Until Marxism, capitalist political economy has also pretended for a long time to pass as the general grammar of all economy, but linguistics still has not found its Marx and Engels who would reset it on its feet. –Guattari, L’Inconscient Machinique, p.30 fn. 14.

The sign is a position of desire; but the first sings are the territorial signs that plant their flags in bodies. And if one wants to call this inscription in naked flesh ‘writing,’ then it must be said that speech in fact presupposes writing, and that it is this cruel system of inscribed signs that renders man capable of language, and gives him a memory of the spoken word. –Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 145.

All methods for the transcendentalization of language, all methods for endowing language with universals…have fallen into the worst kind of abstraction, in the sense that they validate a level that is both too abstract and not abstract enough. Regimes of signs are not based on language, and language alone does not constitute an abstract machine, whether structural or generative. The opposite is the case. It is language that is based on regimes of signs, and regimes of signs on abstract machines, diagrammatic functions, and machinic assemblages that go beyond any system of semiology, linguistics, or logic. There is no universal propositional logic, nor is there grammaticality in itself, any more than there is signifier for itself. “Behind” statements and semioticizations there are only machines, assemblages, and movements of deterritorialization that cut across the stratification of the various systems and elude both the coordinates of language and of existence. That is why pragmatics is not a complement to logic, syntax, or semantics; on the contrary, it is the fundamental element upon which all the rest depend.—Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 148.

Linguistic Machinics: Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Pragmatics

In their Capitalism and Schizophrenia volumes, Deleuze and Guattari outline a historically materialist theory of language and society which is essentially based upon their theories of assemblages, multiplicity, abstract machines, and deterritorialization along with many other concepts. The difficulty in fully appreciating the second volume, A Thousand Plateaus, is mainly due to an ignorance of Guattari’s solo work L’Inconscient machinique which was published a year before ATP and constitutes a sort of companion volume or workbook for the former. It is now time to fully explore this work while keeping A Thousand Plateaus closely in mind in order to fully understand what Guattari’s critiques and use of linguistic theories really amounts to. In other words, the main focus of this essay (beyond an explication of Guattari’s untranslated work) is to specify how language in its stabilization in power formations comes to dominate our everyday lives and what are the means of transformation that pragmatics proposes in order to conceive and actualize new possibilities of subjectification. To perform such a (broad) task, we will focus here mainly on the concepts that Guattari proposes and how they work together to specify the problem in working toward new solutions that the project of a schizoanalytic pragmatics can offer.

Abstract Machines and Contingent Assemblages

The conceptual framework must be stressed here because it seems that in L’Inconscient machinique Guattari particularly wants to safeguard and legitimate his squatter’s rights on philosophical territory. This is not to say that Guattari’s earlier work lacked philosophical content; rather, it is the presence of a certain self-consciousness that betrays Guattari’s eager intent upon truly being recognized as a philosopher in his own rights. His proposal of a machinic unconscious no doubt brings him immediately within the conceptual camp of psychoanalysis, but his insistence on and novel understanding of an abstract machinics forces him in the same movement to qualify his concept of the abstract machine against Platonic ideas and Aristotelian forms (8). Arguing against a time tied down to an abstract, presupposed universality, Guattari proposes to show how abstract machines are produced by their own production through their developments of existential consistencies in conjunction with the various assemblages that allow the actualization of their machinic expressions/propositions. “Abstract machines do not cling to a single, universal time but to a plane of consistency, trans-spatial and trans-temporal, which affects through them a relative coefficient of existence. Consequently, their ‘appearance’ in reality no longer claims to be given with only one source: it is negotiated starting from quanta of potentiality.[1]” Thus, the relative existence of abstract machines depends both on propositional discursivity as well as energetic discursivity in order to effectuate a consistency.

The abstract machine thus conceptually brings it into the domain of the actual and the virtual along with an emphasis on contingency and historical singularity[2]. This emphasis will be crucial for the success of a pragmatics that entails the analysis of the stability of power formations and the means of breaking out of a consistency which has become too viscous in its stratifications which legitimate themselves as universal (hence Guattari’s drive to create a materialist (Marx-Engels) critique of linguistics with his emphasis on pragmatics[3]). But, at the same time, it is difficult to merely speak of the actual and the virtual without stressing that abstract machines make no distinction between the plane of consistency and the plane of content. They are both turned toward the strata, effectuating deteritorializations and reterritorializaitons while also being turned toward the plane of consistency which effectuates destratifications which conjugate the deterritorializations, but only on condition of the quanta of potentiality which will catalyze the processes by releasing diagrammatic signs-particles which will guarantee the passage between these existential registers[4].

In other words, because abstract machines are responsible for their own convergence of degrees of consistency which allows them a relative coefficient of existence, they both preexist the stratifications and constitute transformational materials or optional subjects which may allow stratifications to consist or not. “Abstract machines mark, all in all, the fact that deterritorialization, in all its forms, ‘precedes’ the existence of the strata and the territories.[5]” They precede them because the strata and territories demand a separation of content and expression, they require that contents have been formed and expressions have substance, while abstract machines work through unformed matters and formless functions. Non-semiologically formed materials or semiological encodings will be able to pretend to universality, but, consequently, are always under the threat of decomposition because of the transversality of their quanta of potentiality, that is, due to their constantly recreated nature which is more or less sustainable given certain consistencies due to the convergence of heterogeneous realities. Their degree of transversality[6] will indicate the success with which they are able to traverse various realities and destratify them for new possibilities. Since abstract machines are opposed to abstract structures[7] which concern reproducing themselves and their homeostatic conditions, deterritorialization will be understood as the unground for assemblages, that is, their historically singular and contingent conditions which ultimately undermine any preestablished coordinates of existence. Ultimately though, Guattari’s understanding of the disequilibrium of the abstract machine allows it at the same time to be a dynamic machine whose contingency is precisely the aspect of its heterogeneous relations that guarantee its consistency:

Universality will no longer have as an obligated reference the discourse of a subject, incarnating itself in a word, a revealed text, a divine or scientific law…While conferring on the points of singularity a particular power of crossing stratified fields, signs-particles (carriers of quanta of potentiality) will only equip them for so many universal capacities. Indeed, the assemblages that incarnate the singularity- abstract machine conjunctions remain susceptible to being demolished in order to open up other potentialities and contingencies. Universalist thought always receives a reverential fear with respect to an established order—religious or natural. Conversely, that of assemblages and molecular machinisms should continue setting practices of every nature in relation from the perspective of the changes and transformations of the existing orders and the reduction of their power (14-15).

We will see later the more functionalist side of abstract machines when they work directly within concrete assemblages (from which they are inseparable, along with the deterritorializing effects they produce within the assemblages in relation to the territories). While turning there, let us try to understand more directly Guattari’s construction of the different pragmatic fields that animate the contingent assemblages and sign regimes beyond the politico-philosophical abuses of claims to universality.[8]

Distinguishing Pragmatic Fields and the Threat of Capitalist Abstraction

Schizoanalytic pragmatics reexamines the relation between assemblages of enunciation and pragmatic fields under the angle of unconscious phenomena in the social field. The principal behind this is a radical tranversalist meta-modelization embodied by the concept of the rhizome or lattice which opposes the binarist model of the tree. Rhizomes are fundamental to understanding Guattari’s cartographies of the unconscious because they make it impossible for linguistic and semiological components to claim hierarchical positions over other modes of encoding. Not only is every unspecified point able to connect to another, but also rhizomes bring into play both modes of signs and regulations of non-signs while remaining collapsible and suitable for constant modification. Rhizomatic mappings of the unconscious make a distinction between semiology and semiotics, the former giving primacy to the laws of language and the latter proposing to study sign-systems independent of linguistics. This division corresponds with the division between pragmatic fields, that between interpretative components and non-interpretative components.

The interpretative components can be distinguished between the analogical (iconic semiology) and the signifying (linguistic semiologies). Each of these components belong to specific assemblages of enunciation, and so we can better define Guattari’s understanding of the interpretative side of the pragmatic[9] as the differentiation among particular modes of subjectification due to the presence of certain components which allow the development of assemblages that correspond with different regimes of signs rendering them subservient to historically singular power formations[10]. Analogical components or icons, for example, relate to territorialized or reterritorialized assemblages of enunciation while individual assemblages of enunciation and capitalistic subjectivity corresponds to signifying transformations (L’Inconscient machinique, 17). On the other hand, there are two sides to the non-interpretative components, one symbolic, the other diagrammatic. The first is concerned with an “intensive” semiotics (at the level of perception, gesture, mimicry, etc. while the second involves an a-signifying semiotics “which proceed[s] by a deterritorialization relating jointly to the formalism of content and expression while setting into play mutant abstract machines (systems of signs-particles and quanta of potentialities working simultaneously in the register of material and semiotic realities)” (18). The distinction between the interpretative and non-interpretative will become clearer later on when we discuss the transformations among these fields and show how they entail different coordinates of efficiency—in other words, Guattari makes a generalization between the two fields due to the different types of redundancies that function in these fields. Redundancies of resonance correspond to semiological components of subjectification and consciousness formation, while machinic redundancies or redundancies of interaction correspond to a-signifying diagrammatic components. (For example, in a crystallization of signifying powers, the fields of resonance are submitted to a semiological subjection while the fields of interaction are cybernetically and semiotically enslaved. In other words, libidinal economies and political economies merge in the field of linguistic overcoding through the conjunction of three elements: imperatives of the dominant grammaticality of expression, “ideological” assemblages at the level of content (subjection of redundancies of resonance) and diagrammatic assemblages of enslavement to decoded capitalistic flows at the level of the referent (36).

However, we will not truly be able to understand redundancies until we have dealt with the level of existential coordinates which specify three different types of consistency. There is the molar consistency of the strata with its significations and dominant realities (complete objects, subjects, individuals), but there is also a molecular consistency that expresses the real mechanical incarnation of an assemblage, although on this level it must be stressed that assemblages can neither be distinguished from the fields in which they consist nor the components which allow them to do so. Finally, and above all crucial for the diagrammatic importance of the distinctions made above, the abstract consistency determines the “theoretical” degree of the possibility of the preceding consistencies.

Molar consistencies develop effects of weak resonance (signifying[11] effect, e.g., pure formal translation) and weak interaction (surplus value of stratified codes) because their redundancies are highly stratified and crystallized (46). “What characterizes the molar politics of stratification is the constitution of a world of stratified, identified or hierarchized objects and subjects, singularities and abstract machines there being grasped from systems of coordinates which authorize only the minimum degree of freedom necessary to the survival of the assemblages.[12]” The molecular field on the other hand is not as stratified and allows for strong effects of resonance and interaction to take place. This consistency is the one that will be critical for a micro-political engagement with the social field. “This type of inter-assemblage, inter-component and inter-field consistency is a fundamental micro-political stake for schizo-analysis, such as the greater or lesser malleability of the assemblages to be bent to the various powers of subjection and enslavement, – concerning, in other words, all that pertains to social power struggles and the molecular metabolisms of the machinic unconscious” (47). In other words, there is more freedom for the assemblages here which can empower them to evade subjection and enslavement or can render them powerless in the face of such overcoding. Finally, there is an abstract consistency that never exhausts itself at the level of actualization and always keeps quanta of possible in reserve. These last two consistencies form the field for transformational schizoanalysis.[13] But, beyond these consistencies and the abstract machines that populate and produce the crossings of their singularities, capitalist[14] abstraction is at work proposing to neutralize the potentialities of assemblages and render the entropy of sign-systems too viscous to effectuate truly transversal means of deterritorialization.

To fully engage in the extended complexity of capitalist abstraction it would be necessary to fully account for all the transformations within consciential components and the different creations of black hole effects that correspond with them (this will be one of the positive directions for this paper to continue to plot). To conclude, however, it would first be necessary to sketch the power relations inherent to this capitalist power takeover. To do so, let me quote extensively from L’Inconscient machinique and then draw out the consequences of Guattari’s pragmatic field transformations:

Abstraction is not a “frozen” abstract machine but an active system of neutralization and recuperation of machinic indices and lines of flight. Thus it has always remained bound to key institutions of power. Religious abstractions have long served the grounds for personological, sexual, ethnic or national identity and modulated the signification of the feeling of a membership to a territoriality of reference. All these functions have been captured in relay by a system much more fragmented, much more diversified and at the same time more molecular and more susceptive to devices of power, utility services and mass-media machines, so that today all instances of semiotic production and all systems of value weave a gigantic net composed of points of signifiance from which it is impossible to escape without a radical setting in question of the ensemble of assemblages of enunciation. Religious overcodings were less malleable, more “passive” than the instruments of this capitalistic network. Each system of redundancy is now constantly altered and re-calculated so that the tolerable thresholds of deterritorialization for the established order are precisely determined. Any coding will have to pass and permanently re-pass by the ordering mega-machine of molecular equipment. Any intensity will be forced to give up connections which would be established apart from the “coherence” of abstractions and dominant coordinates. Thus the perspectives open to lines of flight and machinic assemblages will be perfectly delimited: the former will have to be retained on this side of an abstract horizon, and the latter constantly return to the universal contents for which they will become the apparent foundations. If abstract machines are regularly pinned to the sky of universal abstractions, then assemblages of desire are put to the service of a world order, which is an all too terrestrial fact (52-53).

On the one hand, we have the analogical field (interpretance) which refer to territorial or reterritorialized assemblages of enunciation; then there is the signifying field which refers to an individuated assemblage of enunciation; there is the symbolic and a-subjective field which proceeds through desubjectified assemblages of enunciation[15]; finally, there is the “a-subjective diagrammatic transformations whose a-signifying contents deterritorialize not only the assemblages of enunciation but also the machines of expression and semantic formalisms while establishing at the same time a direct connection with intrinsic modes of encoding in the various stratifications of the referent (that which implies a “reference” common to another nature at the most deterritorialized level: that of the machinic plane of consistency)” (58).

Since all assemblages of enunciation are somewhat mixed, we can map the transformations across these fields. For example, moving from the intensive symbolic to the analogical can be understood if we consider that mystic examples, for example, can be reterritorialized on a fascistic assemblage (fascism being understood as the territorial interpretation of redundancies due to a particular membership to a blood or volk—similar to Badiou’s full void or statist operator of the event which claims that only the people directly involved with an event belong). On the other hand, the diagrammatic can be converted into the signifying mode with the recrossing of syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions. This forces an a-subjective machinic assemblage to become (re)subjectivized across a field of signifiance (Guattari gives the example of a bad writer entering L’Acadmie française, thus rendering a certain style as a machine of expression which produces definite contours and traits, etc.—one thinks of Hawthorne or Faulkner for American literature with their unbearably long, drawn out and impossible-to-diagram sentences). This type of transformation corresponds to the ways in which a-signifying fields are transformed into signifying fields. There is, however, an opposite direction to this activity. The signifying field can easily turn into intensive symbolic or the diagrammatic. The first is effectuated through a homophonous and polyphonous proliferation which fragments the denotation of morphemes of the referent; the other proceeds through unsettling the semiologically formed substances in order to extract signs-particles from a-signifying chains of expression.

An extended account of Guattari’s schizoanalysis is called for, but clearly this task can only be undertaken once we have begun to ruminate on the vast conceptual apparatuses which are at work in such theoretical enterprises. The next installment of this paper would direct its studies towards a more thorough engagement with systems of redundancies and the transformations of subjectivity which can be effectuated through their modulations.

Are we escaping or returning, gathering together or tearing apart?

We find ourselves suddenly in need of a post-conceptual way of thinking.

Perhaps this problem of art and machines has always already begun to make itself felt.

We are discovering that its appearance at this critical juncture signifies a bifurcation point, a new kind of possibility.

Imperceptibly we have moved beyond imagination into the abstract, from dreams to decoding.

The rapid counter-movement has placed us beyond abstraction itself, directly transubstantiating the history of expression.

The problem we face is expressing expression; is this problem ontological, and not historical?

From the extraction of linear models to the production of production itself; and we of course recognize this historical sense is not in itself novel.

However, the forms (or rather, anti-forms) of “immanent” expressivity which the material-historical perspective is adept at exposing are indeed fluid, unusual, rareified — non-alienated, non-delimited spaces of thought.

Expressivity is parasitic, a noise which causes other noises to flee, it clears and occupies space: art suddenly discovers smooth spaces — non-intrusive, non-exclusive spaces of differences: a fluid becoming rather than a repetition, variation rather than serialization.

The opening onto intensive space is the line of the fold of being; multiplicity naturally inheres to folded spaces.

What is thought becoming?

Is the being of art to be found in history?

Or is the essence of expression already encoded within intensity, within light, within becoming itself?

Is art a flourish, a technique, a telling — or a transcendence?

The following is the first three sections of Alain Badiou’s first theoretical book Le Concept de modèle: introduction à une épistémologie matérialiste des mathématiques. Paris: Maspero, 1968. p. 7-17 and is an original translation by Taylor Adkins [10/17/07].

Editor’s Advertisement:

The beginning of this text continues a talk given on April 29, 1968 by Alain Badiou within the framework of the “Course of philosophy for scientists” given to the National university.

This continuation should have been the subject of a second exposition on May 13, 1968. This day, it is known, the popular masses mobilized against the middle-class Gaullist dictatorship affirming in all the country their determination, and enticing the process that led to a confrontation of classes on a great scale, upsetting the political economic situation, and causing effects whose continuation will not be made to wait.

It is often imagined that in this storm, the intervention on the philosophical front had to pass to a second plan.

This very day, the somewhat “theoretical” accents of this text return to a surpassed economic situation. The struggle, also ideological, requires a totally different style of labor and a just and lucid political combativeness. It is no longer a question of aiming at a target without reaching it.

One will see in this text not only a document and a benchmark but also fortunately an interrupted patience.

But it can be another thing: keeping in mind of course the sense of the proportions as to the historical significance of the crisis, and more still as to quality the actors, one will remember that Lenin, shortly after the failure of 1905, granted for a moment an exceptional importance to the philosophical struggle against the empirio-criticistes.

These are the apparent failures of practical politics, the erroneous diagnoses of “reflux,” the discouragement of the petty bourgeois, always nourishing a race of liquidators, idealists and revisionists, who, failing to instantaneously change the world, even their “life,” comfort themselves while undertaking simply “to change” Marxism-Leninism.

We do not maintain any illusion: the area of this work (doctrines of science) is not only very limited, and very indirect, but it can also be dangerous, if one mistakes the sense of its limitation. We believe it is nevertheless useful to recall which theoretical shift, in this field, in our opinion and from our point of view, can continue or consolidate the revival of “Dialectic Materialism.”

Theory, December 1968

1. Some preliminaries concerning ideology

We suppose here the known[1] description of an ideological particular formation, distributing the discourse of science according to a presupposed difference: the difference of empirical reality and theoretical form.

It is pointed out that this difference orders an image of science, defined, approximately, as a formal representation of its given object. In this configuration, the element that holds dominance can be considered the effective presence of the object. In this case, one confirms the designer as empiricism; but predominance can also return to the anteriority of formal devices, with a mathematical code in which the present object is represented. One then indicates the configuration as a formalism.

It is quite clear that empiricism and formalism have here nothing but the function to be the terms of the couple that they form. What constitutes bourgeois epistemology is neither empiricism, nor formalism, but the whole of the notions by which one indicates, initially their difference, and afterwards their correlation.

This is exactly how logical positivism, the dominant epistemology in the Anglo-Saxon countries for more than twenty years, poses the problem of the unity of science.

In a canonical article of 1938 titled “The Logical Foundations of the Unity of Science,” Rudolf Carnap proceeds in the following way:

a) He explicitly poses the constitutive difference of which we are a part: “The first distinction that we have to make,” he writes, “is the distinction between formal science and empirical science.”

b) He tries to find rules of reduction which can make it possible to convert the terms of an empirical science into those of another. He thus shows that the terms of biology are convertible into terms of physics: physics is a “base of reduction” sufficient for biology. The use of the operators of reduction makes it possible for Carnap to affirm the unity of the language of science, in the sense that a “physicalist” language is the basis of a universal reduction for the empirical sciences.

c) He poses the problem of the relationship between this single language and the artificial languages of the first group of sciences, formal sciences. All of Carnap’s semantic analysis culminates in this question, why the course is constricted through the distinction of the two types of science.

Concepts like: empirical sciences, reducibility, analyses of sense etc, and their refined development, articulate the stages of the position and the deposition of the initial difference.

This articulation is elaborate, special. It is not, in its discursive existence, immediately reducible to the generality of the ideology of the given. For the remainder, Carnap explicitly opposes it to other variants, for example to that of Quine the logician, who erases from the start the distinction between truth in fact and logical truth. For Quine indeed, to admit variables in a logical calculation is also to make necessary the constants which are values of these variables. However, these constants are fixed only in so far as they have to be able to indicate concrete objects. Reciprocally, what “exists” empirically is nothing other than what is assignable by a constant. Finally, as Quine writes, “being, means to be the value of a variable;” the empirical is a dimension of the formal, or the reverse.

Nevertheless, the oppositions between Carnap and Quine are interior to the same problems. Quine, indeed, defines the characteristic of his enterprise (the originality of its subject matter) by the justified negation of a difference that Carnap, for his part, undertakes to reduce. If Carnap’s discourse has as its essence this reduction, then it is important that in Quine only the justification of what is not reduces what is convenient to deny. The difference in question—of the “fact” and of logical forms—is the common engine of these two discourses.

Or more exactly: the instability of this difference, its perpetual rebirth represents the constraint of the lure of ideological discourses, and consequently deprived of any access to their own cause. These characteristics are in the principle of a discursive agitation which moves the primarily empty place ad infinitum when it should mark the impracticable Science of science.

It should here be understood that what separates two ideological discourses is not of comparable nature only with that which separates, for example, the science of ideology (epistemological cut), or a science of another. Because the rule of this separation is precisely also the ultimate form of the unity of the two discourses.

We will compare this with the musical variations of a theme: different, they are, but of a difference which brings them back one to the other as variations of the same topic. The (infinite) system of the differences between variations is the effect of the (unique) difference between the theme and what, not being it, is referred to it nevertheless: that is to say the field of the possible variations, variational space. Variation is only what comes in this space, with which variation merely justifies, because it is the place where, canceling itself in the unity, proves to be the differences. The ideological lure resides in that which one allots to the variations themselves as the causal capacity of the systematic unity of their differences, thus confusing the course of the system and the law of its production, since the latter is only the lack of the theme to which it should be attached.

It has been shown[2] that to speak about the science was an ideological symptom. To tell the truth, this also goes for speaking of ideology in the singular. Science and Ideology are plural. But their type of multiplicity is different: sciences form a discrete system of articulated differences; ideologies are a continuous combination of variations. We hold this assertion as a thesis. And let us propose the following definition:

Being given an ideological formation, characterized by a couple of terms, one calls the variant any system dependent on notions that make it possible to postpone the question of the unity of the terms of the couple, and, if required, to answer it.

I say to postpone, since the unity of the couple is always already the condition of the existence of the ideological discourse considered. Therefore, the question of that unity is a pure and simple repetition. Marx says–with little to add–: man poses only the problems that he can solve. Here it is necessary to say: one raises only the questions whose answer is the condition already given in the question itself. However, it is the rule of this repetition to be unperceived by its operator. And this invisibility precisely develops in the artifice of the variants. To take again the musical metaphor: these discourses are variations on a theme which is not given (which appears among the variations, neither at the front, nor elsewhere), so that each variation can only be for itself an image, taken as its presence, of the theme itself. Hence, any variant dogmatizes over its own precedence.

The proliferation of methodologies, in these pseudo-sciences that are the so-called “social sciences,” reflects an infinite variational principle, as its ignorance.

2. Theses that remain to be justified

We call notions the units of ideological discourse: concepts those of scientific discourse; categories, of philosophical discourse.

Philosophy being essentially an ideological recovery of science, a category indicates “non-existent” objects where the work of the concept and notional repetition combine. For example, the Platonic category of the “ideal number” indicates, in a “non-existent” arrangement, concepts of theoretical arithmetic and hierarchical notions of a politico-moral origin; the Kantian categories of time and space owe a debt to the notions relating to the human faculties of the concepts of Newtonian physics; the Sartrean category of History combines Marxist concepts and metaphysico-moral notions, like that of temporality, or freedom, etc.

Saying this, we formulate the following theses:

Thesis 1: There exist two epistemological instances of the word “model.” One is a descriptive notion of scientific activity; the other a concept of mathematical logic.

Thesis 2: When the second instance is used as a support for the first, there is an ideological recovery of science i.e. a philosophical category, the category of the model.

Thesis 3: The actual task of philosophy is to distinguish, in the uses of the category of the model, a subdued use, which is only a variant, and a positive use, invested in the theory of the history of the sciences.

3. On certain uses of models that are not in question here

The first part of Thesis 1 is illustrated perfectly in a well known methodological text of Lévi-Strauss, at the end of his book Structural Anthropology. The couple empiricism/formalism is redressed there in the form of the opposition between the neutrality of the observation of facts and the active production of a model. In other words, science is thought here with respect to a real object, into which one must inquire (ethnography), and of an artificial object intended to reproduce, to imitate in the law of its effects, the real object (ethnology).

As an artificial object (Levi-Strauss says precisely: “constructed”), the model is controllable. One can “envisage how the model will react in the event of the modification of one of its elements.” This forecast, in which the theoretical transparency of the model resides, is bound to the fact that it is completely assembled (Lévi-Strauss would say readily: arranged [bricolé]), so that opacity is ascribable to a reality that is absent. From this point of view, the model is not a practical transformation of reality, of its reality: it belongs to the register of pure invention, it is equipped with a formal “unreality.”

Thus characterized, models recover a broad class of objects. For the convenience of this exposition, I will divide this class into two groups: “abstract” models and material assembages.

The first group comprises what one can call the scriptural objects, i.e. the properly theoretical or mathematical models. The question in fact is of a bundle of hypotheses, presumed complete relative to the studied field, and of which coherence, then the deductive development, are guaranteed by a generally mathematical coding.

A ground of election for these models is Cosmology. In his book Cosmologies du xx siecle, Jacques Merleau-Ponty studies systematically, without exceeding the simple chronicle of science, the models of the universe: in fact, the Whole never being susceptible to an experimental inscription, cosmology is bound to the idealism of the model. These deductive constructions were born from a convergence: there were on the one hand the theoretical developments of Relativity, on the other hand astronomical experimentation, culminating in the discovery of the red shift in the spectrum of nebulae. The model is a body of statements thanks to what this historical convergence has integrated in a single discourse. Naturally, these integrations are varied, and none through force of law. This is because models are not intra-scientific constructions. As the child begins to overcome, in the deception of the mirror, the horror of its divided body, the models reflect according to the premature ideal of the text unifying the instantaneous disorder of the production of knowledge. The model relates to securing the meta-theory of a conjuncture.

In the second group, one finds material assemblages, whose destination is triple:

1) To present in space, in a synthetic way, the non-spatial processes: graphs, diagrams etc.

For example, the information given by the national census allows the construction of a graph animated by five headings: administrations, households, goods and services, companies, and financial market. Mobile flows between the headings manifest the structure of the exchanges, graph theory making it possible to refine the speed and the dimension of the flows.

This is the occasion to indicate that generally, bourgeois political economy is achieved in the construction of models of expansion in equilibrium: there still, the model avoids the capitalist “disorder” not by the knowledge of its cause (either the Marxist science of social formations and intelligence of the class struggle), but by the technical image integrated in the interests of the middle-class. “Expansion,” presented as a progressive standard, is actually the inescapable effect of the structures where it is generated, with the asymptotic fall of its rate, profit. “Equilibrium” is the rule of security against the exacerbation of contradictions and the political risk of a rise to the extremes of the class struggle. The models of expansion in equilibrium, under the cover of thinking their object (the economy of the alleged “industrial society”), objectify objectives of class. A nation’s economy expanding in equilibrium represents the motivation satisfied with the state’s interventions in the name of “the general interest.” Portable image, the model externally unifies an economic policy, legitimates it, and disguises its cause as its rule.

It is of primary importance to show how econometric control and the increasing use of the alleged “mathematical models” in economy are one of the clearest forms of revisionism, that is to say of dividing Marxism down the middle even in its best constituted part, and an inevitable alignment according to the objectives of the middle-class.

2) Always in the second group, other models tend to carry out formal structures, i.e. to transfer the scriptural materiality to another “region” from the experimental inscription. The traditional book of Cundy and Rollett, Mathematical Models, exposes for example how to construct indeed, out of cardboard or wood, the five convex regular polyhedrons; how to manufacture a machine to trace the lemniscate of Bernoulli; but, just as easily, how to present a logical connector in the shape of a simple electrical circuit.

3) Lastly, a final class of models aims at imitating behaviors: it is the vast domain of automata.

Of course, the only question for the epistemologist will be that of denying the existence of these devices, none of which are similar, as in cosmology, their “regulative” importance in the history of a science, or, as in cybernetics or in economy, their techno-political importance.

We will restrict ourselves by noting that the model, technical moment or ideal figure, takes place, as well as possible, in the environment of scientific practice. It will be noted that as a transient adjunct, it is intended only for its own dismantling, and that the scientific process, far from fixing it, deconstructs it. Bachelard[3] shows well how the “planetary” model of Bohr delivered a useful image of the atom only at a time when microphysics stressed the obliteration of the orbits, the jamming of their layout, and finally the renouncement of the image itself to the benefit of a statistical model. Who could not know renouncing the model means renouncing the knowledge attributed to it: any stop on the model makes an epistemological obstacle. This is to say, to what point the model remains within the margins of the production of knowledge. But finally, at this point, it is not challengeable. It is not even a necessary question.

[1] Louis Althusser, Cours de philosophie scientifiques.

[2] For a series of examples, see: Michel Serres and Alain Badiou, Modèle et Structure, the text of a scholarly television broadcast (mainly the fifth part). In Emissions de philosophie pour l’année scolaire 1967-8, publication of l’Institut Pedagogique National.

[3] Gaston Bachelard, L’activite de la physique rationaliste, chapter III, and especially part 7 of this chapter.

The following is the preface from Francois Laruelle’s Beyond the Power Principle pp. 1-9 and is an original translation by Taylor Adkins 10/09/07.

Stylistic Caution

A: But if everyone knew this most would be harmed by it. You yourself call these opinions dangerous for those exposed to danger, and yet you express them in public?

B: I write in such a way that neither the mob, nor the populi, nor the parties of any kind want to read me. Consequently these opinions of mine will never become public.

A: But how do you write, then?

B: Neither usefully nor pleasantly–to the trio I have named.

–Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow, 71.

Flowing, multiple and simulated… Power is the only recent philosophical object which is becoming interesting: fictionalized, televised, cinematized, moralized, philosophized, psychoanalyzed… it tolerates all the treatments and survives them. So many transversals have made it acquire plasticity and the capacity for a synthesis which grounds the great fetishes: it joins together in its definition all the meanings and contrary uses, it concentrates in itself contradictory political and ideological ambitions. Like the older terms of Existence or Structure, but with more facility because it expresses fewer theoretical requirements (on this point, it has not been demonstrated until now as being very difficult, and on this point it is not the recent philosophy which will contradict us), it has conquered the grand capitalist style: as a concept, its practical value is virtually null, it is rather its exchange value, to which it is reduced, that makes its only possible usage.

Such a mutation in the history of philosophical concepts has precise material conditions. In particular it answers to a change of market. Any concept, through being bought and sold, must be escorted of its liking or by force to a market which is never single, which is always made of a principal market and resale markets. But the characteristic of the concept of power—I speak only about its circulation, not of its real production—is that it could not acquire an existence, i.e. become a fundamental concept of philosophy itself, beyond philosophy, which had however spoken about it constantly without, however, ever clearly raising the question of its sense, or, as certain philosophers say, the question of its “mode of being.” Let us not speak about a “change of terrain” for such a mutation, since it is no longer internal to philosophy, but has only happened essentially out of it. This will grant the change on the following fact: that the value of the concept of power is initially political and social, before being theoretical.

This fact is repugnant. But only by the excesses to which it gives place as do all grand new things; in particular by the affinity that everyone can apprehend between the same nature of power and its capacity to become what it is: a value rather than a concept, undoubtedly one of the rare philosophical objects able to tolerate at this point, and to perhaps appeal to, the methods that the ancient philosophical manner gave the name—close your eyes—of marketing, and that the new philosophical fashion, with an instinct of admirable surety, knew to make it necessary even to the existence of this object.

But, if this fact is repugnant, it should have nothing definitively graining about it, even for the most killjoy of thinkers. Let us suppose that philosophy, the grand provider of foundations, grounds and bases, ceases for a moment the real trade for which it is costumed and which through pretense agrees to be displaced. It will return sarabanding through the small door, mingling its voice with all those who speak about power, accepting the formation of a single chorus with the journalists and the novelists. All its art and its trickery will be made to turn around a little differently and to place well the wrong note which will suddenly reveal to the singers themselves how much, in the unanimous chorus of the schools, the living rooms, the newspapers, the media, everyone consciously sings falsely, drawn into their partition, relying on the virtues of the exchange to make of all these misunderstandings a pre-established harmony or a continuous miracle, and intending themselves to preserve it “make as if…” without which the capitalist market of philosophical values (and not only philosophical) could not function.

In this universal contraband where everyone speaks about power in general in so many various senses, but without believing in it less in the world, the “philosopher,” who at least will not be regarded as a miracle, but as a recipient, occupying a polemical and strategic position, raises only one question: who speaks about power? Who speaks “power,” i.e. the last of the universal languages?

Too often they are disappointed or conquered spirits: maybe by philosophy and its abstraction (journalists or various “intellectuals” seized by the mission of having to state the sense of history; “I am philosopher: see my extent of thought, my horizons, my insinuations”); maybe through real politics or what they imagine as such (philosophers exhausted by their own abstraction, envious of journalism, obsessed with its average techniques and slightly, why not, of its capacity “to be diffused”; “I am journalist: see my sense of the concrete”). One imagines the pact that these two categories will conclude for a common revenge against “theory,” an alliance that all the half-paid debts of theory and of practice—I want to say the “intellectuals”—can contract and upon which they fixate as in an objective confusion, skillfully maintained, between the traditional philosophical mastery, that which is necessary to cut down in effect, and what a certain silliness, always too modest, denounces as “speculation.”

It may be that spite and the spirit of revenge are bad advisers to reach an object such as power. The thesis of this book is that one does not know what one speaks when one thinks power starting from a scale: the Large or the Small, or of their mixture, when one evokes it as the unlimited reason of our misfortunes, or as the infinitely small element of our constraint and our hopes. Political reflection generally oscillates between two extreme poles that one proposes to avoid: the “power-comedy”, i.e. seen from the side of those who lose it and take it again with the liking of the Prince, the People or the Surveys, the small power for unused ministers. But what makes us nourish this trace: doesn’t any “microphysical” or “molecular” model of power continue to reflect, raise, and give theoretical form to this prejudice of the conception and the politicizing practice, the pettiness, the infinitesimal character of power? Doesn’t it risk, in spite of it all, simply to reverse the scale of the traditional political objects which were either too generic (political philosophy “middle-class”), or too specific (Marxism)? Isn’t it forced sometimes to practice the contrary design, sometimes to oppose itself violently to it (a symptom that hardly misleads), to be made in both cases the accomplice of the other idea of power: the “power-tragedy”, i.e. seen from the side of those who believe to suffer from it (those who really suffer from it do not make of it a tragedy), who represent it and set it up in a universal Despot, as the eternal metamorphosis (if one can say) of Leviathan or Medusa-the Grand Power for philosopher deputies, paid-off advisers to the Marxist tyrant or advisers in place of the Freudian tyrant (they are sometimes the same ones)?

Everything here is to make understood that power returns neither in the category of the Large which controlled traditional political philosophy; nor in that of the Small, the new myth into which modern thought was thrown with a suspect precipitation and which is only the renewal, in other forms, of the same error of optics, which consists in wanting to subject power to an optics or a representation, i.e. to a prospect “from the bottom to the top.”

Power is a fluent matter, continuous, unlimited, i.e. also infinitely divisible. If it thwarts all the forms of representation and even the scales of size, it is because it is in affinity with an order which does not result from the mixture (dialectical or not) of Large and Small, but which explains the possibility of these mixtures. This order, it should well be named-here, will be called the “fractional” or the “machinic.” It has a certain characteristic to impose an unfolding, a lengthwise cleavage, a duplicity rather than a duality, between power (fractional also) and its essence, i.e. the internal condition of its production and its “deterioration”. Hence the division of power between its Principle and the Beyond of this principle. This is the Beyond that explains at the same time the need for the existence and the coercive character of all powers, and the need for their “decline.”

This book introduces thus with “political Materialism,” i.e. with the fundamental concepts of a discipline of power and bodies politic. It formulates in these problems the recent or traditional concepts of political struggle (Dissidence; Resistance; Class struggle; Masses, Classes, and Party). This is done only to withdraw them from their medium of origin and to think them from the point of the Beyond of power, therefore within a non-Marxist framework.

And as it starts with the question of the sense of power, it operates a turning (Kehre) towards that of the power of sense, i.e. the whole of technologies which the Occident has always understood without the name of “interpretation.” It thus presents the broad outlines of a re-evaluated “hermeneutics,” completely distinct from the old: politically minor or minority; materialist in its processes and its “operations;” and bearing on the modes of the political existence of the subject. This project is perhaps a challenge, if one knows what the old hermeneutics was. However, under this name of “minor,” one will not understand a new theoretical form of hermeneutics, but a certain power of interpretation, its techniques, its objects, its rules, its effects, which exert themselves on the whole surface of cultural and social experience, in the fortune telling of politics as well as the class struggle in psychoanalysis. As there is a power to punish or a power to work, there is a power to interpret of which description and criticism require means very distant from those of a Marxism insensitive to its grain, and which entangles, in a fabric of tightened mesh, the sense of power and the power of sense.

Being given this duplicity of power, there are only two possible methods, that which starts from power, and that which starts from its essence or “beyond.” The first is an interminable description of its plays, its strategies, and the historical forms of its techniques, with the manner of what it would be necessary to call an “archeology of power.” Toilsome, laborious, indispensable method. But in addition to this it deposits positive description into the positivist conception of power, and also deposits this movement towards its “microphysical” conception and finishes too often—less from the theoretical plane—by simply being opposed to the traditional and Marxist concept. Thus, what could seem as a deviation, is actually a double normalization of power: by the primacy from the “positive” point of view and “historicizing” fact over its criticism or its declines; by the primacy following from the microphysical scale over the fractional essence of power; in both cases by the primacy of the “Principle of power” over its “Beyond.”

The other method reverses—and makes more than a reversal—this primacy in that “Beyond” of the principle of power over power itself. It does not exclude “description” by any means, even in modifying the concept of it and making a more critical usage of it. But before being an “archeology,” which tolerates certain Marxist references as constituent (for example with the techno-economic apparatus of production), it is a “political Materialism” which differently poses and solves the problems of “historical Materialism.” It goes from the essence of power to the power. For it, the most urgent task is to put an end to higher, by producing internal genetic definitions of its objects (classes, revolution, technopolitics, resistance, subject, etc). It is thus not positivist, but materialist; it does not describe power from its previous history or presents, it thinks it from its future and its decline: the “revolution” also, and “thought” as well. To take again a sufficient Nietzschean distinction, the first method “interprets” the Relations of power, the second “evaluates” them; the first is basically descriptive, the second is “legislative” and leads to a minority ethics of struggle, “political” or not.

One will thus find here none of those historicizing, picturesque descriptions which give the modern reader so easily the feeling that he or she thinks, and which are being so well adapted with their hertzian and cathodic transmission…. Rather the outline of a materialist critique of political reason. There are so many of these mixtures of philosophy and social sciences, philosophy and the history of institutions, so many, as of now, mixtures of philosophy and morals, that it has appeared useless for us to add to the encumbrance and variegation of the market of culture. One is satisfied to proceed with an immanent description, genealogical and critical, of power, by the means of a method which it would be necessary to call a materialist eidetic, and for the severity of which one would be slightly tempted to excuse oneself. As for the “abstract” character—thus it is said—of this text, it would have to be understood also—but that is an ideal which one does not pretend to reach—with the sense in which one speaks in mathematics about “abstract theory.” Because here the “abstraction,” if it can be possibly felt like a defect, is initially a positive character intrinsic to the theory of power, whose purity could only be darkened by “examples.” To tell the truth an example does not exist any more than a dream: let one show me an example of an example, and I will disavow this book. All the concepts worked out and produced in this text are at most designs to make function, not in alleged “feats of power,” but for a new cutting, primarily mobile and critical, historical experience as the production of power. These designs, this general writing of power, if one holds to denounce their insufficiency, can be defined as virtual rather than as “abstract,” in the sense that they have existence only in their effects (of “theoretical” power) which they are likely to produce. One usually believes to be precise by referring a concept with empirically taken phenomena and without trying hard to construct the design of the concept, the syntax to some extent of the division of phenomena, without having defined its capacity to effectuate itself not in, but as the experience. This theoretical indetermination combined with “concrete” references is what allows for the flowering of contradictory discourses on power.

To take a point of reference which makes it possible to measure to what degree of forfeiture philosophical theory is fallen—in France and perhaps all of Europe—in that common and vulgarized discourse that has failed a little more than out of habit, if we recall the double tradition which shared in the production of philosophy at the end of the 17th century: on the one hand that of the popular essay, illustrated by the English, the alleged “French philosophers” of the 18th century, and some German professors—on the other hand another part of the “system” renovated under the impulse of Kant, and who, only after him, is identified by his virtues of analysis and theoretical construction, with a “science” or, more rigorously, to a “doctrine of science.” Such an opposition, which regained with this double manner the old tradition of exoteric and esoteric sayings, can no longer apply to us such as it is, including its presupposed changes. In particular we no longer conceive in the same manner the sense of theory and its autonomy. But it makes it possible to measure the path traversed in the loss of the flavor of philosophical style (mainly in France, where the philosophers are obsessed with literature, history and politics and neglect, except some, the invention of a method to think, to give all their care to the “contents”) and how much structuralism, on this point, has constituted nothing but a feeble barrage against this decline and this vulgarization. If it is thought that a genre of writing like this one, however abstract and tight, would have likely been arranged among the books that Fichte, for example, indicated as “popular,” including some of his own among them, it will be estimated that the “intellectuals” (France always had far too many “intellectuals” and not enough inventors of methods) should not delude themselves too much about their capacity of being nothing other than agitators of ideas.

It would have been necessary to be able to show—it is not the place here—that philosophy cannot find a new form of autonomy (it is certainly not the only one…), of new critical and revolutionary resources, unless it can conceive its relations with other disciplines, more generally the relations of the abstract and concrete, of thought and reality, to take again these slightly ineffective terms, such as a continuous transition, a continuous passage, topologically without tear, of one of these opposites to the other. Supposing that philosophy still has a future, it will conduct itself against the period which has consummated itself, characterized by its vicious mixtures of opposites, mixtures for example, of philosophy with the social sciences, linguistics and psychoanalysis, with history and literature. But also against the period which started from a supplementary baseness: mixtures of philosophy with the moral essay, the biography, journalism. If philosophy cannot occur, not only from raw material, but from external models of intelligibility, if it cannot form mixtures with them, on the one hand it may find it beneficial to attend to the exact sciences rather than the journalistico-fashion mongers who were recently illustrated in the commercial circulation of philosophy; and in addition it will preserve its rigor and its critical power only if it can cut sharply into its own flesh and make pass a pitiless line of demarcation through these necessary mixtures, i.e. between itself and itself: a thought without cruelty is a guard dog.

Because of all our efforts to destroy the traditional philosophical mastery, far from reaching also the humanities, literature, etc., philosophy has contributed also indirectly to deliver philosophy in order to worsen it, since they exceeded their goal thus by producing impossible effects for this mastery, it is perhaps time to assert with much prudence the dignity of the thinking thought, and again a certain autonomy of the philosophical discourse, established on new bases, integrating the maximum of the means by which we “arrange” in order to limit the return of this mastery, while preventing the resentment of the disciplines traditionally ousted by the great philosophical style and which currently try to build their revenge.

All our hopes, which go against this time, rest on the invention of a new Form of theoretical order, and not only theoretical. The current collapse (provisional besides) of Marxist theory, but also of all who had believed, in psychoanalysis or elsewhere, power to bind their fate to the structural form of order, is not at all the collapse of “the” theory. The “theory” is less surpassed than those who believe to have surpassed it. Because they had raised the theoretical ideal too high, they shout at the end of the world when their theoretical small world crumbles. The philosophical field was always partially occupied with guides and amateurs, now invaded here saboteurs and the nostalgic ones of the past who have known to elevate their vacuity of thought, their resentment, their lack of theoretical technology, to the height of a vision of the world and soon, perhaps, of an international market of philosophy.

Thus, we will not avoid the appearance here—but appearances are quite real in their own way—of a “reaction” against the economic situation. Like what Nietzsche says of art, the economic situation forces us to say to philosophy: there are necessary reactions, recurrences which are progress. Philosophy must be a necessary reaction against this time, in the name of the future and to keep it unnamed.

Continue to the six definitions from Laruelle’s dictionary

Continue to the definition of Vision-in-One

Simondon, Gilbert. L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 1964. Original Translation by Taylor Adkins.

Chapter One: Form and Matter

Section I—Foundations of the Hylemorphic Model: Technology of the Capture of Form

1. The Conditions of Individuation: pp. 27-39.

The notions of form and matter can help solve the problem of individuation only if they are first compared to its position. So if by the contrast it was discovered that the hylemorphic system expresses and contains the problem of individuation, it would be necessary, under pain of locking ourselves [sous peine de s'enfermer] into begging the question, to regard the research of the principle of individuation as logically anterior to the definition of matter and form.

It is difficult to consider the notions of form and matter as innate ideas. However, at the moment when one would be tempted to assign a technological origin to them, one is arrested by the remarkable capacity of generalization which these notions have. It is not only the clay and the brick, the marble and the statue which can be thought according to the hylemorphic model, but also a great number of formal, genetic and compositional actualities, in the living world and the psychic domain. The logical force of this model is such that Aristotle could use it to support a universal system of classification which applies itself to reality by following a logical path as well as a physical path, by ensuring the agreement of the logical order and the physical order, and by authorizing inductive knowledge. Even the ratio of the soul and the body can be thought according to the hylemorphic model.

A base as narrow as that of the technological operation hardly appears able to support a paradigm having a similar force of universality. It is thus appropriate to examine the base of the hylemorphic model, to appreciate the direction and the range of the role played in its genesis by the technical experiment.

The technological character of the origin of a model does not invalidate this model, with the condition that the operation which is used as a basis for the formation of the utilized concepts passes entirely and expresses itself without deterioration in the abstract model. If, on the contrary, the abstraction is carried out in an unfaithful and summary manner, by masking one of the fundamental dynamisms of the technical operation, the model is false. Instead of having a true paradigmatic value, it is nothing more than a comparison, a more or less rigorous juxtaposition according to the cases.

However, in the technical operation which gives rise to an object having form and matter, like a clay brick, the real dynamism of the operation is extremely far from being able to be represented by the matter-form couple. The form and the matter of the hylemorphic model are an abstract form and an abstract matter. The definite being that one can show, this brick drying on this board, does not result from the union of an unspecified matter and an arbitrary form. If one takes fine sand, that it is wet and then one puts it in a brick mould: with the release from the mould, one will obtain a sand heap and not a brick. If one takes clay and then passes it to the rolling mill or the spinneret: one will obtain neither plate nor wire, but an accumulation of broken layers and course cylindrical segments. The clay, conceived as supporting an indefinite plasticity, is the abstract matter. The right-angled parallelepiped, conceived as a brick form, is an abstract form. The concrete brick does not result from the union of the clay’s plasticity and the parallelepiped. So that there can be a parallelepipedic brick, a really existing individual, it is necessary that an effective technical operation institutes a mediation between a given clay mass and this notion of the parallelepiped. However, the technical operation of molding does not itself suffice. Moreover, it does not institute a direct mediation between a given mass of clay and the abstract form of the parallelepiped[1]; the mediation is prepared by two chains of preliminary operations which make matter and form converge toward a common operation. To give a form to clay is not to impose the parallelepiped form on rough clay: it is to pack prepared clay in a manufactured mold. If one divides the two ends of the technological chains, the parallelepiped and the clay in the quarry, one tests the impression of realizing, in the technical operation, an encounter between two realities of heterogeneous domains, and institutes a mediation, by communication, between an inter-elementary order, macro-physical, larger than the individual, and an intra-elementary order, micro-physical, smaller than the individual.

Precisely, in the technical operation, it is the mediation itself which should be considered: it consists, in the chosen case, in making a prepared block of clay fill without void a mold and, after release from the mold, dry while preserving without cracks or damage this definite contour. However, the preparation of clay and the construction of the mold are already an active mediation between rough clay and the imposable geometrical form. The mold is constructed so as to be able to be opened and closed without damaging its contents. Certain shapes of solids, geometrically conceivable, became realizable only with very complex and subtle artifices. The art of constructing the mold is, nowadays still, one of the most delicate aspects of the foundry. The mold, moreover, is not only built; it is also prepared: a defined coating, a dry powdering that will prevent wet clay from adhering to the walls at the time of the release from the mold, by disaggregating it or by forming cracks. To give a form, it is necessary to construct such a defined mold, prepared in such a fashion, with such a species of material. There thus exists a first advance which goes from the geometrical form to the concrete material mold, parallel with the clay, existing in the same way as it, posed by the dimensions of it, does in an order of magnitude that is easily formalized. As for clay, it is also subjected to a preparation; as a raw material, it is what the shovel raises to the surface at the edge of the marsh, with roots of rush, and gravel grains. Dried, crushed, sifted, shaped, lengthily kneaded, it becomes this homogeneous and consistent dough having a rather great plasticity to be able to embrace the contours of the mold in which one presses it, and firm enough to preserve this contour during the time necessary for that plasticity to disappear. In addition to the purification, the preparation of rough clay has a goal of obtaining homogeneity and a more appropriate degree of humidity for reconciling plasticity and consistency. There is in the rough clay an aptitude for becoming a plastic mass with the dimensions of a future brick because of the colloidal properties of aluminum hydro-silicates: these are those colloidal properties that effectuate the action of the technical half-chain bordering on the prepared clay; the molecular reality of clay, and the water which it absorbs, organizes itself by the preparation so as to be able to direct itself during the individuation as a homogeneous totality to the stage of the brick in a train of appearances. The prepared clay is that through which each molecule will effectively be put in communication, whatever its place compared to the walls of the mold, with the ensemble of pressure exerted by these walls. Each molecule intervenes on the level of the future individual, and thus enters in an interactive communication with the order of magnitude superior to the individual.

From its dimension, the other technical half-chain descends towards the future individual; the parallelepipedic form is not any form; it already contains a certain schematic which can direct the construction of the mold, which is an ensemble of coherent operations contained in an implicit state; clay is not only passively deformable; it is actively plastic, because it is colloidal; its faculty of receiving a form is not distinguished from that of keeping it, because to receive and to keep are the same: to undergo a deformation flawlessly and with coherence of the molecular chains. The preparation of clay is the constitution of this state of equal distribution of the molecules, of this arrangement in chains; the setting into form is already commenced at the time when the craftsman stirs the paste before introducing it into the mold. Because the form is not only the fact of being parallelepipedic; it is also the fact of being without cracks in the parallelepiped, without bubbles of air, split: fine cohesion is the result of a formalization; and this setting into form is only the exploitation of the colloidal characters of this elementary form without which nothing would be possible, and which is homogeneous compared to the form of the mold: there is only, in the two technical half-chains, a change of scale. In the swamp, clay has its colloidal properties as well, but they are there molecule by molecule, or grain by grain; this is prior to the form, and it is what later will maintain the homogeneous and well molded brick. The quality of the matter is the form’s origin, the form’s element which the technical operation forces to change its scale. In the other technical half-chain, the geometrical form concretizes itself, becomes a dimension of the mold, collected wood, sawdust or damp wood[2].

The technical operation prepares two half-chains of transformations that meet at a certain point, when the two created objects are compatible, are on the same scale; this comparison is not single and unconditional; it can be done through stages; what one considers as single formalization is often only the last episode of a series of transformations; when the block of clay receives the final deformation which enables it to fill the mold, its molecules are not reorganized completely and in one move; they displace a little the ones compared to the others; their topology is maintained, it only acts as the latest total deformation. However, this total deformation is not only a formalization of clay by its contour. Clay gives a brick because this deformation operated on masses in which the molecules are already arranged the ones compared to the others, without air, without sand grains, with a good colloidal equilibrium; if the mold did not control in a recent deformation all these pre-established former arrangements, it would not give any form; one can say that the shape of the mold operates only on the shape of clay, not on the clay matter. The mold limits and stabilizes rather than only imposing a form: it gives the end of the deformation and achieves it by stopping it according to a definite contour: it modulates the ensemble of the already formed networks: the gesture of the workman who fills the mold and compresses the clay continues the former gesture of kneading, stretching, shaping: the mold plays the part of a fixed set of modeling hands, acting like arrested forming hands. One could make a brick without a mold, with one’s hands, prolonging the shaping by a fashioning that would continue it without rupture.

Matter is matter because it receives a positive property which enables it to be modeled. To be modeled does not mean to undergo arbitrary displacements, but to order its plasticity according to definite forces that stabilize the deformation. The technical operation is the mediation between an inter-elementary unit and an infra-elementary unit. The pure form already contains gestures, and the primary matter has the capacity to become; the gestures contained in the form meet the becoming of the matter and modulate it. So that the matter can be modulated in its becoming, it is necessary that it is, like the clay at the time when the workman presses in the mold, of a deformable reality, i.e. of the reality which does not have a definite form, but all the indefinite forms, dynamically, because this reality, at the same time that it possesses inertia and consistency, is the agent of force, at least for a moment, and is identified point by point with this force; so that the clay fills the mold, it is not enough that it is plastic: it is necessary that it transmits the pressure that the workman presses on it, and that each point of its mass is a center of forces; clay is pushed in the mold which it fills; it propagates with it in its mass the energy of the workman. During the time of the filling, a potential energy actualizes itself [3]. It is necessary that the energy which pushes the clay exists, in the system mold-hand-clay, in potential form, so that the clay fills all empty space, being developed in any direction, arrested only by the edges of the mold. The walls of the mold intervene then not simply as the materialized geometrical structures, but point by point as fixed places which do net let the expanding clay advance and oppose to the pressure only a developed equal force in the contrary direction (principle of reaction), without carrying out any work, since they are not displaced.

The walls of the mold play compared to a clay element the same part as an element of this clay compared to another close element: the pressure of an element compared to another within the mass is almost as strong as that of an element of the wall compared to an element of the mass; the only difference resides in this fact that the wall does not displace, whereas the elements of clay can displace the ones compared to the others and to the wall [4]. A potential energy being translated within clay by compressive forces actualizes itself during the filling. The vehicular matter with potential energy actualizes itself; the form, represented here by the mold, plays an informative part by exerting forces without work, forces that limit the actualization of the potential energy which the matter is momentarily carrying. This energy can, indeed, actualize itself according to such or such direction, with such or such speed: the form is the limit. The relation between matter and form is not thus made between inert matter and form coming from the outside: there is operation common to and at the same level of existence between matter and form; this common level of existence, is that of force, coming from an energy momentarily transported by the matter, but extracted from a state of the total inter-elementary system of a superior dimension, and expressing individuated limitations. The technical operation constitutes two half-chains which, starting from the raw material and from the pure form, come into contact with one other and reunite. This union is made possible by the dimensional congruence of the two ends of the chains; the successive links of development transfer characters without inventing new ones: they establish only changes of order of magnitude, levels, and of state (for example the passage of the molecular state to a molar state, of the dry state to a wet state); what there is at the end of the material half-chains, is the aptitude of the matter for transporting point by point a potential energy which can cause a movement in an indeterminate direction; what there is at the end of the formal half-chains, is the aptitude of a structure to condition a movement without achieving a work, by a play of forces that do not displace their point of application.This assertion is not rigorously true however; so that the mold can limit the expansion of the plastic dough and direct this expansion statically, it is necessary that the walls of the mold develop a force of reaction equal to the pressure of the clay; the clay ebbs and squashes itself, filling the voids, when the reaction of the walls of the mold is slightly more elevated than the forces which are exerted in other directions at the interior of the clay mass; when the mold is filled completely, on the contrary, the internal pressures are everywhere equal with the forces of the reaction of the walls, so that any movement becomes impossible. The reaction of the walls is thus the static force which directs clay during the filling, by prohibiting the expansion according to certain directions. However, the forces of reaction can only exist in consequence of one very small elastic inflection of the walls; one can say that, from the point of view of matter, the formal wall is the limit from which a displacement in a determinate direction is only possible at the price of a very large increase in work; but so that this condition of the increase in work is effective, it is necessary that it starts to be realized, before the equilibrium merely breaks and so that the matter does not take other directions in which it is not limited, pushed by the energy that it transports with it and self actualizes while advancing; thus it is necessary that there is a light work from the walls of the mold, that which corresponds to the weak displacement of the point of application of the forces of reaction. But this work is not added to that of the actualization of transported energy produced by the clay; it is not cut off any either: it does not interfere with it; it can moreover be reduced as needed; a mold out of thin wood deforms notably under the abrupt pressure of clay, then returns gradually in place; a mold out of thick wood displaces less; a cast iron or flint mold displaces extremely little.

Moreover, the positive work of re-installation compensates for the mainly negative of deformation. The mold can have some elasticity; it must not be plastic. It is as forces that matter and form are put in presence. The only difference between the mode of these forces for the matter and the form reside in that the forces of the matter come from a transported energy by the matter and are always available, while the forces of the form are forces which produce only a slight amount of work and intervene as the limits of the actualization of the energy of the matter. It is not in the infinitely short moment, but in becoming it, that form and matter differ; the form is not the vehicle of potential energy; the matter is in-formable matter only because it can be point by point the vehicle of an energy which actualizes itself [5];the preliminary treatment of the raw material has as a function to render the support matter homogeneous from a definite potential energy; it is by this potential energy that the matter becomes; the form, it does not become. In the instantaneous operation, the forces which are those of the matter and the forces which come from the form do not differ; they are homogeneous the ones compared to the others and form part of the same instantaneous physical system; but they do not form part of the same temporal unit. The work exerted by the forces of elastic deformation of the mold is nothing anymore after the molding; the forces were canceled, or were degraded in heat, and did not produce anything on the order of magnitude of the mold. On the contrary, the potential energy of the matter is actualized on an order greater than the clay mass by giving a distribution of the elementary masses. For this reason the preliminary treatment of the clay prepares this actualization: it makes the molecule interdependent of the others molecules and the deformable unit, so that each piece also takes part in the potential energy whose actualization is the molding; it is essential that all the pieces, without discontinuity or privilege, have the same chances of deforming in any direction; a clot, a stone, come within provinces of non-participation to this potentiality which actualizes itself by locating its support: they are parasitic singularities. The fact that there is a mold, i.e. limits of actualization, created in the matter a state of reciprocity of the forces leading to equilibrium; the mold does not act on the outside by imposing molecule on molecule, piece by piece; the clay, at the end of the molding, is the mass in which all the forces of deformation meet in all the directions of the equal forces and contrary direction which founds its equilibrium. The mold translates its existence within the matter by making it tend towards a condition of equilibrium. So because this equilibrium exists it is necessary that at the end of the operation there remains a certain quantity of potential energy still unactualized, contained in the whole system. It would not be exact to say that the form plays a static part whereas the matter plays a dynamic part; in fact, so that there is a single system of forces, it is necessary that matter and form both play a dynamic role; but this dynamic equality is only true in that moment. The form does not evolve or modify itself, because it receives no potentiality, whereas the matter evolves. It carries uniformly widespread potentialities and sets out again in it; the homogeneity of the matter is the homogeneity of its possible becoming. Each point has as many chances as all the others; the matter taking form is in a state of complete internal resonance; what occurs in a point redounds on all the others, the becoming of each molecule retains itself in the becoming of all the others in all the points and in all directions; the matter is that whose elements are not isolated the ones from the others nor heterogeneous the ones compared to the others; any heterogeneity is a condition of the non-transmission of the forces, therefore of internal non-resonance. The plasticity of clay is the capacity to be in a state of internal resonance as soon as it is subjected to a pressure in an enclosure. The mold as limit is that through which the state of internal resonance is provoked, but the mold is not that through which the internal resonance is realized; the mold is not that which, within the plastic earth, uniformly transmits in all directions the pressure and displacements. One cannot say that the mold gives form; it is the earth which takes form according to the mold, because it communicates with the workman. The positivity of this capture of form belongs to the earth and to the workman; it is this internal resonance, the work of this internal resonance [6]. The mold intervenes as a condition of closing, limiting, stopping of expansion, direction of mediation. The technical operation institutes the internal resonance in the matter taking form, by means of topological conditions that can be named form, and the energy conditions that express the whole system. Internal resonance is a state of the system which requires this realization of the energy conditions, the topological conditions and the material conditions: resonance is movement and energy exchange in a determined enclosure, communication between a microphysical matter and a macrophysical energy starting from a singularity of average magnitude, topologically definite.</font

[1] I.e. between the reality of an order of magnitude higher than future the individual, concealing the energy conditions of the molding, and the reality-matter, which is, by grain, in its availability, of an order of magnitude lower than that of the future individual, the real brick.

[2] The mold, thus, is not only the mold, but the technical term of the inter-elementary chains, which comprise vast sets locking up the future individual (working, workshop, press, clay) and containing potential energy. The mold totalizes and accumulates these inter-elementary relations, as prepared clay totalizes and accumulates the molecular inter-elementary interactions of aluminum hydro-silicates.

[3] This energy expresses the macroscopic state of the system containing the future individual; it is of an inter-elementary origin; however, it enters into interactive communication with each molecule of the matter, and it is by this communication that the form emerges, contemporary with the individual.

[4] Thus the individual constitutes itself by this act of communication, within a society of particles in reciprocal interaction, between all the molecules and the action of molding.

[5] Although this energy is an energy of state, an energy of the inter-elementary system; it is in this interaction of two orders of magnitude, on the level of the individual as it encounters forces through which the communication between orders of magnitude consists, under the aegis of a singularity, principle of form, that individuation starts. The mediating singularity is the mold here; in other cases, in Nature, it can be the stone which starts the dune, the gravel which is the germ of an island in a drifting river of alluvia: it is of the intermediate level between inter-elementary dimensions and infra-elementary dimensions.

[6] At this moment, matter is no longer pre-individual matter or molecular matter, but already individual. The potential energy which actualizes itself is an inter-elementary state of the system vaster than matter.

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