Form is the process by which a subject holds a distinction over time. This formulation raises the question of how a distinction continues to be accessible to the subject and enacted in relations among subjects as circumstances and understanding change.
Definition under development. The meaning of holding, the connection between individual acts, and the limits of applicability of the definition still need to be elaborated. The open questions indicate the current subject of investigation. The possibility of revising any definition is a general principle of the archive.
A circle is a form.
A state is a form.
A contract is a form.
A scientific theory is a form.
Memory and the Repetition of Distinction
Distinction as an event occurs within a specific relation of the subject to what is happening. A subsequent return to what was discovered is a new act. In it, the subject can recognize the previous boundary, even though the event of distinction now takes place under different circumstances.
Memory makes it possible to investigate the connection between these acts. A subject can return to a discovered boundary even if its explanation has not been found or preserved. The subject can confirm the earlier distinction, refine it, or discover that they are now drawing a different boundary. A sign, habit, or rule may facilitate this return.
A dynamic understanding of form does not require continuously and consciously drawing the distinction. Between returns to the boundary, the subject may not think about it. The word “trace” denotes a connection with an earlier act, but does not in itself explain what is preserved in the interval. A distinction may be preserved through the preservation of the possibility of drawing it again; these descriptions have not yet been established as mutually exclusive.
What makes it possible to recognize an earlier distinction, and in what sense form exists between acts, is investigated in “Memory and the Holding of Form”.
The question of how the initial act occurs in the subject’s relation to reality, and how held distinctions enter into new relations, is examined in “Relation as a Condition of Distinction”.
Holding in Relations Among Participants
A distinction may be held through the actions of several subjects. In the example of the requirement to salute a senior officer, the boundary “senior / junior” is enacted again whenever they meet. The participants recognize the established distinction and reproduce the order in which it determines their actions.
Here memory allows the order to be remembered, while action enacts it in each subsequent encounter. Holding takes place within the reproducible relation among participants. Practical confirmation of the boundary is possible even without internal agreement about its significance.
The requirement to confirm the established distinction over and over again constitutes one mode of loyalty to form. The expression “form requires confirmation” designates the rule and the demands that subjects impose on one another.
The holding of a primary boundary by an individual subject and the reproduction of an established boundary by participants share a common structure: the distinction is renewed in subsequent relations and actions. At the same time, the initial drawing of a boundary and the obligatory confirmation of a boundary already presented remain different moments. This case is examined in “Loyalty to Form”.
Holding and Definition
In order to return to a distinction, the subject must recognize again at least the boundary through which it was discovered. This does not require knowing what the distinguished thing is or assigning it to an established category. One may clearly remember which contradiction was discovered without knowing why it arose. The definiteness of a held boundary and the definition of the nature of what has been distinguished are different things.
Here, interpretation means explaining what was discovered, determining its nature, or placing it in a known category. If interpretation is understood more broadly as any establishment of relations, the very discovery of a contradiction already presupposes it. The thesis that a distinction can be held without explanation does not mean the absence of every relation in which the boundary becomes definite.
A written record may preserve a trace of a question, while a concept may suggest a way of explaining it. Neither the record nor the concept in itself replaces a return to the discovered distinction. A distinction may be preserved in memory without an interpretation; the opposite rupture is also possible, when an explanation is repeated but the original boundary can no longer be recovered. Form remains open to investigation if the subject can revise the interpretation while continuing to hold what initially prompted the distinction.
This case is investigated separately in “Open Form: Holding a Distinction Without Classification”.
What Requires Examination
The research thesis leaves the following questions open:
- What makes it possible to establish that a new act is directed toward an earlier distinction, even though its explanation has changed?
- What is preserved between acts, and how is the preservation of a distinction connected with the possibility of drawing it again?
- Is the possibility of returning sufficient to speak of a process of holding, and does every act of holding constitute a form?
- In what sense are the holding of a boundary by an individual subject and its reproduction in relations among participants the same operation carried out in different ways?
- How does the existence of external records participate in the holding of form by an individual subject and by several participants?
The examples listed, a circle, state, contract, and theory, provide different cases against which to test the thesis. Mentioning memory does not itself explain the mode of existence of each of them.
Properties of Form
Form is always limited by the distinction that has been drawn and therefore is never universal in the sense of encompassing everything without remainder. This limitation concerns the scope of form, what is encompassed by the distinction, rather than its prevalence among subjects: one and the same form may be private while one subject holds it and become shared when others accept the same distinction; the distinction itself does not change in the process.
The continuation of form can be investigated by comparing the subject’s returns to the boundary. However, what connects those returns must be established separately. The coincidence of a new formulation with the old one does not in itself prove that the distinction remained unchanged between acts.
Forms may differ in their prevalence among subjects, in how long they are held, and in the complexity of their structure:
- private / shared;
- temporary / stable;
- minimal / complex.
None of these properties in itself says anything about the capacity of a form to change its own foundation.
At the same time, a fixed form need not contain a mechanism for its own change.
For example, applying an existing law can reproduce the established legal order, but the law itself does not contain an explanation of how the demand to change the foundations of that order arose.
The Foundation of Distinction
The definiteness of a distinction does not arise from the form itself: the subject draws the distinction on some foundation of meaning. Distinction does not merely discover a boundary between two already given domains; it establishes what, in the relevant context, is to count as “this” and what is to count as “not this.”
In formal systems, such a foundation is expressed through definitions, rules, and axioms. In other forms, it may not be separately formulated, but it must be definite enough for the distinction to be held.
Closed Reproduction of Form
A form may contain rules for transforming other forms and distinctions already fixed.
Here reproduction is called closed when the permissible operations, criteria of distinction, and modes of transition have already been fixed in existing forms and are not reconsidered during the operation.
Within such reproduction, the transformation of one form produces another form.
- A rule is applied to already defined objects.
- An algorithm transforms a given representation.
- A formula makes it possible to obtain another formula or value within an accepted system of distinctions.
- An institution reproduces the procedures, roles, and rules by which it is itself defined.
Closed formal reproduction makes it possible to transform what has already been distinguished, but does not in itself contain an explanation of the emergence of a new foundation for distinction.
Such formal reproduction continues a structure specified by existing forms. That is precisely why institutions often multiply regulations faster than meanings.
A New Combination and a New Distinction
The novelty of a result must not be confused with the novelty of a distinction.
Within closed formal reproduction, a state may arise that has never existed before. The rules of chess may generate a game nobody has previously played. But the space of permissible moves and the criterion of what counts as a chess move have already been specified.
Such a state remains new within an already given space of distinctions if it is constructed entirely from established distinctions and according to established transition rules.
Novelty of combination is not the same as novelty of distinction itself.
A new distinction arises when a subject draws a boundary on a foundation that cannot be derived from already fixed criteria.
The Creative Power of Form and Its Limit
Closed formal reproduction has combinatorial power, but it does not create a new foundation for distinction.
It can:
- combine;
- rearrange;
- reproduce;
- transform;
- fix;
- transmit.
The outcome of such a transformation may be new as a configuration, but not new as a foundation for distinction.
Combinatorics may look like creativity, but in the strict sense it is work within an already specified space of distinctions. If a distinction arises that cannot be derived from criteria fixed within a given formal reproduction, that reproduction itself is not a sufficient foundation for its emergence.
Rigid and Open Formulations
The phrase “form can produce only form” is correctly considered true only of closed formal reproduction, and only with the clarification that already fixed distinctions are transformed within it.
A transformation is called open when the already fixed criteria of distinction may themselves become the subject of a new distinction.
With open transformation, the picture changes:
- closed formal reproduction transforms distinctions already fixed;
- a subject can draw a distinction on a foundation of meaning not derivable from already fixed criteria;
- the new distinction may be fixed in a new form.
If an earlier distinction ceases to hold meaning for subjects, the possibility of revising it arises. For example, a monarchical constitution may fix a distinction in which the monarch is the source of supreme power. A constitution based on popular sovereignty fixes a different foundation for political power and becomes a new form.
