Another quick post, from Guelph, Ontario: I've glanced over the past few posts and the comments my friends Andrew, James, and Oona were kind enough to offer, and I'm thinking tonight about the plurality of selves. In many academic contexts, following on the focus on "identity politics", people have learned to be suspicious of the "we", asking always and ever who in fact is included in this "we"? Who are "we the people"? Do we really mean "white people", "landed gentlemen", or some other restrictive if transparent category that includes (or excludes) by effacing all those who don't fit the norm? And yet this suspicion of the word "we" - especially when combined with the encouragement, in pop psychology as well as in pop intellectual work, to use "I statements" - actually implies that the word "I" is not a similarly problematic term. Indeed, what exactly do we mean when we say "I"? It seems to me that this question is an important one, especially if taken in light of most if not all of the axioms I've advanced so far: Two Descriptions Are Better Than One, It Takes Two to Cogito, Relation is the Smallest Unit, Map is Not Territory. Take this last one, an expression coined by the important early twentieth century philosopher Alfred Korzybski. I haven't discussed it in detail yet, but the implication is fairly clear, and even clearer when expressed in its fuller form: "Map is not territory, and the name is not the thing named." In other words, a representation or description - no matter how detailed, no matter how exhaustive - is not the thing it represents, and must not be confused with it. This seems simple at first, but more often than not we find ourselves acting as if the word "I" - for example - actually were a complete representation of this knot of organisms, ideas, impulses, thoughts, etc., that is, as if it actually were equivalent to the thing itself. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead has called this the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness", while Marxist theorists would call it the error of "reification", that is, the "thingifying" of vastly networked and complexly evolving processes like "Capitalism". While acting as if an ineffable process could be summed up in one simple word is vital, I think, to the usefulness of language, it also betrays the true power language can have. In other words, if the map were the territory then why would we bother making maps at all? Why would we even need them? Long story short - and so I can slope off to bed where I desperately want to be - there is nothing transparent about the word "I", any more than there is anything transparent about the word "we", or any other word for that matter. Learning to think - and truly taking on thinking about thinking, as I'm doing here in Axiomatix - begins in a skepticism about how words get taken for "self-evident", for "axiomatic", when really they offer only one description, and two or more would be better! I? We? Or, indeed, to return again to the Rimbaud: It. It Thinks...

See you again on May Day, and in a flurry of primes thereafter: 1, 3, 7...