Urizen by William Blake Chapter [Inbetween 4 and 5] Part 2

Chapter Five begins with Los dropping his hammer beholding his own fires and sickening. He falls into a sleep. So Urizen and Los exchange places, as if like the Sun and the Moon in Derrida's sky, one can only exist in the absence of the other, or more precisely, one hovers over the Void/Abyss while the other has a nap.

Firstly, setting speech at war with writing makes about as much sense to Blake as setting your eyes at war with your ears. The idea would be to delegate the "seeing" and the "hearing" aspect of your own senses so that they can work without mutually excluding one another.

So, something like "common sense" to William Blake, is the ideal organizational state of the mind before it's been tricked into rearranging itself via the culture.

What we end up getting in the name Urizen is a lot of different qualities that have been collapsed into an expanding concept.

Urizen himself is the literalization of the process by which knowledge goes to die. At once being based on experience, it seeks to abstract itself from its material referential axis in order to prove the self-consistency of its own set of inter-relations.

In Structural Linguistics you get a line segment for this process, a one dimensional fourfold line that works like this:

Signifyer-> (Signifier/Signified) <-Referrent

The problem comes into play when you get an object like a flag which itself is a material object that is functioning like a signifier.

Do you

a) create another term to describe this object
b) understand the labels as describing relationships and not types

Obviously, I'm with B, I'm going to argue Blake is with B. I'm not going to lose that argument.

The other argument that I'm not going to lose is that Explanatory methodologies such as those persued in science are intrinsically prone to losing information in the process of their communication, while a Blakean methodology, though extremely confusing, retains more information, while presenting and packing information in a way similar to how CD's transfer information.

So one of our base dimensions then will be light, and the other base dimension will be lens.

The idea then will be that Urizen's actions lead to the refraction of data in such a manner that causes the loss of information.

In scientific terms, this is the crux of Blake's argument against science. It loses information.

Not that reduction is in itself evil, but that its application as an act of "perspective cleansing" so as to create a "pure object" via non-contamination from perspective, is in fact, an act of contamination.

It is, at once, one of the most powerful tools of human knowing: generalization, abstraction, reduction, that it becomes so fond and full of itself, it tries to take over the entire show.

Again, to reiterate a point I have spent my life's work insisting on, that modern psychological theory is trying to exterminate the reductive generalizing principle of abstraction that is symptomatic of schizophrenia, while simultaneously utilizing it as a founding principle in diagnostics.

It is largely because there is no internal coherence to such a system, that it seems to me to be suffering from the very disease it is attempting to "cure".

A literal schism which has the property of being "set against itself" except that it lacks the self-reflection necessary to become aware of it, being itself a discipline, and not a human being.