The ‘response’ that follows is not just ‘reaching’, it is ‘reaching-guided-by-seeing’. He says, ‘the arc is virtually a circuit, a continual reconstitution’ (1896: 360), and ‘It is the circuit within which fall distinctions of stimulus and response as functional phases of its own mediation or completion’ (1896: 370). This description provides a vocabulary – phase, co-ordination and continual reconstitution – with which to address the partial continuities that can be established in relation to the properties of different forms of circulation.12 Importantly for the understanding of problem space being developed here, while the dictionary declares that ‘across’ can be used as a preposition to refer to relations between fixed points (from one side of a river to another for example), it can also mean to pass through, throughout or intersect at an angle, a crossing, to find or meet, and it is these meanings of the word that are enrolled here. A paradigmatic example of how ‘across’ may be accomplished is the method of chiasmus (the dictionary definition of which is a rhetorical or literary figure in which words, grammatical constructions, or concepts are repeated in reverse order, as if across each other) or double proportional comparison as described by Roy Wagner (2019). This is a practice in which the comparisons do not result in an equivalence but a reversed doubling of sameness that results in difference. For Wagner, metaphor is the primary technique of double proportional comparison, ‘the automatic reflex of [the] reinversion [of language] out of itself’: ‘“a metaphor is two words, each dividing the significance of the other between them”’ (2019: xvi). An apt example is Appadurai’s ‘the circulation of forms’ and ‘forms of circulation’.
– Part II – The Epistemic Infrastructure
