“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 not. There is no universal propositional logic, nor is there grammaticality in itself, any more than there is signifiance 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…

A Thousand Plateaus 148

The world is segmented, stratified, breaking or already broken-up: what happened, what is happening? What crosses over, releasing free, untamed intensities as it travels along the intermediary zones? What is it which is just now passing through — beyond, behind, between — these lines? How do these lines — and always bundles of lines, fibres — work? A question of codes, partitions, signal-sign networks: are these lines of forced motion (interpretation) or rather lines of free variation (experimentation)? “The mixed semiotic of signifiance and subjectification has an exceptional need to be protected from any intrusion from the outside.” (ATP 179) A single expressive substance precludes the development of nomadic machines — truth, God, the Earth, are not “allowed” to have an outside! Do we think we understand this “allowed”? What happened? But already in order to translate we must achieve an expressive unification, yet this by no means guarantees that the language we thus arrive at conveys a message: “You will never know what just happened, or you will always know what is going to happen…” (ATP 193)

All becoming are molecular — not objects or forms easily recognized from science, habit or experiences — and in this sense “unknowable,” at least from the outside. Are human beings the same way? Is there no relation of resemblance between the woman and becoming-woman, the child and becoming-child? “All we are saying is that these in-dissociable aspects of becoming-woman must first be understood as a function of something else: not imitating or assuming the female form, but emitting particles that enter the relation of movement and rest, or the zone of proximity, of a micro-femininity, in other words, that produce in us a molecular woman…” (ATP 275) The question is not about representing a woman, producing an accurate imitation of a particular molecular multiplicity — but of making something that has to do with that multiplicity enter into composition with the speeds of the image. In becoming we discover our own proximity to the molecular: “That is the essential point for us: you become-animal only if, by whatever means or elements, you emit corpuscles that enter the relation of movement and rest of the animal particles, or what amounts to the same thing, that enter the zone of proximity of the animal molecule.” (275)

Can we “make” the world a becoming? Only if we reduce ourselves to “one or several” abstract lines can we find our own proximities, our own zones of indiscernibility; that is, our own passageway to a becoming-everywhere, a becoming-everybody: “The Cosmos as an abstract machine, and each world as an assemblage effectuating it.” (ATP 280) Eliminate everything exceeding this moment; but don’t forget to include within the moment everything which it includes in its turn. We ourselves slip into the moment, which slips transparently into the impersonal, the indiscernible. “One is then like grass: one has made the world, everybody/everything, into a becoming, because one has made a necessarily communicating world, because one has suppressed in oneself everything that prevents us from slipping between things and growing in the midst of things… Saturate, eliminate, put everything in.” (ATP 280)

In truth, the nature of the abstract machine is the most general problem: there is no reason to tie the abstract machine to the universal or the constant, or to efface the singularity of abstract machines insofar as they are built around variables and variations.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (92-93)

Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of the Chomsky-Labov debate exemplifies a well-developed but perhaps under-emphasized aspect of their thinking — namely, their theory of semiotics — and in particular the curious relationship they argue holds between language and the abstract machine. The debate between Labov and Chomsky concerns linguistic variation — an issue which, as we shall see, helps illuminate an important aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the abstract machine. Chomsky’s position is more or less what you would expect it to be: linguists isolate from an essentially heterogeneous linguistic reality a standard and homogenous system, thus grounding abstraction not in aggregations but in positions, roots, and linearity. In fact, he claims, it’s only in this way that one can get at real principles, and that science can operate in no other way… — and so on. D+G summarize:

“Chomsky pretends to believe that by asserting his interest in the variable features of language, Labov is situating himself in a de facto pragmatics external to linguistics. Labov, however has other ambitions…” (A Thousand Plateaus 93)

What does Labov do (according to Deleuze and Guattari)? He refuses the very alternative which Chomsky presumes exists between linguistic constants and pragmatic variability. Labov asks us to think about lines of pure or inherent variation. It’s not difficult to see why Deleuze and Guattari like Labov so much; it’s also not difficult to see see why they must move definitively beyond this particular debate, and challenge its very pretext. But let’s slow down, what do these lines mean in the first place — these lines of “inherent variation”? Deleuze and Guattari clarify that, on the one hand, we ought not to think of these simply as “free variants” already in relation to a given style or pronunciation (that is, whose features would still lie completely outside the system, thus leaving its homogeneity intact.) On the other hand, these lines of variations are not a “de facto” mix of both systems — in other words, we shouldn’t think that each system is homogeneous in its own right (“as if the speaker moved from one to the other,” write D+G.)

What, in other words, is the alternative which Labov refuses? It is precisely the one which linguistics wants to set up for itself: the practice of assigning variants to different systems or relegating them to a place outside the structure. Labov’s critical objection to Chomsky — and quite brilliant insight — is that it is the variation itself which is systematic. Deleuze and Guattari explain: “Labov sees variation as a de jure component affecting each system from within, sending it cascading or leaping on its own power and forbidding one to close it off, to make it homogenous in principle.” (A Thousand Plateaus 93) Isn’t it ultimately the abstract distinction between two systems that proves the most arbitrary? The majority of forms belong to one or another only by chance…
Quite close to this question of variation is that of pragmatics, which Deleuze and Guattari argue quite passionately ought to be thought not only as an “external” science involving “nonlinguistic” factors (88-89). In fact, linguistics “itself” is inseparable from an “internal pragmatics” — variables of “content,” they argue, in perpetual interaction with variables of “expression”:

The only way to define the relation [between expression and content] is to revamp the theory of ideology by saying that expressions and statements intervene directly in productivity, in the form of a production of meaning or sign-value. The category of production doubtless has the advantage of breaking with schemas of representation, information and communication. (89)

But they recognize that this too is ambiguous, even if only in that it appeals to an “ongoing dialectical miracle” by which matter is transformed into meaning — in other words, the social process itself into a signifying system. Here there is a semiconductor, or transducer, which reminds us of Serres’ diagrams of guests who are also hosts themselves — that is, always “cascaded” by a parasitic chain, already interrupted, by the noisy third.
This self-miraculation of the primary transformation announces a key shift in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, towards an understanding of the material interactions of bodies not in terms of the production of goods — but rather in terms of machinic assemblages, rhizomes, multiplicities: “a precise state of intermingling of bodies in a society, including all the attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations, penetrations, and expansions that affect bodies of all kinds in their relations to one another.” (90)
The relation between the rhizome and the body without organs is mapped out “structurally” through the refinement of the notion of an abstract machine. The key shift they make here is analogous to the shift in the very first plateaus (One or Several Wolves?) where they recommence the discussion of abstract machines, marking a shift from the inflection placed upon these ideas in Anti-Oedipus. Let’s return there just for a moment before we continue:

“There are no individual statements, there never are. Every statement is the product of a machinic assemblage, in other words, of collective agents of enunciation (take “collective agents” to mean not peoples or societies but multiplicities.) The proper name (nom propre) does not designate an individual: it is on the contrary when the individual opens up to the multiplicity pervading him or her, at the outcome of the most severe operation of depersonalization, that the or she acquires his or her true proper name. The proper name is an instant apprehension of a multiplicity. The proper name is the subject of a pure infinitive comprehended as such in a field of intensity…” (25)

In some sense there are two sides to all of this, two non-symmetrical but reverse operations (capitalism and schizophrenia…) One of the important consequences of the “rhizomatic shift” is a complication of reductionistic or essentialist theories of media and technology, always beholden to this static myth of studying tools “themselves,” somehow in isolation from the world they’re used in! The Deleuzo-Guattarian challenge is to go even more abstract than this — to find the real-virtual abstract machines operating in every register and dimension of human and non-human activity.
The point is that tools exist only in relation to the interminglings they make possible or that make them possible. “Similarly, generative trees constructed according to Chomsky’s syntagmatic model can open up in all directions, and in turn form a rhizome.” (15) But even if the links proliferate, we never get beyond fake multiplicities, hierarchical systems with definitive centers of signifiance and subjectification. This poses particularly urgent challenges with respect to information science because

“[i]n the corresponding models, an element only receives information from a higher unit, and only receives a subjective affection along pre-established paths. This is evident in current problems in information science and computer science, which still cling to the oldest modes of thought in that they grant all power to a memory or central organ.

Pierre Rosensthiehl and Jean Petitot, in a fine article denoucing ‘the imagery of command trees’ (centered systems or hierarchical structures,) note that “accepting the primacy of hierarchical structures amounts to giving arborescent structures privileged status… The arborescent form admits of topological explanation… In a hierarchical system, an individual has only one active neighbor, his or her hierarchical superior… The channels of transmission are preestablished: the arborescent system preexists the individual, who is integrated into it at an allotted place…”

The authors point out that even when one thinks one has reached a multiplicity, it may be a false one — of what we call the radicle type — because its ostensible nonhierarchical presentation or statement in fact only admits of a totally hierarchical solution.” (D+G, A Thousand Plateause 15-16)

It is nonetheless the case that intensity also works itself; the hegemony of any signifier is always shaken loose, challenged, mutated. Semiotic systems can regain their freedom and shake off the “traces” of the tracings: a minimal event can upset the entire balance of power, flip the parasitic chain inside-out. This is why, in producing pragmatics, it is not enough to construct a semantics, to take into account signifiers and referents — because these very notions of significance and reference are themselves bound up with “supposedly autonomous and constant structure” (91) — a pre-treatment by a standardizing phonetic, semantic or syntactic machine:

“For a true abstract machine pertains to an assemblage in its entirety: it is defined as the diagram of that assemblage. It is not language based but diagrammatic and superlinear. Content is not a signified nor expression a signifier. Rather, both are variables of the assemblage.” (91)

The problem with Chomsky is that he cannot really conceive of variation or pragmatics. His abstract machine retains both linear ordering and an arborescent model: but what about pragmatic values, or internal variables? Once these are taken into account (especially with respect to indirect discourse,) one is obliged to construct “abstract objects” or bring “hypersentences” into play. D+G argue this implies “superlinearity,” or as they would have it, a plane without linear order, a rhizome:

“From this standpoint, the interpenetration of language and the social field and political problems lies at the deepest level of the abstract machine, not at the surface. The abstract machine as it relates to the diagram of the assemblage is never purely a matter of language, except for lack of sufficient abstraction. It is language that depends on the abstract machine, and not the reverse. At most, we may distinguish in the abstract machine two states of the diagram, one in which variables of content and expression are distributed according to their heterogeneous forms in reciprocal presupposition on a plane of consistency, and another in which it is no longer even possible to distinguish bewteen variables of content and expression because the variability of that same plane has prevailed over the duality of forms, rendering them ‘indiscernible’…”

If men learn this [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.

What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder.

And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.

Plato, Phaedrus 275a-b

If we speak language, then it is at least equally true that our languages speak us — even up to that extreme sense wherein language becomes actual, corporeal — and so the horizons of language and of writing cannot be the same as the limits of thought. Yet there is a single abstract machine underlying both thought and language.

Language is neither a channel, a signal, nor a noise. For if language is a channel, then language channels us — it becomes a closed loop, thought = language = being. The result: only intensive realities, only qualities — we’ve isolated the durational aspect of being, a consequence of self-transformation or self-affection.

On the other hand, if language is born from pure noise, it situates itself within us, finds somewhere between and inside us to become a station… Noise clears, but does not disclose, or does so only darkly, ambiguously.

Language transmits us — what does this mean? Nothing more than that language is not a medium, not communication — but a relational attitude to the world, a turning towards an immanent and essential reality.

Perhaps we can trace the otherworldly intensity of language to its pre-supposition — and (continual) recommencement — in (a) social relation itself, the face to face?

What is language but encountering a world where things are both being and being-as-somethings? — but this ontic-ontological distinction collapses, since it is equivalent to a logical substitution, engendering an alien or viral parasitism within knowledge as such.

Yet we cannot simply abandon this provisional division. It has, perhaps, an auto-immunitary function — a sure sign of an underlying machinic (or “unconscious”) intelligence. In some important sense, writing begins precisely a kind of careful self-analysis, which could be formulated approximately: a transcendence towards the Graphic of the graphic through the graphic.

So this is what a philosophy of language seeks to do with expressivity as such, with the essence of language. Not only to elucidate it, to classify it phenomenologically, to illustrate its grounding and ungrounding role in social reality — but in fact to actually explore new territories — that is, to write. For our shame, we write for the world.

But in our hearts we write for ourselves, and ourselves alone. It takes a deeply conservative mindset to conflate style with justice (Aristotle: equalizing the unequal)… Yet lurking beneath there is a tacit revolution in this “gut reaction.” The brilliant origin of a science.

Writing is acting, it is more real than the changing social reality — which it expresses only metaphorically, that is, misleadingly. The recurrent problem (with writing, language, art) is that, on the contrary, it’s too real — the metaphors become reality, we escape from ourselves to the exterior, into the glorious rapture of song (also the harmony of equations…)

This is the mischief, the confusion of real and illusionary, which Plato detects at the heart of poetry — it is his understanding of the “reason” for the ancient war between the philosophers and the poets. Is there a scientific disqualification of writing in the Republic?

Science is already inscribed within writing, but would in some way attempt to do without (as though it were a harmful drug) the affect of the writing — the excessive affection inspired by poetry is precisely Plato’s problem with it, it’s evocativeness which leads people out of themselves, ultimately into weakness, decadence, destruction.

Plato is afraid of a pure difference, the passage of becoming which initiates us, guides us in differentiating, connecting to more complex assemblages. The forms are more material than the metaphors Plato is fighting — the hallucinatory anti-Forms on the edges of Forms, constantly mutating and interconnecting, tracing territories and escape-routes, lines of death and of flight…

Writing is therefore strategic. Does it begin with war machines or with the state? Writing is economy, a city-state, a mathematics. The originary marks: are they counting or writing? A sign so primitive this distinction is still implicit.

So what about this production of writing? Is there no reconciliation between the mystical and the logical?

Surely the production of writing is about open systems of bodies, differential relations between atomic elements, intensive forces, operative and “stylistic” modulations of space or time: in short, a generic assembly, the molecular production of a complex assemblage, with many dimensions and speeds and forces encoded within it. In general, molecular multiplicity is synonymous with revolutions in any practice, social transformations along every dimension of production, every aspect of an assemblage.

The point is to contest the paranoid logic of signification: to overturn ‘power centers’ in language or expression itself, to open up virtual and hallucinatory possibilities anywhere and everywhere.

Map their regimes of power onto new dimensions: show the hidden structural fluxes, gaps, vulnerabilities, escape-routes. It’s always already dramatized.

So: show us, don’t tell us!

Write because you’re sick to death of stories.

Write despite and even because there is a world already overfull of noisy significance.

Write because in every possible relation — there waits upon us to discover an uneasy balance — between primordial responses (absences) and divine secrecy (celerity.)

Language is the house of being — because of an enframing which allows disclosure, a clearing which provides a background for distinction. What is invariant but this gesture of capturing, as though magically, an event in a representation, a process in an Idea?

What varies is segmentarity, really only what kind of connections an assemblage allows between elements, what relations elements are capable of assembling between themselves.

Language is a stage, a setting-into-play of more primordial forms, a delicate (altruistic-parasitic) balance — a thin, glittering line we have experienced before chasing the essence of expression itself.

Always ask: are these circles still concentric?

Is there still a sign, still a self in the center?

Mimic the arrangement, form lateral connections, slowly introduce chaotic and parasitic transformations.

Writing is not action nor reaction, but a counteraction… It is first of all a drug, before the distinction of poison or medicine — an agent of transformation, a pure vector.

What is the essence of writing? Insofar as writing is language, extensive writing is an instruction, or an element of a list of instructions. Intensive writing (which qualifies the quantitative structures of distinctions) are structural diagrams, already in some sense a machine.

Writing is not a prosthetic but a real and independent function along with its interdependent or interindividual aspect — and so it is already an assemblage, a multiplicity of assemblages, assembling novel multiplicities within itself.

In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather ‘metastable,’ endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed. (Potential energy is the energy of the pure event, whereas forms of actualization correspond to the realization of the event). In the second place, singularities posses a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast. In the third place, singularities or potentials haunt the surface. Everything happens at the surface in a crystal which develops only on the edges. Undoubtedly, an organism is not developed in the same manner. An organism does not cease to contract in an interior space and to expand in an exterior space–to assimilate and to externalize. But membranes are no less important, for they carry potentials and regenerate polarities. They place internal and external spaces into contact without regard to distance. The internal and external, depth and height, have biological value only through this topological surface of contact. Thus, even biologically, it is necessary to understand that ‘the deepest is the skin.’ The skin has as its disposal a vital and properly superficial potential energy. And just as events do not occupy the surface but rather frequent it, superficial energy is not localized at the surface, but is rather bound to its formation. Gilbert Simondon has expressed this very well: the living lives at the limit of itself, on its limit… The characteristic polarity of life is at the level of the membrane; it is here that life exists in an essential manner, as an aspect of a dynamic topology which itself maintains the metastability by which it exists… The entire content of internal space is topologically in contact with the content of external space at the limits of the living; there is, in fact, no distance in topology; the entire mass of living matter contained in the internal space is actively present to the external world at the limit of the living… To belong to interiority does not mean only to ‘be inside,’ but to be on the ‘in-side’ of the limit… At the level of the polarized membrane, internal past and external future face one another. [Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia, 1990. p. 103-104.]

Gilbert Simondon, L’individu et sa genese physico-biologique (Paris: P.U.F., 1964), pp. 260-264. This entire book, it seems to us, has special importance, since it presents the first thought-out theory of impersonal and pre-individual singularities. It proposes explicitly, beginning with these singularities, to work out the genesis of the living individual and the knowing subject. It is therefore a new conception of the transcendental. The five characteristics through which we have tried to define the transcendental field–the potential energy of the field, the internal resonance of series, the topological surface of membranes, the organization of sense, and the status of the problematic–are all analyzed by Simondon. Thus the material of this, and of the following paragraph, depends directly on the book, with which we part company only in drawing conclusions. [Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia, 1990. fn. 3, p. 344.]

As a fourth determination, we will say therefore that the surface is the locus of sense: signs remain deprived of sense as long as they do not enter into the surface organization which assures the resonance of two series (two images-signs, two photographs, two tracks, etc.). But this world of sense does not yet imply unity of direction or community of organs. The latter requires a receptive apparatus capable of bringing about a successive superimposition of surface planes in accordance with another dimension. Furthermore, this world of sense, with its events-singularities, offers a neutrality which is essential to it. And this is the case, not only because it hovers over the dimensions according to which it will be arranged in order to acquire signification, manifestation, and denotation, but also because it hovers over the actualizations of its energy as potential energy, that is, the realization of its events, which may be internal as well as external, collective as well as individual, according to the contact surface or the neutral surface-limit which transcends distances and assures the continuity on both its sides. And this is why (determination number five) this world of sense has a problematic status: singularities are distributed in a properly problematic field and crop up in this field as topological events to which no direction is attached. As with chemical elements, with respect to which we know where they are before we now what they are, likewise here we know of the existence and distribution of singular points before we know their nature (bottlenecks, knots, foyers, centers…). This allows us, as we have seen, to give an entirely objective definition to the term ‘problematic’ and to the indetermination which it carries along, since the nature of directed singularities and their existence and directionless distribution depend on objectively distinct instances. [Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia, 1990. p. 104.]

See Albert Lautman, Le Probleme du temps (Paris: Hermann, 1946), pp. 41-42: “The geoemtrical interpretations of the theory of differential equations clearly places in evidence two absolutely distinct realities: there is the field of directions and the topological accidents which may suddenly crop up in it, for example: the existence of the plane of singular points to which no direction has been attached: and there are the integral curves with the form they take on in the vicinity of the singularities of the field of directions… The existence and distribution of singularities are notions relative to the field of vectors defined by the differential equation. The form of the integral curves is relative to the solution of this equation. The two problems are assuredly complementary, since the nature of the singularities of the field is defined by the form of the curves in their vicinity. But it is no less true that the field of vectors on one hand and the integral curves on the other are two essentially distinct mathematical realities.” [Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia, 1990. fn. 4, p. 344.]

Certain distinctions proposed by Simondon can be compared to those of Husserl. For Simondon exposes the technological insufficiency of the matter-form model, in that it assumes a fixed form and a matter deemed homogeneous. It is the idea of the law that assures the model’s coherence, since laws are what submit matter to this or that form, and conversely, realize in matter a given property deduced from the form. But Simondon demonstrates that the hylomorphic model leaves many things, active and affective, by the wayside. On the one hand, to the formed or formable matter we must add an entire energetic materiality in movement, carrying singularities or haecceities that are already like implicit forms that are topological, rather than geometrical, and that combine with processes of deformation: for example, the variable undulations and torsions of the fibers guiding the operation of splitting wood. On the other hand, to the essential properties of the matter deriving from the formal essence we must add variable intensive affects, now resulting from the operation, now on the contrary making it possible: for example, wood that is more or less porous, more or less elastic and resistant. At any rate, it is a question of surrendering to the wood, then following where it leads by connecting operations to a materiality, instead of imposing a form upon a matter: what one addresses is less a matter submitted to laws than a materiality possessing a nomos. One addresses less a form capable of imposing properties upon a matter than material traits of expression constituting affects. Of course, it is always possible to “translate” into a model that which escapes the model; thus, one may link the materiality’s power of variation to laws adapting a fixed form and a constant matter to one another. But this cannot be done without a distortion that consists in uprooting variables from the state of continuous variation, in order to extract from the fixed points and constant relations. Thus one throws the variables off, even changing the nature of the equations, which cease to be immanent to matter-movement (inequations, adequations). The question is not whether such a translation is conceptually legitimate–it is–but what intuition gets lost in it. In short, what Simondon criticizes the hylemorphic model for is taking form and matter to be two terms defined separately, like the ends of two half-chains whose connection can no longer be seen, like a simple relation of chains whose connection can no longer be seen, like a simple relation of molding behind which there is a perpetually variable, continuous modulation that is no longer possible to grasp. The critique of the hylomorphic schema is based on ‘the existence, between form and matter, of a zone of medium and intermediary dimension,’ of energetic, molecular dimension–a space unto itself that deploys its materiality through matter, a number unto itself that propels its traits through form.

W e always get back to this definition: the machinic phylum is materiality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneously; it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities and traits of expression. This has obvious consequences: namely, this matter-flow can only be followed. Doubtless, the operation that consists in following can be carried out in one place: an artisan who planes follows the wood, the fibers of the wood, without changing location. But this way of following is only one particular sequence in a more general process. For artisans are obliged to follow in another way as well, in other words, to go find the wood where it lies, and to find the wood with the right kind of fibers. Otherwise, they must have it brought to them: it is only because merchants take care of one segment of the journey in reverse that the artisans can avoid making the trip themselves. But artisans are complete only if they are also prospectors; and the organization that separates prospectors, merchants, and artisans already mutilates artisans in order to make ‘workers’ of them. We will follow a flow of matter, a machinic phylum. The artisan is the itinerant, the ambulant. To follow the flow of matter is to itinerate, to ambulate. It is intuition in action. Of course, there are second-order itinerancies where it is no longer a flow of matter that one prospects and follows, but, for example, a market. Nevertheless, it is always a flow that is followed, even if the flow is not always that of matter. And, above all, there are secondary itinerancies, which derive from another ‘condition,’ even if they are necessarily entailed by it. For example, a transhumant, whether a farmer or an animal raiser, changes land after it is worn out, or else seasonally; but transhumants only secondarily follow a land flow, because they undertake a rotation meant from the start to return them to the point from which they left, after the forest has regenerated, the land has rested, the weather has changed. Transhumants do not follow a flow, they draw a circuit; they only follow the part of the flow that enters into the circuit, even an ever-widening one. Transhumants are therefore itinerant only consequentially, or become itinerant only when their circuit of land or pasture has been exhausted, or when the rotation has become so wide that the flows escape the circuit. Even the merchant is a transhumant, to the extent that mercantile flows are subordinated to the rotation between a point of departure and a point of arrival (go get-bring back, import-export, buy-sell). Whatever the reciprocal implications, there are considerable differences between a flow and a circuit. The migrant, we have seen, is something else again. And the nomad is not primarily defined as an itinerant or as a transhumant, nor as a migrant, even though nomads become these consequentially. The primary determination of nomads is to occupy and hold a smooth space: it is this aspect that determines them as nomad (essence). On their own account, they will be transhumants, or itinerants, only by virtue of the imperatives imposed by the smooth spaces. In short, whatever the de facto mixes between nomadism, itinerancy, and transhumance, the primary concept is different in the three cases (smooth space, matter-flow, rotation). It is only the basis of the distinct concept that we can make a judgment on the mix–on when it is produced, on the form in which it is produced.

But in the course of the preceding discussion, we have wandered from the question: Why is the machinic phylum, the flow of matter, essentially metallic or metallurgical? Here again, it is only the distinct concept that can give us an answer, in that it shows that there is a special, primary relation between itinerance and metallurgy (deterritorialization). However, the examples we took from Husserl and Simondon concerned wood and clay as well as metals. Besides, are there not flows of grass, water, herds, which form so many pyhla or matters in movement? It is easier for us to answer these questions now. For it is as if metal and metallurgy imposed upon and raised to consciousness something that is only hidden or buried in the other matters and operations. The difference is that elsewhere the operations occur between two thresholds, one of which constitutes the matter prepared for the operation, and the other the form to be incarnated (for example, the clay and the mold). The hylomorphic model derives its general value from this, since the incarnated form that marks the end of an operation can serve as the matter for a new operation, but in a fixed order marking a succession of thresholds. In metallurgy, on the other hand, the operations are always astride the thresholds, so that an energetic materiality overspills the prepared matter, and a qualitative deformation of transformation overspills the form. For example, quenching follows forging and takes place after the form has been fixed. Or, to take another example, in molding, the matallurgist in a sense works inside the mold. Or again, steel that is melted and molded later undergoes a series of successive decarbonations. Finally, metallurgy has the option of melting down and reusing a matter to which it gives an ingot-form: the history of metal is inseparable from this very particular form, which is not to be confused with either a stock or a commodity: monetary value derives from it. More generally, the metallurgical idea of the ‘reducer’ expresses this double liberation of a materiality in relation to a prepared matter, and of a transformation in relation to the form to be incarnated. Matter and form have never seemed more rigid than in metallurgy; yet the succession of forms tends to be replaced by the form of a continuous development, and the variability of matters tends to be replaced by the matter of a continuous variation. If metallurgy has an essential relation with music, it is by virtue not only of the sounds of the forge but also of the tendency within both arts to bring int its own, beyond separate forms, a continuous development of form, and beyond variable matters, a continuous variation of matter: a widened chromaticism sustains both music and metallurgy: the musical smith was the first ‘transformer.’ In short, what metal and metallurgy bring to light is a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such, a material vitalism that doubtless exists everywhere but is ordinarily hidden or covered, rendered unrecognizable, dissociated by the hylomorphic model. Metallurgy is the consciousness of thought of the matter-flow, and metal the correlate of this consciousness. As expressed in panmetallism, metal is everywhere. Metal is the conductor of all matter. The machinic phylum is metallurgical, or at least has a metalic head, as its itinerant probe-head or guidance device. And thought is born more from metal than from stone: metallurgy is minor science in person, ‘vague’ science or the phenomenology of matter. The prodigious idea of Nonorganic Life–the very same idea Worringer considered the barbarian idea par excellence–was the invention, the intuition of metallurgy. Metal is neither a thing nor an organism, but a body without organs. The ‘Northern, or Gothic, line’ is above all a mining or metallic line delimiting this body. The relation between metallurgy and alchemy reposes not, as Jung believed, on the symbolic value of metal and its correspondance with an organic soul but on the immanent power of corporeality in all matter, and on the esprit de corps accompanying it [Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. pp. 408-411]

Gilbert Simondon has contibuted much to the analysis and critique of the hylomorphic schema and of its social presuppositions (‘form corresponds to what the man in command has thought to himself, and must express in a positive manner when he gives his orders: form is thus of the order of the expressible”). To the form-matter schema, Simondon opposes a dynamic schema, that of matter endowed with singularities-forces, or the energetic conditions at the basis of a system. The result is an entirely different conception of the relations between science and technology. See L’individu et sa genese physico-biologique (Paris: PUF, 1964). [Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. fn. 33, p. 555.]

On the mold-modulation relation, and the way in which molding hides or contracts an operation of modulation that is essential to matter-movement, see Simondon, Du mode d;existence des objets techniques, pp. 28-50 (‘modulation is molding in a continuous and perpetually variable manner’; p. 42). Simondon clearly shows that the hylomorphic schema owes its power not to the technological operation but to the social mode of work subsuming that operation (pp. 47-49). [Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. fn. 92, p. 562.

The following is subsections 2 and 3 of section 1 of chapter 1 of Gilbert Simondon's L'individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964. pp. 39-50. Original translation by Taylor Adkins 10/19/07.

2. Validity of the hylemorphic model; the obscure zone of the hylemorphic model; generalization of the notion of the capture of form; modeling, molding, modulation

The technical operation of the capture of form can thus be used as a paradigm provided that one asks this operation to indicate the true relations which it institutes. However, these relations are not established between the raw material and the pure form, but between the prepared matter and materialized forms: the operation of the capture of form does not suppose only raw material and form, but also energy; the materialized form is a form that can act as a limit, as a topological border of a system. The prepared matter is that which can transport the potential energy which charges it in the technical manipulation. The pure form, playing a role in the technical operation, must become a system of points of application corresponding to the reactive forces, while the raw material becomes a homogeneous vehicle of potential energy. The capture of form is a common operation of the form and matter in a system: the condition of energy is essential, and it is not furnished by the form alone; it is the whole system that is the focus of potential energy, precisely because the capture of form is an in-depth operation throughout the entire mass, in consequence of an energy state of reciprocity of the matter in relation to itself<!--[if !supportFootnotes]–>[1]<!–[endif]–>. It is the distribution of the energy which is determining in the capture of form, and the mutual suitability of the matter and the form is related to the possibility of existence and the characters of this energy system. The matter is what transports this energy and the form what modulates the distribution of this same energy. The unity matter-form, at the time of the capture of form, is in the field of energy.

The hylemorphic model retains only the ends from these two half-chains that the technical operation elaborates; the schematics of the operation itself is veiled, been ignored. There is a hole in the hylemorphic representation, making the true mediation disappear, the operation itself which attaches one to the other both half-chains by instituting an energy system, a state that has evolved and must indeed exist so that an object appears with its haecceity. The hylemorphic model corresponds to the knowledge of a man who remains outside the workshop and considers only what enters there and what is done there; to know the true hylemorphic relation, it is not enough even to penetrate inside the workshop and to work with the craftsman: one would need to penetrate inside the mold itself to follow the operation of the capture of form to the various levels of the dimensions of physical reality.

Seizure in itself, the operation of the capture of form can effectuate itself in many ways, according to various methods apparently very different from each other. The true technicality of the operation of the capture of form largely exceeds the conventional limits which separate trades and the fields of work. Thus, it becomes possible, by the study of the energy field of the capture of form, to bring closer the molding of a brick to the operation of an electronic relay. In an electron tube of the triode type, the “matter” (vehicle of potential energy which actualizes itself) is the cloud of electrons leaving the cathode in the circuit cathode-anode-effector-generator. The “form” is what limits this actualization of potential energy in reserve in the generator, i.e. the electric field created by the potential difference between the grid of order and the cathode, which is opposed to the cathode-anode field, created by the generator itself; this counter-field is a limit to the actualization of the potential energy, as the walls of the mold are a limit to the actualization of the potential energy of the system clay-mold, transported by the clay in its displacement. The difference between the two cases lies in the fact that, for clay, the operation of the capture of form is finished in time: it tends, rather slowly (in a few seconds) towards a state of equilibrium, until the brick is taken from the mold; one uses the state of equilibrium while un-molding when it is reached. In the electron tube, one employs a support of energy (the cloud of electrons in a field) of a very weak inertia, so that the state of equilibrium (adequacy between the distribution of the electrons and the gradient of the electric field) is obtained in an extremely rapid time compared to the preceding (some billionths of a second in a tube of greater dimensions, some tenth of a billionth of a second in the smaller tubes).

Under these conditions, the potential of the grid of order is used as a variable mold; the distribution of the support of energy according to this mold is so fast that it is carried out within the smallest minimum time for the majority of the applications: the variable mold is then used to vary in time the actualization of the potential energy of a source; one has stopped not when equilibrium is reached, one continues by modifying the mold, i.e. the grid voltage; actualization is almost instantaneous, there is no end to its release from the mold, because the circulation of the support of energy is equivalent to a permanent release from the mold; a modulator is a continuous temporal mold. The “matter” is there almost only as the support of potential energy; it however always preserves a defined inertia, which prevents the modulator from being infinitely fast. In the case of the clay mold, that which, on the contrary, is technically used as the state of balance that one can preserve while un-molding: one then accepts a rather large viscosity of clay so that the form is conserved during the release from the mold, although this viscosity slows down the capture of form. In a modulator of energy, because one does not seek to preserve the state of balance after the conditions of equilibrium have been met: it is easier to modulate energy carried by compressed air. The mold and the modulator are extreme cases, but the essential operation of the capture of form is achieved there in the same way; it consists of the establishment of energy, durable or not. To mold is to modulate in a final way; to modulate is to mold in a continuous and perpetually variable way.

A great number of technical operations use a capture of form that has intermediate characters between the modulation and the molding; thus, a spinneret, a rolling mill, are molds in a continuous mode, creating by successive stages (master keys) a final profile; the release from the mold is continuous there, as in a modulator. One could design a rolling mill which would really modulate the matter, and would manufacture, for example, a crenulated or dented bar; rolling mills that produce corrugated sheet iron modulate the matter, while a rolling mill smoothes only a model. Molding and modulation are the two borderline cases whose modeling is the average case.

We would like to show that the technological paradigm is not deprived of value, and that it is possible up to a certain point to think the genesis of individuated beings, but under the express condition that one retains as an essential model the relation of the matter in the form through the energy system of the capture of form. Matter and form must be seized during the capture of form, at the moment when the unity of the becoming of an energy system constitutes this relation on the level of the homogeneity of forces between the matter and the form. What is essential and central, is the operation of energy, supposing energy potentiality and a limit of actualization. The initiative of the genesis of substance returns neither to the raw material as passive nor to the form as pure: it is the complete system that generates, and it generates because it is a system of actualization of potential energy, joining together in an active mediation two realities, of different orders of magnitude, in an intermediate order.

Individuation, in the classical sense of the term, cannot have its principle in the matter or the form; neither form nor matter is enough with the capture of form. The true principle of individuation is the genesis itself taking place, i.e. the system in becoming, as its energy self-actualizes. The true principle of individuation can neither be sought in what exists before the individuation occurs, nor in what remains after the individuation is accomplished; it is the system of energy that is individuating insofar as it realizes in the individual this internal resonance of the matter taking form and a mediation between orders of magnitude. The principle of individuation is the single way in which the internal resonance of this matter is established taking this form. The principle of individuation is an operation. With the result that a being is itself, different from all the others; it is neither its matter nor its form, but it is the operation by which its matter took form in a certain system of internal resonance. The principle of individuation of brick is not the clay, nor the mold: this heap of clay and this mold will leave other bricks than this one, each one having its own haecceity, but it is the operation by which the clay, at a given time, in an energy system which included the finest details of the mold as the smallest components of this wet dirt took form, under such pressure, thus left again, thus diffused, thus self-actualized: a moment ago when the energy was thoroughly transmitted in all directions from each molecule to all the others, of the clay to the walls and the walls to the clay: the principle of individuation is the operation that carries out an energy exchange between the matter and the form, until the unity leads to a state of equilibrium. One could say that the principle of individuation is the common allagmatic<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[2]<!–[endif]–> operation of the matter and form through the actualization of potential energy. This energy is energy of a system; it can produce effects in all the points of the system in an equal way, it is available and is communicated. This operation rests on the singularity or the singularities of the concrete here and now; it envelops them and amplifies them<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[3]<!–[endif]–>.

3. Limits of the hylemorphic model

However, one cannot extend in a purely analogical way the technological paradigm to the genesis of all beings. The technical operation is complete in a limited time; after actualization, it leaves a partially individuated, more or less stable being which draws its haecceity from this operation of individuation having constituted its genesis in a very short time; the brick, at the end of a few years or several thousand years, again becomes dust. The individuation is complete in one stroke; the individuated being is never individuated more perfectly than when it leaves the hands of the craftsman. There thus exists a certain externality of the operation of individuation compared to its result. Quite to the contrary, in the living being, the individuation is not produced by only one operation, limited by time; the living being is in itself partially its own principle of individuation; it continues its individuation, and the result of a first operation of individuation, instead of being only one result which gradually degrades, becomes the principle of a later individuation. The individuating operation and the individuated being are not in the same relation except in the product of the technical effort.

To become a living being, instead of being a becoming following individuation, is always to become between two individuations; individuating and individuated are in the living being in a prolonged allagmatic relation. In the technical object, this allagmatic relation exists only for a moment, when both half-chains are connected one to the other, i.e. when the matter takes form: in this moment, individuated and individuating are coincident; when this operation is finished, they separate; the brick does not carry its mold<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[4]<!–[endif]–>, and it is detached from the workman or the machine that pressed it. The living being, after being begun, continues individuating itself; as time individuates the system and partial results of individuation. A new mode of internal resonance is instituted in the living being whose technology does not provide the paradigm: a resonance through time, created by the recurrence of the results going up towards the principle and becoming the principle in its turn. As in the technical individuation, a permanent internal resonance constitutes the unity of the organism. But, moreover, with this simultaneous resonance a successive resonance is superimposed, a temporal allagmatic. The principle of individuation of the living is always an operation, like the capture of technical Form, but this operation is of two dimensions, that of simultaneity, and that of succession, through an ontogenesis supported by memory and instinct.

One can then wonder whether the true principle of individuation is not indicated better by the living than by the technical operation, and if the technical operation could be known as individuating without the implicit paradigm of the life exists in us, that knows the technical operation and practices it with our body diagram, our practices, and our memory. This question is of a wide philosophical range, because it results in wondering whether a true individuation can exist apart from life. For knowledge, it is not the technical, anthropomorphic and consequently zoomorphic operation that is necessary to study, but the natural processes of formation of the basic unities that nature presents apart from the domain defined as the living.

Thus, the hylemorphic model, departing from technology, is insufficient under its usual species, because it is even unaware of the center of the technical operation of the capture of form, and led in this direction to be unaware of the role played by the conditions of energy in the capture of form. Moreover, even restored and completed in the form of the triad matter-form-energy, the hylemorphic model is likely to wrongly objectify a contribution of the living in the technical operation; it is this fabricated intention which constitutes the system thanks to which the energy exchange is established between matter and energy in the capture of form; this system does not form part of the individuated object; however, the individuated object is thought by mankind as having an individuality as a manufactured object, by reference to the manufacture. The haecceity of this brick as brick is not an absolute haecceity, it is not the haecceity of this preexistent object due to the fact that it is a brick. It is the haecceity of the object as a brick: it comprises a reference for use and, through it, to the fabricated intention, therefore with the human gesture which constituted the two half-chains joined together in a system for the operation of the capture of form<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[5]<!–[endif]–>.

In this semse, the hylemorphic model is perhaps only apparently technological: it is the reflection of the vital processes in an abstractly known operation and draws its consistency of what it is made by a living being for living beings. This would explain the very great paradigmatic capacity of the hylemorphic model: coming from the living, it goes back there and applies to it, but with a deficiency owing to the fact that the awakening which has clarified it seizes it through the wrongly simplified particular case of the technical capture of form; it seizes types more than individuals, specimens of a model more than of realities. The dualism matter-form, seizing only the extreme terms of that which is larger and smaller than the individual, obscures the reality that is of the same order of magnitude that produced the individual, and without which the extreme terms would remain separate: an allagmatic operation spreading itself starting from a singularity.

However, it is not enough to criticize the hylemorphic model and to restore a more exact relation in the course of the technical capture of form to discover the true principle of individuation. It is also not enough to suppose in the knowledge that one takes from the technical operation a paradigm initially biological: even if the relation matter-form in the technical capture of form is easily known (adequately or inadequately) thanks to the fact that we are living beings, it is not more important than the reference to the technical field that makes it necessary for us to clarify, explicate, and objectify this implicit concept that the subject carries with it. If testing the vital is the condition of the represented technique, the represented technique becomes in its turn the condition of the knowledge of the vital. One is thus returned from one order to another, so that the hylemorphic model seems to owe its universality mainly to the fact that it institutes reciprocity between the vital domain and the technical field. Besides, the model is not the only example of a similar correlation: the automatism to penetrate the functions of the living by means of representations resulting from technology, from Descartes to current cybernetics. However, an important difficulty emerges in the hylemorphic use of the model: it does not indicate what is the principle of individuation of the living, precisely because it grants to the two terms an existence prior to the relation which links them, or at least because it cannot make it possible to think this relation clearly; it can represent only the mixture, or attachment part by part; the way in which the form informs the matter is not enough for the hylemorphic model. To use the hylemorphic model is to suppose that the principle of individuation is in the form or in the matter, but not in the relation of both. The dualism of substances–soul and body–is in the seed of the hylemorphic model, and one can wonder whether this dualism will leave the technique in good condition.

In order to look further into this examination, it is necessary to consider all the conditions that surround a notional capture of consciousness. If there were only the living individual being and the technical operation, the hylemorphic model perhaps could not be constituted. In fact, it seems well that the middle term between the living field and the technical field was, at the hylemorphic origin of the model, social life. What the hylemorphic model reflects initially is a socialized representation of work and a representation also socialized of the individual living being; the coincidence between these two representations is the foundation common to the extension of the diagram from one field to the other, and the guarantor of its validity in a given culture. The technical operation which imposes a form on a passive and unspecified matter is not only an operation considered abstractly by the spectator who sees between the workshop and what is produced without knowing the development properly stated. It is primarily the operation commanded by the free man and executed by the slave; the free man chooses matter, unspecified because it is generically enough to the designer under the name of substance, without seeing it, without handling it, without preparing it: the object will be made of wood, or iron, or out of the earth. Truthfully, the passivity of matter is its availability abstracted behind the given order that others will carry out. Passivity is that of the human mediation which will retrieve the matter. The form corresponds to that which the man who commands has thought by himself and which he must express in a positive way to whom he gives his orders: the form is thus of the order of the expressible; it is eminently active because it is what one imposes on those who will handle the matter; it is the same contents of the order, that through which it governs. The active character of the form and the passive character of the matter answer the conditions of the transmission of the order which supposes social hierarchy: it is in the contents of the order that the indication of matter is undetermined and at the same time form is determination, expressible and logical. It is through social conditioning that the soul is opposed to the body; it is not through the body that the individual is citizen, participating in collective judgments, common beliefs, surviving in the memory of his fellow citizens: the soul is distinguished from the body as the citizen from the human living being. The distinction between form and matter, the soul and the body, reflects a city that contains citizens in opposition to the slaves. One must notice however that the two designs, technological and civic, if the citizens agree to distinguish the two terms, do not assign to them the same role in the two couples: the soul is not pure activity, full determination, whereas the body would be passivity and indetermination. The citizen is individuated as a body, but he or she is also individuated as a soul.

The vicissitudes of the hylemorphic model owes to the fact that it is neither directly technological nor directly vital: it is a technological operation and a vital reality mediated by the social, i.e. by the conditions already given—in inter-individual communication—from an effective reception of information, in the species the order of fabrication. This communication between two social realities, this operation of reception which is the condition of the technical operation, masks what, within the technical operation, allows two extreme terms—form and matter—to enter into interactive communication: information, the singularity of the “here and now” of the operation, pure event in the dimension of the appearing individual.

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[1]<!–[endif]–> This reciprocity causes a permanent energetic disposal: in a very limited space a considerable amount of work can effectuate itself if a singularity attracts a transformation there.

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[2]<!–[endif]–> Greek word allagma can mean change or vicissitude, but it can also mean that which can be given or taken in exchange, which more genuinely captures the idea of energy exchange here [Tr. Note].

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[3]<!–[endif]–> These real singularities, occasion of a common operation, can be called information. The form is an apparatus for producing them.

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[4]<!–[endif]–> It only manifests the singularities of the here and now constituting the conditions of information of its particular mold: state of usury of the mold (engravings, irregularities).

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[5]<!–[endif]–> The individuality of the brick, that by what this brick expresses such operation that have existed here and now, envelops the singularities of this here and now, prolongs them, amplifies them; however, the technical production seeks to reduce the margin of variability, of unpredictability. The real information that modulates an individual seems like a parasite; it is that by which the technical object remains in some measurement inevitably natural.

Go back to previous section of The Individual and Its Physico-Biological Genesis

Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone, 1991.

Bergson on several occassions compares the approach of philosophy to the procedure of infinitesimal calculus: When we have benefited in experience from a little light which shows us a line of articulation, all that remains is to extend it beyond experience—just as mathematicians reconstitute, with the infinitely small elements that they perceive of the real curve, ‘the curve itself stretching out into the darkness behind them.’ In any case, Bergson is not one of those philosophers who ascribes a properly human wisdom and equilibrium to philosophy. To open us up to the inhuman and the superhuman (durations which are inferior or superior to our own), to go beyond the human condition: This is the meaning of philosophy, in so far as our condition condemns us to live among badly analyzed composites, and to be badly analyzed composites ourselves (Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism pg 27-28).

Deleuze’s project in Bergsonism is to render a systematic understanding of Bergson’s concepts in their interrelations. Of course, this book is an experiment in philosophical buggery, and so there is a clear Deleuzian ring to it. There is much in here that is strictly related to Deleuze’s project, but in itself it still retains a lot of theoretical value and stands as a concise and intriguing reading of Bergson. The first chapter on intuition as method lays out clearly Bergson’s project in three moves: (1) state and create problems; (2) discover the genuine differences in kind; (3) apprehend time in its reality as duration. To construct this method in its rigor, we must set out some rules as we go along.

Rule #1: Apply the test of true and false to problems themselves. Condemn false problems and reconcile truth and creation at the level of problems (15).

Like Bachelard’s insights in The Formation of the Scientific Mind, Bergson argues that true and false are always unsuccessfully applied to solutions because it is the figure of the schoolmaster who gives the problems with presupposed answers. It is in this sense that true freedom lies in a power to decide and constitute problems themselves. Properly stating a speculative problem is the first step to solving it, in the same way that problems get the solutions they deserve based on how well they are formulated.

This line of argumentation is so fundamental to Bergson’s project that he will claim that the history of mankind revolves theoretically and practically around the construction of problems. Becoming conscious of this activity is the undertaking of a conquest of freedom. The goal is not to discover problems, for to discover something is the same as saying that it has always already been there in actuality. The truly creative aspect of thinking confronts the task of inventing new ways of posing the problem, for invention is an actualization of a reality that could have always remained only potential in nature.

Complementary Rule #1: There are two types of false problems: ‘nonexistent problems’ that arise from the confusion of the ‘more’ and the ‘less;’ and ‘badly stated’ questions, so defined because their terms represent badly analyzed composites (17).

To illustrate the first kind of problem Bergson cites the problems of nonbeing, of disorder or of the possible (the problems of knowledge and being)…His analyses…consist in showing that there is not less, but more in the idea of nonbeing than that of being, in disorder than in order, in the possible than in the real. In the idea of nonbeing there is in fact the idea of being, plus a logical operation of generalized negation, plus the particular psychological motive for that operation (such as when a being does not correspond to our expectation and we grasp it purely as the lack, the absence of what interests us) (17).

Bergson here critiques the common understanding of negation because it automatically assumes that nonbeing is quantitatively less than being or that disorder less than order, when in fact these questions are misdirected. He argues that this type of false problem involves a fundamental illusion wherein being, order, and the existent are thought to precede themselves and “project an image of themselves back into a possibility, a disorder, a nonbeing which are supposed to be primordial” (18). Therefore, questions like “Why is there something rather than nothing?” or “Why is there order rather than disorder?” or “Why is there this rather than that (when that was equally possible)?” are false problems because they assume that the negative types pre-exist the positive, as though nonbeing existed before being or the momentary void before the self-generation of God (which contradicts ‘Its’ perfection, theologically and non-anthropomorphically speaking).

The fallacy of the ‘more’ and ‘less’ plagues the simple binary opposition of order/disorder. The reason why this embroils the intellect in false problems is because two or more irreducible orders (mechanism/organism) have been reduced to a general idea of order. But there is no order-in-general just as there is no order-in-itself. This illusion emerges whenever a variety of general ideas are reduced to a general idea encompassing all general ideas. Put another way, the common error of science and metaphysics is to see nothing but differences in degree (quantity) where there are actually only differences in kind (quality). Thus the idea of disorder emerges from the idea of order as a badly analyzed composite, and so the first type of false problem of the ‘more’ and ‘less’ can be considered as a special example of the question of badly analyzed composites.

Like in Kantian critical philosophy, these illusions are due to reason’s own prejudice, so they can not in themselves be removed, only repressed (21). So if the intelligence is the faculty that states problems in general, and the instinct is the faculty that finds solutions, the role of intuition can be best described as a method that distinguishes between true and false problems, even if this means driving the intellect to turn against itself (21).

Rule #2: Struggle against illusion, rediscover true differences in kind or articulations of the real.

With the advent of the theories of relativity in physics, we are quick to mix space and time, constructing a four-dimensional[1] reality. But we find ourselves unable to separate duration from extensity or perception from memory. Intuition focuses on the condition of real (instead of possible) experiences, and this is why it has an obsession with the pure as it is constituted by differences in kind. One question of difference in kind arises in the first chapter of Matter and Memory. Bergson stresses that the body nor the brain are the generating cause behind the faculty of representation; instead, both are involved in a complication of the relationship between a received movement (excitation) and an executed movement (response) (24). Moreover, the brain is not responsible for our representations because it is just another image along with the stimuli in our nervous system and the external world (matter itself being the aggregate of images in their totality). There is no difference in kind between the brain and the body, both are images, and the perception of matter is not different in kind than matter itself (25).

The body’s responsiveness/affectivity gives the subject volume in space insofar as recollections form in memory and link instants together through a conservation of the past in the present. Through a selection of these recollections, memory takes on another form (contraction-memory) by contracting the matter or images that gives the body something other than an instantaneous point through duration and the conjunction of two types of memory (double articulation of memory: re-collecting or assembling fragments and contraction through stabilized reconnection.

Complementary Rule# 2: The real is not only that which is cut out according to natural articulations or differences in kind: it is also that which intersects again along paths converging toward the same ideal or virtual point (29).

This is because duration is not a psychological experience. It is the variable essence of things and is the theme of a complex ontology (34). This ontology is made of two halves: science and metaphysics. Science and metaphysics correspond to the divide between difference in degree and in kind.

Rule #3: State and solve problems in terms of time rather than space.

In its homogeneity, space is nothing but difference in degree, whereas duration takes on all differences in kind because it has the power to qualitatively vary with itself. Thus for Bergson, the qualitative differences are only on the side of time. In space, there is only the ability to diminish or enlarge things—in time, a thing differs from all other things, most of all itself. Alteration is the essence of the individual being in relation to duration (we must wait for sugar to dissolve, as Bergson says). We must wait for a change, because our impatience contrasts with other durations that form a rhythm with mine.

Intuition is not duration but the means by which we emerge from our duration and affirm other durations, above and below us. For inferior and superior durations are not simply quantitative, they are differences in kind. This means that the singular durations are themselves different in kind, and so another individual’s becoming impinges on my duration and a falling-in-and-out-of-step ensues.

Does this mean that humanity can be characterized by its polyphonic harmonies, its syncopated beats, its (war)drum solos? What sort of rhythm and conjunction of durations does it take to through the individual out-of-step with humanity (to either sub- or super-human ends)?

[1] Whitehead’s really quick to do this, especially in The Concept of Nature published in 1919. There are a number of criticisms that Whitehead levels against Bergson, as well as some positive remarks. However, by the mid-30s in Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead warns us that Nietzsche and Bergson are the two primary negative forces of anti-intellectualism plaguing American philosophy (287). This reaction seems quite arbitrary but can readily be explained: Whitehead sees Bergson as a worthy adversary insofar as he represents the philosopher most capable of resonating systematically with the cosmological implications of the theory of relativity. On the other hand, I would wager that Russell influenced Whitehead’s conception of Nietzsche (Russell’s History of Western Philosophy levies a gross misrepresentation of Nietzsche and constitutes probably the most critical and bitter part of the whole book).

–Taylor Adkins

Ignoring the obvious inadequacies of a functionalist line of thinking–namely it’s inability to conceive of reality as anything else than a series of static points connected by lines of force–let’s here call forth a question that allows itself to momentarily detained as a function, even if it ultimately shall cause our functionalizing schema to splinter: What is the nature of cognition? Is it a fundamental process or a secondary production? What is the relation between thought and desire? How do society and multiplicity relate to cognition?

If cognition is social, then thinking is desiring, characterized functionally by its intensity and distance from a fixed point of thought, a pre- or meta-cognitive axiom, a cognum. But these sort of automatically meaningful axioms are granted us only relatively, thus thinking is not just the mental production of what is desired (as wish fulfillment) but rather thinking is the production of a cognitive horizon, thought is the opening of a space for itself in an already overcoded information stream. The intensity of the “surgical” implantation is a matter of the degree of disjunction from the (pre-)cognitive horizon. It is as though each thought were the first, and as if even the most brave, flowing and free of thoughts were always pressed against an interminable emptiness and aporia. Thought is an artists’ cut, a deliberate scrambling of the message, a recoding of the code. Thought erupts afresh anywhere there is an interruption in the smooth function of the body-machine, but it is only at the extreme edge of realities where thinking at long last traverses negation, approaches the sickeningly steep abyss of a-subjective emptiness and a boundless dark beyond barely perceived, which is to say that the being of the cognum consists in the differential intensity of a structural (ontological) transformation of the active presence of being into a passive absence. Thus, thinking has it’s opposite, anti-thinking as it were: a re-naturalization of artifical desire.

In short, thought subsists in the splintering of its own plane of functionality, it is an excess that overflows the presence of things; moreover, thinking in the most abstract is the intense erasure of what-is and what-ought, it consists in forgetting. At the limit of the void thought conjugates its own limitations with the infinite multiplicity of desire and at last becomes itself, a becoming-conscious and a becoming-machine at once, as a propulsion and a suction: thinking founds itself upon a vacuum called forth into existence only by the taut potency of expectation. Thinking in general follows a twisted logic of exploding dualism (by abstraction and deriving contradiction); thus thought can be said to annul its law (of non-contradiction.) Being, striving, wondering; wrenching away, forgetting, thinking: energy flows disperse particles of sensation over the smooth, slippery surface of the pre-cognitive subject, the universal one-multiple. Thought is a juncture away from a continuous boundary: a tangent or trace, a derivative function, a function of the difference in intensities between flows, or within a circuit.

The fractality of cognition is an assertion that thought is ir-regular, slips into gear only when instincts and drives fail to maneuver properly. Awareness is awakened as a process only when smaller-scale local organizations are unable to directly cope with either the amount or kind of information they are receiving. A thought-process has a sort of scale-invariance, or, put another way, cognition preserves justification across transformations, given that all these transformations reproduce an endlessly deep self-similarity. Relations to the exterior are folded deep inside the innermost recesses of a fractal set. Does thought reflect even in its unconscious structure the infinite divergence of fractal boundaries?