Sociology has long sought to find out how acting in a situation and observing that situation may differ and nevertheless belong to a single kind of social operation. George Spencer-Brown's "Laws of Form" (1969) provides one way to conceive of such an operation. The present book is the first to make sociological use of his mathematical calculus of form, which has been extensively applied to cybernetics, systems theory, cognitive science, and mathematics.
Spencer-Brown's theory states that any action or communication is always an operation that makes a distinction. Not only does this operation take place, but it can be observed as indicating what it is interested in, and as leaving unmarked what it is not. Distinctions thereby entail a logic of inclusion and exclusion that is subject to social debate and conflict. In social situations there is no action that does not at the same time execute, maintain, or cross a distinction.
Thus the observer is part of the situation he or she observes. The essays in this volume use this idea to describe different social "forms" as consisting of action observed by further action. A "form" here is understood to be the two sides of a distinction and its dividing line, taken together. All social action, therefore, consists of three values: marked side, unmarked side, and an operation separating the two. If one watches the third value, one ends up observing the observer drawing the distinction--an observer who, of course, may be oneself.
In this collection, more general essays study the consequences of such an understanding of form for our conceptions of literature, paradox, sign, play, and language. Other essays focus on the observations necessary to construct such forms as money, the university, the state, a career, or sickness. All the essays share an interest in problems ensuing from the fact that though one can observe the form of a distinction and become aware of its arbitrary, contingent, and discriminatory nature, one nevertheless, when trying to act or communicate, must choose a distinction. The essays show how social situations deftly veil the arbitrariness of the distinctions that constitute their forms.

The rapid, recent, and international growth of interest in problems of translation has scarcely registered in literature departments in the United States. Here translation is still largely seen as a didactic exercise, and translation studies is regarded as groping toward rules about how to carry an utterance from one language into another. In Europe and Israel, however, university centers have been established to further the "science of translation" and the training of professional translators, resulting in an outpouring of practical and theoretical literature on the domain of translation. This volume has a dual purpose: to acquaint American readers and academic communities with some of the most important trends in European and Israeli translation studies, and to bring together this work with that of American scholars who have begun to participate in this field.
Four of the eleven essays in this volume are by participants in the Center for Literary Translation Studies at the University of Gottingen, which has conducted research into Anglo-German cultural and literary transfer over the last three centuries. These essays summarize the Gottingen approach, propose a typology of translated literature, discuss translations for the theater, and examine the relation between translation and literary history. Three other essays deal with aspects of the interaction between German and American culture: the role of translations from German literature in the formation of New England Transcendentalism, the entrance of German Idealism into the American philosophical tradition, and the problems of creating a newly translated American edition of Nietzsche's complete works.
Other essays discuss the effects of metaphor and poetic language on our understanding of language and the process of translation; the translations by the German poet Paul Celan of Russian, English, American, and French poets; the effects of translation studies on interpretation in the arts and the humanities; and the complex procedures that trace a translation of a poem to its multimedia stage adaptation.

The rapid, recent, and international growth of interest in problems of translation has scarcely registered in literature departments in the United States. Here translation is still largely seen as a didactic exercise, and translation studies is regarded as groping toward rules about how to carry an utterance from one language into another. In Europe and Israel, however, university centers have been established to further the "science of translation" and the training of professional translators, resulting in an outpouring of practical and theoretical literature on the domain of translation. This volume has a dual purpose: to acquaint American readers and academic communities with some of the most important trends in European and Israeli translation studies, and to bring together this work with that of American scholars who have begun to participate in this field.
Four of the eleven essays in this volume are by participants in the Center for Literary Translation Studies at the University of Gottingen, which has conducted research into Anglo-German cultural and literary transfer over the last three centuries. These essays summarize the Gottingen approach, propose a typology of translated literature, discuss translations for the theater, and examine the relation between translation and literary history. Three other essays deal with aspects of the interaction between German and American culture: the role of translations from German literature in the formation of New England Transcendentalism, the entrance of German Idealism into the American philosophical tradition, and the problems of creating a newly translated American edition of Nietzsche's complete works.
Other essays discuss the effects of metaphor and poetic language on our understanding of language and the process of translation; the translations by the German poet Paul Celan of Russian, English, American, and French poets; the effects of translation studies on interpretation in the arts and the humanities; and the complex procedures that trace a translation of a poem to its multimedia stage adaptation.

Sociology has long sought to find out how acting in a situation and observing that situation may differ and nevertheless belong to a single kind of social operation. George Spencer-Brown's "Laws of Form" (1969) provides one way to conceive of such an operation. The present book is the first to make sociological use of his mathematical calculus of form, which has been extensively applied to cybernetics, systems theory, cognitive science, and mathematics.
Spencer-Brown's theory states that any action or communication is always an operation that makes a distinction. Not only does this operation take place, but it can be observed as indicating what it is interested in, and as leaving unmarked what it is not. Distinctions thereby entail a logic of inclusion and exclusion that is subject to social debate and conflict. In social situations there is no action that does not at the same time execute, maintain, or cross a distinction.
Thus the observer is part of the situation he or she observes. The essays in this volume use this idea to describe different social "forms" as consisting of action observed by further action. A "form" here is understood to be the two sides of a distinction and its dividing line, taken together. All social action, therefore, consists of three values: marked side, unmarked side, and an operation separating the two. If one watches the third value, one ends up observing the observer drawing the distinction--an observer who, of course, may be oneself.
In this collection, more general essays study the consequences of such an understanding of form for our conceptions of literature, paradox, sign, play, and language. Other essays focus on the observations necessary to construct such forms as money, the university, the state, a career, or sickness. All the essays share an interest in problems ensuing from the fact that though one can observe the form of a distinction and become aware of its arbitrary, contingent, and discriminatory nature, one nevertheless, when trying to act or communicate, must choose a distinction. The essays show how social situations deftly veil the arbitrariness of the distinctions that constitute their forms.