LOGO and the Transcendental Signfier

It turns out that the LOGO language my son used to program little cartoon critters is significant in terms of linguistic reckoning. Back in ye olde '60's, scientists building an OS for robots ran into a problem as to how to measure geography. Most OS's deal with space in terms of X-Y or X_Y-Z axes, like standard algebra problems (at least the elementary ones back in ye olde '60's).

The problem, of course, is that the poor little robot, just like most biocritters, has to negotiate an external world without a screen edge. He (or she!) therefore can't find a place to put zero, or a place from where to extend the axes. Programmers resolved the problem by using a sort of I AM HERE NOW as zero: the robot calculates space in terms of steps and turns from a point of origin.

Of course, all this corresponds to humans in a world with nary a transcendental signfier. Having left mine at home, in the womb, or whatever, I have to be egocentric about it, taking myself and my immediate positions and thoughts as center. (This does indeed resemble Lacan's idea of the not-so-phallic phallus as transcendental signifier, but appropriating the rather arbitrary freudian structure in this way seems unnecessarily arbitrary and recondite; one needs to be nearly as clever as Lacan to follow the concept. The logo robot, however, doesn't seem to have the problem.)

Now, when the OS is rebooted, it starts with a new point of zero. One must assume that periodically humans must restart from a new zero. Apparently we do so whenever we blink. Walter Murch's In the Blink of an Eye is a great piece of work that deals with this, coming from a completely different angle. Murch recounts a story wherein John Huston points out that he blinks when he wants to glance across a room. Apparently it's easier cognitively to just reset zero than to try to maintain the calculations. Murch -- and this reveals so much of human music crossing between the various sensorial and cognitive processes -- begins to look for when the actors blink to decide when to cut the scene.

One may see algebraic descriptions of axial dimension as necessarily human, since humans have invented the system (reputedly). But general functioning involves a different problem. In measuring movement by axes, the axes themselves do not move. In meta-analysis. one shifts the entire axial zero and moves it, over and over.

As much as possible, one makes the adjustments to new ideas and new literature by a kind of substitution or substitution-with-(amendment/qualification-modification). Then, at some point, one must blink and move the entire axis. Now, there must be small shifts and large shifts, and small and large shifts in major and minor levels of important and not-so-important reasonings. But this has something to do with what Kuhn called a new paradigm.