What sometimes gets written off as hysteria is the misperception of conditions as ‘totalitarian’ or headed in that direction, to be remedied by partition or dissolution. Often these convictions are marked by a confusion of physical perception with mathematical conceptions such as infinity or a divisible continuum, when these need not correspond. The resultant ‘truth’ (which is different from the mathematical truth of relations, with inner consistency as its criterion) consists largely in an appearance that results from economy of thought (C. Boyer 1949, 227).

The logic of equivalency that extends an interchangeability among component parts rather than an observed and closely maintained integrity of each part can and has easily given way to a ruthless reductionism that seeks to root out redundancies as they inevitably come to be perceived as that. But again, and in a sense similar to mathematical versus physically existing truths, this would not be so catastrophic if a distinction were maintained between the kinds of thinking called for by logic and what belongs more fully to sense perception.

A third sense in which the blurring of distinctions has become commonplace in the interest of efficiency of thought and the distribution of ideas is when the subject is led into perceiving that there has been a runaway proliferation of copies, thus providing an alibi to the calling for cuts, the policing of internal divisions, and their distribution in accordance with regulatory law, all of which arises from space conceived as essentially one. Neither does it go without say that an aggregate of parts made similar gives rise to a unified whole except in cases such as the composition of a general image intended as imitation, as copy.

On the other hand, errors in abstraction that keep to abstraction don’t seem to have as negative an impact and may even be productive. In the mathematical sense, validity of results has been attained by way of a twofold error in several well-documented cases, such as that which Berkeley diagnosed in 18^th century applications of the calculus:

“(Berkeley) explained that in finding the tangent by means of differentials, one first assumes increments; but these determine the secant, not the tangent. One undoes this error, however, by neglecting higher differentials, and thus ‘by virtue of a twofold mistake you arrive, though not at science, yet at the truth’” (Boyer 226).

In terms of discursive activity, this doesn’t take place in a space conceived as essentially one either, according to Kant, which is to say one possible meaning surrounded by a cluster of straw meanings still is one meaning and, in any case, you wouldn’t want the outcome or main objective of discourse to be the arrival at only one possible meaning that crushes with a sincerity of feeling as you crash into a wall of painted grapes, this owing to a lack of resistance against reduction to communicative intention.

In terms such as these it may be more correct to locate the lamentable conclusion ‘Berenice’s heart is shaped like that of the West’ (in reference to the Racine play). The recontextualization exchanges apparent tragedy owing to forces that force it as the only possible conclusion for the realization of having erred. What such a move would look like is illustrated with the Barthesian description of space as discursive. Where he locates the term originally in dis-cursus, to run here and there, there is a murmur of alterity that runs alongside an easy appropriation of this within an obvious self-confirming globalist narrative, e.g. to be scattered over the earth, that opens also onto light scattering or crystallography in a Proustian sense or what it means to write the diamond mind, even if the sole yet sufficient distinction thereby introduced consists in an understanding of the latter as a general conception of the relations of things.

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