Theory, Society, and George Spencer Brown

2021 will see the 60th anniversary of the completion of the typescript “Design
with the NOR” by polymath George Spencer Brown. Based on today’s experience
of mountains of unpublished scientific “working papers” and journal articles
descending into a digital abyss shortly after publication, only to be found by
an accidental web search, it is easy to dismiss the yet unpublished typescript as just another stepping stone or draft of an unfinished idea of “the form” that came to be known as the basic principle in Laws of Form. Such a dismissal would be an untimely reaction to a text that sits at the very beginning of – in many ways – revolutionary times. “Design with the NOR” is a first grasp of a proto-philosophy of distinction and selection based on the emerging integrated digital circuits,
marking the revolutionary shift in the design of computing and networked
devices which pervade early twenty-first-century society.
This chapter introduces the NOR typescript in its social and historical settings,
and concludes with a suggestion for how the NOR circuits enable a new
visualization and formal qualification of the theoretical structure inherent in the systems theory by Niklas Luhmann.