love/Madness, as we have been gradually habituated “toward” through map-making? We must choose how “everything is connected”: is it such through an “equal sign” of identification (A/A), or is it through relations, dialectics, and situation (A/B)? We must decide if “Love = Madness” (A/A) or if “Love situates with Madness” (A/B), but unfortunately because we are naturally A/A in Understanding, we are likely to end up in the first option (without “spreading Childhood,” the concern of Part 2), which is self-effacing. To become conscious that “the map isn’t the territory” is an opportunity for A/B and Reason, even though this reality is why the mistake of A/A is even possible and something we don’t ever have to necessarily abandon, but the initial experience of A/B without training can be one of Madness that we can interpret as evidence that we should stay in A/A (and hence self-effacement), and such is likely without awareness or preparation. Furthermore, to experience A/B can initially be an experience that “everything isn’t connected,” for “the map isn’t the territory,” and yet we have been (subconsciously) trained and habituated our entire lives by our maps (like dream-equality) into being “toward” the world as if “everything is connected” (A/A) — and isn’t it? Yes, in a way, but how the world is such matters, for again the difference between identification (“=”) and dialectics (“situation”) changes everything (as itself). “The map isn’t the territory” and yet they are connected — that is a key Hegelian move that is so difficult, but it brings together connection without identification — a crucial achievement of dialectics.

It would seem to avoid Madness to make it equal Love, but this identification can actually guarantee it (unprepared for “The Real”). Alternatively, to accept “Madness and Love are situated together” seems to guarantee Madness, but actually it can give us an opportunity to master ourselves and keep Madness from eclipsing Love. “The map is indestructible” and yet it can be negated/sublated, but how? Through “faithful presence,” as we’ll later explore in The True Isn’t the Rational, which entails “integration with lack.” Regardless though, our maps make everything connected, and then one day we might realize “everything is connected” and find ourselves having to divide Love and Madness while at the same time keeping them related but perhaps having never learned how (to be Hegelian as such), meaning we are vulnerable to pathology. Korzybski’s work was to help us avoid this fate, but this road to Childhood requires us to accept that we are (in)sane because we must map-make and hence be Lovers/Mad. How do Love and Madness relate? As one and the same (identification, A/A) or all with all (dialectic, A/B)? This question in mind, we might consider a question Žižek asked: ‘[I]s what we call philosophy still able to account for what quantum mechanics is dealing with?’²⁴⁸ Both-ness we can “see” as equality? A/B we can “see” as A/A? If philosophy can’t, perhaps nothing can, but if there’s potential in philosophy, there’s potential for us. “The map is indestructible” because Love/Madness is inescapable, yes, but Love/Madness we dwelt with faithfully could be trained through negation/sublation into (em)powerment and even Beauty. And the fate of beauty is the fate of us.

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Notes

¹²³Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 7.

¹²⁴Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 7.

¹²⁵Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 8.

¹²⁶Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 10.

¹²⁷Žižek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf. Cambridge, Mass. The MIT Press, 2003: 5.

¹²⁸Žižek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf. Cambridge, Mass. The MIT Press, 2003: 7.

¹²⁹Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 11.

¹³⁰Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 11.

¹³¹Žižek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf. Cambridge, Mass. The MIT Press, 2003: 32.

¹³²Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 12.

¹³³Žižek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf. Cambridge, Mass. The MIT Press, 2003: 47.

¹³⁴Žižek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf. Cambridge, Mass. The MIT Press, 2003: 77.

¹³⁵Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 11.

¹³⁶…and today we seem the flames (“givens” do not hide us). Žižek tells us that philosophy is ‘an exploration of what is presupposed even in daily activity,’ which risks driving us mad in the act of setting us free (and “freedom is a disease without a cure,” alluding to Žižek).⁰¹ Especially today, with the spread of “philosophical consciousness” (as we’ve discussed with Berger and Hume) due to Pluralism and Globalization, ‘you cannot find your way around daily life itself without answering certain philosophical questions. It is a unique time when everyone is, in a way, forced to be some kind of a philosopher.’⁰² Exactly, and what does that mean? Freedom. Philosophy brings freedom, and if freedom is global, there has been unleased a global disease without a cure.

There is a way in which we are not so much free but find ourself before Freedom saying ‘I am myself chosen,’ which means we cannot escape (if we forgo the responsibility, we must know we have forsaken it).⁰³ Furthermore, ‘[f]reedom is one of those deceiving notions that appear self-evident, but the moment we try to dissect them we get caught in ambiguities and contradictions.’⁰⁴ We know that a world without freedom at all would be oppressive, but a world where everyone was free from all customs or norms would be a world that ‘los[t] an immense amount of time with pointless interpretations’ (and hurt).⁰⁵ Nothing would make sense, and so we would be free; likewise, without a map, we would be free, but also lost (‘every figuration of freedom is in itself plural and full of inconsistencies,’ say between Hegel’s “concrete freedom” and “abstract freedom”).⁰⁶

For Žižek, freedom follows amid the relationship between the subject and the Symbolic, in a world where everyone is an excess that cannot be experienced, and hence is a lack. He discusses the + at the end of LGBTQ+, and asks ‘can one be directly a +? The properly dialectical answer is: yes, the subject is inscribed into a series of its possible identities precisely as a +, as an excess that eludes every identification.’⁰⁷ Furthermore, to handle this excess and make it intelligible to others, we design Symbolics which restrict freedom while also making it intelligible, and ‘[t]he symbolic universe in which we dwell is ‘transcendental’: it is not an object in the world since it provides the very frame of how we approach objects.’⁰⁸ As transcendental, it is not reducible to determinable causation, which means both degrees of freedom but also responsibility, leaving us ever-asking, ‘Why am I what you are saying that I am?’⁰⁹ As an excess, we are not reducible to Symbolics, and yet those Symbolics provide accurate representations of our identities — how? It is what necessarily follows from freedom; otherwise, there would be chaos, and we wouldn’t feel very free at all. In this way, suggesting Korzybski, the nature and precise quality of our Symbolic is of the upmost important; otherwise, this balance is not likely to be struck. And it is in representation and “appearance” that the results of this balancing act “emergence,” which is why freedom is more a question of “what appears,” not (finding) something hidden.

Freedom is a matter of maps, not reaching territory, for territories essentially consists of maps, and so to reach a territory without maps is to reach something which doesn’t exist. Freedom then is not a world in which ‘I am myself reduced to an object which can be endlessly refashioned’; rather, freedom is found in mastering an “Artform of Maps/Territories.”⁰¹⁰ It belongs to those who can say, ‘I have to identify myself as the hole in the big Other, as the crack in its edifice’; hence, ‘the only way to avoid cynicism is to heroically pass to the position of a new Master.’⁰¹¹ We are to be masters of the “/” in “Map/Territory,” which is to say masters of surprises. Breaks. Encounterology. Virtuous. Beautiful. ‘Real is, rather, freedom as a radical cut in the texture of reality.’⁰¹²

⁰¹Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 26.

⁰²Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 54.

⁰³Žižek, Slavoj. Freedom: A Disease Without Cure. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023: 8.

⁰⁴Žižek, Slavoj. Freedom: A Disease Without Cure. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023: 5.

⁰⁵Žižek, Slavoj. Freedom: A Disease Without Cure. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023: 16.

⁰⁶Žižek, Slavoj. Freedom: A Disease Without Cure. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023: 16.

⁰⁷Žižek, Slavoj. Freedom: A Disease Without Cure. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023: 54.

⁰⁸Žižek, Slavoj. Freedom: A Disease Without Cure. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023: 53.

⁰⁹Žižek, Slavoj. Freedom: A Disease Without Cure. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023: 51.

⁰¹⁰Žižek, Slavoj. Freedom: A Disease Without Cure. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023: 268.

⁰¹¹Žižek, Slavoj. Freedom: A Disease Without Cure. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023: 281.

⁰¹²Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 166.

¹³⁷Žižek, Slavoj. Freedom: A Disease Without Cure. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023: 70.

¹³⁸Žižek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf. Cambridge, Mass. The MIT Press, 2003: 87.

¹³⁹Žižek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf. Cambridge, Mass. The MIT Press, 2003: 88.

¹⁴⁰Žižek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf. Cambridge, Mass. The MIT Press, 2003: 94.

¹⁴¹Butler, Rex. Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory. New York, NY: Continuum, 2005: 17.

¹⁴²Butler, Rex. Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory. New York, NY: Continuum, 2005: 31.

¹⁴³Why does Žižek speak as if “Real Materialism” requires what he calls “Christian Atheism?” It is because a true materialism must be found through God; otherwise, some “God” will still be lurking subconsciously or in the background. For Žižek, Atheism must mean not merely ‘there is no god’ but […] ‘there is something in god more than god itself,’ and it is this excess which designates true materialism.’⁰¹ I might say that we cannot have the B of A/B be “transcendent” of A but in/as A, and that requires us to go through A for B then; hence, “true A” is through A in B, which makes A truly what it “is” as A/B. This in mind, Žižek stresses that:

‘what dies on the cross is not God’s earthly representative (stand-in) but the God of beyond itself, so what happens after the crucifixion is not a return of the transcendent One but the rise of the Holy Spirit which is the community of believers without any support in transcendence.’⁰²

Through A (Christ on the cross) it is unveiled B (Holy Spirit), which entails a realization that God was “always already” also Holy Spirit, which is “with us.” Critically, if we don’t go through some realization and process like this, we are likely to end up unintentionally in “the evil” which concerned Schelling, some indirect ‘spirituality [that] long[s] for infinity,’ suggesting ‘why Evil is much more spiritual than our sensual reality. In other words, the root of Evil is not our egotism but, on the contrary, a perverted self-destructive spirituality which can also bring us to sacrifice our lives.’⁰³ What Žižek is wisely warning is that an Atheism which doesn’t go “through Christian Atheism” will ironically still be spiritual (not a “true materialism”), and as a result it will be vulnerable to this profound “spiritual evil” (likely through the subconscious). (Perhaps “true religion” isn’t possible without “true materialism” either? Blood and bread?)

Žižek stresses that Hegelian logic is “negative” but not so much “subtractive” (perhaps making Hegel and Lacan distinct from Buddhism, though it depends on what we mean), which is to say Atheism cannot be “a process of subtracting God from materiality” (which runs the risk of A/A), but instead Atheism must be “a process of going through God into materiality” (more A/B), which requires facing and suffering negativity (Hegel does not “liberate us from — nirvana” but “liberates us through — anxiety,” which suggests ‘obstacle is a positive condition’).⁰⁴

Žižek warns that there is often a subtle and secret “Master Signifier” like God lurking behind materialism, for it is simply too hard and maybe impossible to really believe and live like reality is incomplete and lacking (A/B) without “going through negativity.” We can talk about negativity and “the death of God” all we like, but until we really experience God’s death (a Christ on a cross), we won’t really believe it (we might say a scientist can’t be a scientist until an experiment has him mocked by science).

‘On account of its all-pervasiveness, ideology appears as its own opposite, as non-ideology, as the core of our humanity underneath all the ideological labels.’⁰⁵ In other words, when we are completely under some Master, we do not experience ourselves as Mastered (it is everyone else who needs to be set free). As humans, we are prone and vulnerable to irony (a theme of O.G. Rose), and the likelihood we end up ironic without going “through the death of God” is very high (“practically inevitable”). As an example, Žižek notes that ‘[i]t is is easy to make fun of Fukuyama’s notion of the “End of History,” but most people today are Fukuyamean, accepting liberal-democratic capitalism as the finally found formula of the best possible society, such that all one can do is to try to make it more just, more tolerant, and so on.’⁰⁶ Now, this doesn’t mean Fukuyama is necessarily wrong, but it is to say that its easy to be a critic of what we are still actually part of, which ultimately means our critique might make us more ideological, precisely because we don’t think we are ideological at all.

⁰¹Žižek, Slavoj. Christian Atheism. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024: 41.

⁰²Žižek, Slavoj. Christian Atheism. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024: 45.

⁰³Žižek, Slavoj. Christian Atheism. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024: 64.

⁰⁴Žižek, Slavoj. Christian Atheism. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024: 75.

⁰⁵Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2009: 39.

⁰⁶Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2009: 88.

¹⁴⁴Butler, Rex. Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory. New York, NY: Continuum, 2005: 121.

¹⁴⁵Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 70.

¹⁴⁶Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 70.

¹⁴⁷Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 71.

¹⁴⁸Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 73.

¹⁴⁹Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 98.

¹⁵⁰Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 165.

¹⁵¹Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 97.

¹⁵²Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 166.

¹⁵³Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 59.

¹⁵⁴Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 8.

¹⁵⁵Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 8.

¹⁵⁶Žižek provides a wonderful explanation of different kinds of Reals speaking with Daly:

‘In the case of the Real, then we have the real Real, the symbolic Real and the imaginary Real […] The real Real is the shattering experience of the negation (the meteors, the monsters and maelstroms of traumas), The symbolic Real, by contrast, refers to the anonymous codes and/or structures (vanishing points, space curvature […]) that are meaningless in themselves and simply function as the basic abstract ‘texture’ onto which (or out of which) reality is constructed […] / Finally we have the imaginary Real in which against that is an emphasis on an invisible-immanent twist that gives structure and specificity to the imaginary realm.’⁰¹

⁰¹Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 9.

¹⁵⁷To speak very generally, Regarding the relation of “maps” and “territory,” we might say there are four metaphysical and ontological options:

1. Just Territory (Simple)
2. Maps and No Access to Territory (Popular Kantianism)
3. Map/Territory (Heglian)
4. Map and Accessible Territory (Scientism)

I don’t mean to declare these are the only options, but this outline might better help us grasp the oddity of 3, which is a world in which maps are not territories, and yet territories consist of map-making and hence “the conditions of the possibilities for maps” must be considered in their essence.

¹⁵⁸Žižek, Slavoj. Christian Atheism. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024: 53.

¹⁵⁹Žižek, Slavoj. Christian Atheism. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024: 23–24.

¹⁶⁰Žižek, Slavoj. Christian Atheism. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024: 27.

¹⁶¹Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying With the Negative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994: 11.

¹⁶²Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying With the Negative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994: 13.

¹⁶³Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying With the Negative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994: 15.

¹⁶⁴Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying With the Negative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994: 20.

¹⁶⁵Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 81.

¹⁶⁶Žižek, Slavoj. Freedom: A Disease Without Cure. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023: 99.

¹⁶⁷Žižek, Slavoj. Freedom: A Disease Without Cure. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023: 107.

¹⁶⁸But in this situation, we are “subjects,” which means we can subject ourselves and/or be formative of the situation: we are free to act and see ourselves determined or co-(n)structive (capable of parallax). To play on the words, we can be “obstacles” to the situation determining us (“object” to it), or we can let ourselves be “subjected” by it (“subjects” of it) (Žižek writes that ‘[t]he difference between subject and object can […] be expressed as the difference between the two corresponding verbs, to subject (submit) oneself and to object (protest, oppose, create an obstacle)’).⁰¹

⁰¹Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006: 17.

¹⁶⁹Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006: 4.

¹⁷⁰Žižek speaks of “the parallax view,” and here we might ask how that construct relates to the notion of “situation?” Žižek writes on ‘an insurmountable parallax gap, the confrontation of two closely linked perspective between which no neutral common ground is possible’; further, he wages that ‘the parallax gap provides the key which enables us to discern [the] subversive core [of dialectics].’⁰¹ A “parallax view” is possible in situation, but not “a neutral ground,” and so we must learn to think parallax if we are to “think together” and with “otherness” (A/B) at all. As Žižek writes:

‘[P]arallax is: the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change of the point from which we observe it. The philosophical twist to be added is that the observed difference is not simply ‘subjective’ […] It is rather that, as Hegel would have put it, subject and object are inherently ‘meditated,’ so that an ‘epistemological’ shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an ‘ontological’ shift in the object itself.’⁰²

A world of situation/monad vs thinghood is a world of parallax, or else we’ll go insane, stuck in a problematic Symbolic (A/A) and so problematic hermeneutic.

⁰¹Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006: 4.

⁰²Žižek, Slavoj. Christian Atheism. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024: 127.

¹⁷¹Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006: 17.

¹⁷²Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006: 20.

¹⁷³Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006: 27.

¹⁷⁴Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006: 29.

¹⁷⁵Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006: 37.

¹⁷⁶“The Absolute Choice” ‘is nothing but [a] process of freeing-itself-from,’ like Spirit for Hegel, which suggests it has no substance beyond its “negation” of A/A into A/B.⁰¹ The choice does not “add” or “entail” something; it is a pure parallax, which is to say a pure observational shift, that nevertheless, in its lack of substance, changes everything (through negation/sublation); we might say ‘the bracketing itself produces its object.’⁰²

⁰¹Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006: 46.

⁰²Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006: 56.

¹⁷⁷Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006: 106.

¹⁷⁸Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006: 211.

¹⁷⁹Žižek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf. Cambridge, Mass. The MIT Press, 2003: 60.

¹⁸⁰Ideology is necessarily “(in)consistent,” and hence “points beyond itself” (to that which may or may not be thus). Hence, to “step into” an ideology is to step into that which “points to” a justification that is outside of that ideology, and in order to determine if an inconsistency is a logically contradictory versus an essential one, we would have to compare that inconsistency with the “standard of justification” that supposedly legitimizes it (which is outside the ideology). For example, if we were to determine if the fact that “there is evil in the world” is contradictory or justifiable with the premise “a Good God Exists” (as claimed by the ideology of Christianity), we would have to consider this fact in light of God’s Person, which to actually determine, we would have to interact with God and see (in line with the claims of the Christian ideology) if God is Good and concerned with Free Will (or ascribe to a book that we believe Reveals God — but why?). But since God is Infinite, a finite being cannot interact with Him “as Infinite”; hence, perspectives on God cannot be utterly justified or unjustified, regardless their validity. Hence, there’s seemingly nothing we can do: the person who ascribes to the ideology gets to decide if the inconsistency is contradictory or essential, and by virtue of the fact that person ascents to the ideology, it is highly probably the person will interpret the inconsistency as essential, and hence not a contradiction (only an “apparent” contradiction).

To offer another example: if I were to seek corresponding justification for the belief, “humans have innate dignity,” I would have to “step out from” the ideology assenting to the idea that “homo sapiens are (dignified) human(s)” into a version of the world in which ideas didn’t exist — a world in which I only perceived — and see if homo sapiens still have dignity and if they still fall under the category of “human.” If not, how could I say homo sapiens have “innate (human) dignity,” versus dignity be something given to homo sapiens by others (via thought), and hence be more “contingent”? Well, how can I be sure thought “gives” dignity versus “realize” dignity that is (somehow) present? If I am blind, the cup in front of me doesn’t disappear or not exist; likewise, just because people couldn’t think wouldn’t necessarily mean “dignity” vanished. But unlike the cup, isn’t dignity a nonphysical reality, and hence something that does in fact vanish when there is no thought? Who are we to say dignity isn’t physical (sound waves are invisible and yet “there”)? Perhaps dignity is “the human” (qualitative)? How do we know? By what standard? By the standard of the fact that I can’t empirically experience dignity. Are we sure? Perhaps the human is dignity and we are simply mislabeling it? How can we be sure that it isn’t the case, seeing as a world that accepted the premise “the human is dignity” could be a world that we observed functioned well, if not better, than our current world?

And so on. As long as “the map” stays consistent, the variables within it can shift in any manner necessary to uphold the ideology, and the ideology will stand. But perhaps the variables could be forced to shift (if the ideologue so chooses to change) in such a manner that there is no way the “consistency” could be maintained? Perhaps, and that “shift” would be an example in which a “contradiction” was realized in the system — but remember, an ideology that is truly an ideology is a system that’s consistency cannot be broken. Alright, but isn’t that convenient? To suggest an ideology that is destructible isn’t an ideology? To a degree, admittedly, but that distinction is still important and will be elaborated on when we discuss history, notion, ideology, and the Pynchon Risk elsewhere in O.G. Rose.

¹⁸¹Thomas Pynchon. Edited by Harold Bloom. Edgemont, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986: 1.

¹⁸²Thomas Pynchon. Edited by Harold Bloom. Edgemont, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986: 2.

¹⁸³Thomas Pynchon. Edited by Harold Bloom. Edgemont, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986: 3.

¹⁸⁴Kermode, Frank. “The Use of Codes in The Cry of Lot 49.” Thomas Pynchon. Edited by Harold Bloom. Edgemont, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986: 11.

¹⁸⁵Kermode, Frank. “The Use of Codes in The Cry of Lot 49.” Thomas Pynchon. Edited by Harold Bloom. Edgemont, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986: 11.

¹⁸⁶Kermode, Frank. “The Use of Codes in The Cry of Lot 49.” Thomas Pynchon. Edited by Harold Bloom. Edgemont, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986: 11.

¹⁸⁷Hayakawa, S. I. Language in Thought and Action. Orlando, Fla. Harcourt, Inc., 1990: 16.

¹⁸⁸Hayakawa, S. I. Language in Thought and Action. Orlando, Fla. Harcourt, Inc., 1990: 98.

¹⁸⁹Kermode, Frank. “The Use of Codes in The Cry of Lot 49.” Thomas Pynchon. Edited by Harold Bloom. Edgemont, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986: 12.

¹⁹⁰Kermode, Frank. “The Use of Codes in The Cry of Lot 49.” Thomas Pynchon. Edited by Harold Bloom. Edgemont, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986: 12.

¹⁹¹Hayakawa, S. I. Language in Thought and Action. Orlando, Fla. Harcourt, Inc., 1990: 17.

¹⁹²Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fort Worth, TX. Institute of General Semantics, 2010: 24.

¹⁹³Kermode, Frank. “The Use of Codes in The Cry of Lot 49.” Thomas Pynchon. Edited by Harold Bloom. Edgemont, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986: 12.

¹⁹⁴Kermode, Frank. “The Use of Codes in The Cry of Lot 49.” Thomas Pynchon. Edited by Harold Bloom. Edgemont, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986: 12.

¹⁹⁵Kermode, Frank. “The Use of Codes in The Cry of Lot 49.” Thomas Pynchon. Edited by Harold Bloom. Edgemont, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986: 12.

¹⁹⁶Kermode, Frank. “The Use of Codes in The Cry of Lot 49.” Thomas Pynchon. Edited by Harold Bloom. Edgemont, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986: 13.

¹⁹⁷Kermode, Frank. “The Use of Codes in The Cry of Lot 49.” Thomas Pynchon. Edited by Harold Bloom. Edgemont, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986: 13.

¹⁹⁸Kermode, Frank. “The Use of Codes in The Cry of Lot 49.” Thomas Pynchon. Edited by Harold Bloom. Edgemont, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986: 14.

²⁰⁰Kermode, Frank. “The Use of Codes in The Cry of Lot 49.” Thomas Pynchon. Edited by Harold Bloom. Edgemont, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986: 14.

²⁰¹Mendelson, Edward. “Pynchon’s Gravity.” Thomas Pynchon. Edited by Harold Bloom. Edgemont, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986: 15.

²⁰²Mendelson, Edward. “Pynchon’s Gravity.” Thomas Pynchon. Edited by Harold Bloom. Edgemont, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986: 15.

²⁰³endelson, Edward. “Pynchon’s Gravity.” Thomas Pynchon. Edited by Harold Bloom. Edgemont, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986: 17.

²⁰⁴Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fort Worth, TX. Institute of General Semantics, 2010: 19.

²⁰⁵Hayakawa, S. I. Language in Thought and Action. Orlando, Fla. Harcourt, Inc., 1990: 17.

²⁰⁶‘As words are not the objects which they represent, structure, and structure alone, becomes the only link which connects our verbal processes with the empirical data’, and so the same can be said about ideologies and maps.⁰¹ Furthermore, we decide if the map we accept and the territory “align” enough to not throw out the map, and seeing as the map is “groundless,” we always seem to have the ability to assure this is the case, motivated by the human drive to preserve ideology. ‘The only usefulness of a map or a language depends on the similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map-languages,’ and yet it is precisely because ideology is so useful that we are prone to conflate it with actuality — that we are prone to ‘read unconsciously in the world the structure of the [ideology] we use’ (though that isn’t to say an ideology couldn’t be actual).⁰² ⁰³ Furthermore, its usefulness is what makes ideology indestructible, which for apocalyptic ideologies, is a major problem, especially considering that even trying to destroy them requires taking “The Pynchon Risk.”

‘If [ideology] is consistent, it is incomplete,’ and in being (in)complete, true ideology is indestructible, for we decide what “flaw” is its essential incompleteness (versus contradicting incompleteness), and hence acceptable.⁰⁴ Considering that the main drive of human action is perhaps ideology preservation, this means that all humans will naturally define “flaws” in their worldviews as essential, and will not naturally think otherwise until forced to think otherwise, but if only so forced by logic, the person can of course ignore the logic. When it comes to most ideologies that don’t threaten the human race, this is inconsequential, but when it comes to apocalyptic and deadly ideologies, this is a major problem, and because it is a problem, we have reason to “step into” an ideology in hopes of finding a contradicting inconsistency that must be recognized as “a non-essential inconsistency” (which is no easy task and perhaps impossible depending on the ideology “stepped into”).

Considering this, to undermine an ideology, I have to take “The Pynchon Risk,” which seems highly illogical, considering that an ideology that is absurd but consistent can’t be effaced (though it can be pointed out that it isn’t falsifiable, which though might not persuade “ideology preserving”-humans), and that justification for an ideology lies “outside the system” — and yet we have to go into a system to see what is outside of it (paradoxically).

Even if we take “The Pynchon Risk” and succeed, there’s no guarantee anyone will listen, and “a map” can simply be reformatted or redefined in such a way that makes all our work irrelevant — systems can “grow back like weeds,” per se, since their “roots” — their justification(s) and premise(s) — can never be entirely uprooted (assuming the premises don’t logically contradict, a determination in of itself that can sometimes be subjective). And all that’s assuming “The Pynchon Risk” even works out: the risk could cost us our life-time for no reason. And even if we do actually defeat an ideology and “rip a map apart” as a notion, per se, another ideology can emerge at any moment, requiring someone else to take “The Pynchon Risk,” which there is perhaps no rational reason to do, since one can live happily in the system he or she is currently living in, and seeing as ideologies can emerge anytime, rendering the tragic and painful work ultimately meaningless. What then?

⁰¹Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fort Worth, TX. Institute of General Semantics, 2010: 24.

⁰²Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fort Worth, TX. Institute of General Semantics, 2010: 25–26.

⁰³Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fort Worth, TX. Institute of General Semantics, 2010: 25.

⁰⁴Gödel’s Proof by Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman. New York University Press, 2001: 104.

²⁰⁷Bloom, Harold. How to Read and Why. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2001: 249–250.

²⁰⁸Bloom, Harold. Kabbalah and Criticism. New York, NY: Th Seabury Press, Inc., 1975: 33.

²⁰⁹Bloom, Harold. Kabbalah and Criticism. New York, NY: Th Seabury Press, Inc., 1975: 104.

²¹⁰Friedman, Alan J. and Manfred Puetz. “Gravity’s Rainbow: Science as Metaphor.” Thomas Pynchon. Edited by Harold Bloom. Edgemont, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986: 23.

²¹¹Hite, Molly. Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. New York, NY: Ohio State University Press, 1983: 32.

²¹²Hite, Molly. Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. New York, NY: Ohio State University Press, 1983: 33.

²¹³Hite, Molly. Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. New York, NY: Ohio State University Press, 1983: 33.

²¹⁴Hite, Molly. Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. New York, NY: Ohio State University Press, 1983: 33.

²¹⁵Hayakawa, S. I. Language in Thought and Action. Orlando, Fla. Harcourt, Inc., 1990: 4.

²¹⁶Hayakawa, S. I. Language in Thought and Action. Orlando, Fla. Harcourt, Inc., 1990: 11.

²¹⁷Hite, Molly. Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. New York, NY: Ohio State University Press, 1983: 37.

²¹⁸Hayakawa, S. I. Language in Thought and Action. Orlando, Fla. Harcourt, Inc., 1990: 11.

²¹⁹Hayakawa, S. I. Language in Thought and Action. Orlando, Fla. Harcourt, Inc., 1990: 16.

²²⁰Hayakawa, S. I. Language in Thought and Action. Orlando, Fla. Harcourt, Inc., 1990: 19.

²²¹‘The mind does, indeed, have to choose its path right from the start; an original decision is demanded of it, and it is a decision that will dictate its entire fate’ — or so Maritain writes⁰¹ Is every moment a beginning…?

⁰¹Maritain, Jacques. The Degrees of Knowledge. Translated by Gerald B. Phelan. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995: 114.

²²²Hayakawa, S. I. Language in Thought and Action. Orlando, Fla. Harcourt, Inc., 1990: 6.

²²³Hayakawa, S. I. Language in Thought and Action. Orlando, Fla. Harcourt, Inc., 1990: 14.

²²⁴Hayakawa, S. I. Language in Thought and Action. Orlando, Fla. Harcourt, Inc., 1990: 18.

²²⁵Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fort Worth, TX. Institute of General Semantics, 2010: 36.

²²⁶Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fort Worth, TX. Institute of General Semantics, 2010: 36.

²²⁷Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fort Worth, TX. Institute of General Semantics, 2010: 25.

²²⁸Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fifth Edition (Second Printing). Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2000: 448.

²²⁹Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fifth Edition (Second Printing). Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2000: 467.

²³⁰Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fifth Edition (Second Printing). Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2000: 460.

²³¹Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fifth Edition (Second Printing). Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2000: 473.

²³²Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fifth Edition (Second Printing). Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2000: 518.

²³³Also of note, Korzybski writes that ‘[i]n infantile nations we witness […] a great deal of exhibitionism,’ for we can avoid evaluation if we are “vivid” enough in our expressions (“vividness” can feel to “do our evaluations for us,” per se)⁰¹

⁰¹Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fifth Edition (Second Printing). Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2000: 522.

²³⁴Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fifth Edition (Second Printing). Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2000: 540.

²³⁵Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fifth Edition (Second Printing). Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2000: 540.

²³⁶Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fifth Edition (Second Printing). Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2000: 543.

²³⁷Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fifth Edition (Second Printing). Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2000: 550.

²³⁸Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fifth Edition (Second Printing). Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2000: 559.

²³⁹McGowan, Todd. Emancipation After Hegel. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021: 9.

²⁴⁰Aligning with Korzybski and an emphasis on “situation,” Todd McGowan shows how in Hegel ‘[i]dentity depends on what negates it’ (sounding like Korzybski) and that ‘the principle of noncontradiction actually refutes itself.’⁰¹ ‘An identity free of negation would be completely immobile, isolated, and finally unable to be identified. It is through the negation that contradicts identity that identity becomes what it is.’⁰² If this is so, ‘there is no identity or position that can function as a stable thesis’ (no “identification”); there is only an “unfolding tension” that in being an ontological description means we need a new logic by extension (‘the inescapability of contradiction reveals that logic and ontology cannot be kept apart’).⁰³ ⁰⁴ “An unfolding tension” is a “situation,” where “being-for-other” is itself.

McGown also notes that if contradiction is possible in thought, there must be something in reality that makes contradiction possible; otherwise, we couldn’t encounter it. “What are ‘the conditions of possibility’ necessary so that we might encounter and experience contradiction?” — this is a Kantian question we are left with if we take Hegel seriously, which brings together epistemology and ontology. ‘The antinomies mark a point at which thought reaches outside itself and reveals a fundamental truth about the nature of being’: the fact I cannot identify a thing without misidentifying suggests reality itself is “situational,” not just thought (even if we cannot escape thought, to learn about thought can be to learn about reality, for they are isomorphic, as I understand Houlgate to suggest).⁰⁵ Furthermore, if humans are part of nature, and humans experience contradiction, then there is reason to think contradiction is part of nature, especially if we gain better “sanity” through honoring and acknowledging it (if A/A makes us “insane,” why be so sure contradiction isn’t “natural?”).

For Hegel, ‘it is not thought that contradicts itself, but being itself is contradictory,’ which thought realizes.⁰⁶ The territory entails the map which the territory isn’t (A/B), and ‘[a]t the point of the absolute, we recognize that there is nothing outside contradiction.’⁰⁷ ‘If contradiction is necessary in thought, then being must be structured in a way that gives rise to it,’ or on what basis could we claim otherwise (especially, again, if A/A makes us “insane”)?⁰⁸ ‘Kant’s error, for Hegel, does not lie in confining his inquiry to knowledge but in failing to see that the contradictions our knowing encounters when it tries to think the absolute must have their basis in the nature of being.’⁰⁹ Contradiction is not where reality is lost but where it is found: it is “The Gödel Point” where “the map isn’t the territory” that we can find…

⁰¹McGowan, Todd. Emancipation After Hegel. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021: 7.

⁰²McGowan, Todd. Emancipation After Hegel. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021: 9.

⁰³McGowan, Todd. Emancipation After Hegel. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021: 12.

⁰⁴McGowan, Todd. Emancipation After Hegel. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021: 17.

⁰⁵McGowan, Todd. Emancipation After Hegel. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021: 95.

⁰⁶McGowan, Todd. Emancipation After Hegel. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021: 85.

⁰⁷McGowan, Todd. Emancipation After Hegel. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021: 55.

⁰⁸McGowan, Todd. Emancipation After Hegel. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021: 97.

⁰⁹McGowan, Todd. Emancipation After Hegel. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021: 94.

²⁴¹McGowan, Todd. Emancipation After Hegel. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021: 18.

²⁴²McGowan, Todd. Emancipation After Hegel. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021: 21.

²⁴³McGowan, Todd. Emancipation After Hegel. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021: 24.

²⁴⁴McGowan, Todd. Emancipation After Hegel. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021: 27.

²⁴⁵McGowan, Todd. Emancipation After Hegel. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021: 27.

²⁴⁶McGowan, Todd. Emancipation After Hegel. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021: 35.

²⁴⁷A thing is always in a “situation” with otherness, and so a “thing” is always “connected”; hence, it is fair to say “everything is connected,” which means “identification is (mis)identification,” for what things “pass over” into are connected to them even in “not being them,” for otherwise they couldn’t have been “passed over into.”

²⁴⁸Žižek, Slavoj. Christian Atheism. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024: 96.

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