Tracking Abstracting

I had undoubtedly read Houston A. Baker Jr.'s Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing before I wrote this

Abstraction is good. Clear communication about abstraction better. One is of the life of the mind. The other, of the life of the mind in a body.

from the opening lines of "Axioms" the first chapter of Sense: orientations, meanings, apparatus

My copy of Baker's book still has a slip inserted to mark the spot (p. 73) where this appears: "Abstraction demands not concretization or reification but relation and relationship." And it is ever tempting to abstract that sentence from its context which is a discussion of space and architecture.

But at this remove... I refrain.

I am still pondering "relation and relationship" — how they relate to each other.

And so for day 833
25.03.2009