[lbo-talk] language query

[Jerry Monaco]

On 2/6/07, Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > Jerry: Well yes, as Bateson was fond of saying, "The Map is not the
> > Territory", borrowing from Alfred Korzybski, I believe.  Sometimes the
> > map is not even a good guide to the territory.
>
> A "map" is not the right metaphor for "el Sur."  It's a banner, held
> up by the leaders of Venezuela and like-minded leaders elsewhere.  At
> present, they are a minority, but an insurgent, not declining, group.
> They will never win over all countries that could theoretically belong
> in "el Sur," but the more they can line up on their terms, the better.
> --
> Yoshie

 Alfred Korzybski's aphorism "the map is not the territory", may be
right or wrong, as a semantic premise, but it was not meant to refer
specifically to maps.  It was meant to remind us of certain kind of
consistent mistakes by referring  to a quasi-Kantian premise that
humans are often confusing "representations" with what is being
represented, and the "thing-itself" is not the representation, etc.

I don't completely agree with Bateson, but some of what he says should
be taken into account:

"We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the
territory? Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a
measuring stick and made representations which were then put on paper.
What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the
retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push
the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite
series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. […] Always, the
process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world
is only maps of maps, ad infinitum." (From "Substance and Difference",
in "Steps to an Ecology of Mind.")

In the context of "El Sur", which I was not thinking about when I was
replying to Carrol, it is important to remind ourselves that what ever
we name "El Sur", or "third world" countries, or "developing
countries" that the name itself usually comes out of a set of
assumptions, implicit or explicit, that we should unpack, in order not
to take the assumptions for granted (or even to accept the
assumptions) and in order not to put all of the countries in "one
basket" for every type of analysis or argument.  To state the obvious,
the interests of Brazil are not the same as the interests of India,
and certainly not the same as the interests of Cuba or Vietnam, etc.

Names _do_ matter politically, though we cannot always unpack the
assumptions, nor can we always, understand the ideological
implications, that provide the foundation for the "name."

At least this is the best way for me to state this problem.

Jerry