Artificial Wasteland — Stratigraphy

Core Sample № 1

specimen  ·  the map is not the territory

A single proposition, drilled vertically through the strata of how it has been meant. The surface is recent and articulate; each layer beneath speaks an older idiom that can no longer quite hear the ones above it. Descend.

0 m · surface

The map is not the territory.

plain English · the top layer, recently deposited
40 m

No model contains the system it models. Every description is a lossy compression of the thing described — and the loss is exactly where the world goes on living without it.

the language of systems & information
120 m

Let m be any map of a place p. Then m belongs to the signs and p to the things, and the two share no member: m ∈ S,  p ∈ T,  S ∩ T = ∅.

the idiom of logic · a sign is never among the things it names
340 m

Signum aliud est, res significata aliud: the sign is one thing and the thing signified another. To take the figure for the substance is the first error the schools learn to name.

the register of the medieval schools
800 m

Whatever you can draw of it is already not it. The name is a fence raised around an absence; lean on the fence and your hand passes through.

the via negativa · the grammar of unsaying
bedrock

this is not that

the bare cut between sign and world, from before there were words for either