Will. The question of the will is not whether to emphasize cycles or fluxes (identities or events, structures or processes, concepts and percepts or acts and effects); still less how to conduct a grand unifying synthesis of the two — events and processes as differing stages or aspects of what is ultimately some overly ideal dialectical Unity; the question is rather, first and foremost, to determine how we can possibly proceed (vis a vis the unconscious) given the radical discontinuity between the two accounts of thought and existence. A theory of the will (a diagnostics of the sick will and a genealogy of the healthy, that is to say the real analysis of the unconscious) must affirm the divergence of a purely ‘immanent’ theory of flows and a purely ‘ideal’ theory of machines. Yet the very difficulty in convincingly theorizing the will is precisely the fact that these two modes of interpretation beg one another and are ultimately cut from the same cloth; a successful account of the will cannot disguise the deadlocks which have hitherto almost completely blocked the progress of understanding the unconscious. (It was owing to the sterile dogmatism wherein both accounts decayed for centuries, each thinking itself “complete,” that their kinship and even mutual implication had been able to go so long unnoticed.)

Resemblances. The event has an excess over existence, as a surplus; must this intimate some radical intervention of Truth or more simply, an intangible and virtual dimension of immanence — that the event happens to return, perhaps without limit, breaking with the continuity of resemblances, linking up with a pre-individual and differential flux?

Ground. Becoming can also be understood as a terrible guest: a noisy, ill-mannered, and parasitic inhabitant of beings. Both noise and parasites (and bad manners for that matter) indicate pathways to grasping becoming — these transversal or transevental vectors each affirm a dangerous divergence from the smooth severity of the host or background. Becoming fractures (a) being into a prism: it is precisely the assemblages of parasitic flows of matter and of life which collectively constitute “becoming,” the eruption and eviction of Being; and yet, in another sense, the singular, material and sufficient cause of existence.

Degeneration. Growth (whether cosmic or vital) is never simply a question of similarity, it is not a matter of the general but rather precisely of the repeated: not of convergent series but “degenerate” planes and lines which expand only through a rigorous fragmentation, a limitless mechanism of tortuous recurrence. What is ontologically primary are these infested and “aware” surfaces, the resurgence of certain parasitic elements within the event, the systematic degeneration on the part of the surface of being, the positive knowledge of our incapability to maintain the stability of the surface against the rising ground.

A science of being is not enough. This subtraction which purifies, this selection and division which makes holy, which ‘invents’ and ‘discovers’ truth — how could ontology do anything but give us theories of the One, of the Law, of the Real, of the existing-as-such? How could it do anything but carefully induce multiplicity to subtract itself into unified theory, divide itself into functions and axioms; endlessly seduce differences into homogeneity, and minorities into conformity; plumb the depths only in order to reproduce an absolute height for an absolute voice?

Ontology is always the political ontology of Power, taken to the absolute point of dispersion where nothing remains, everything is subtracted, except for forces and matter — only functions, pure functions, and even concepts are now only seen in terms of effects, the site they create, “their” ontology. Ontology as both lens and situation, a regime where truths are always the same, is insufficient as long as it remains without a phenomenology of becoming, the concept as event, coming from outside of being which throws existence into doubt.

Multiplicity is first apprehended as risk, as danger; this much seems to be always already understood. The ontological question is how much can we take, what can be subtracted — from the situation, in short from life. Life as subtraction and transubstantiation. The holiness of being should not be misunderstood, for we encounter the most peculiar bifurcation precisely here, the curvature of space itself, the uncanny pull of the invisible — the Other, a zone which implies another reality — where being merges with non-being. The fold between us.

Ontology grasps the other only as what-escapes, as invisible or abstract lines of flight carrying on vertiginously into infinity, as impossibilities spiralling into a “beyond” of the situation itself. The other infects ontology like a virus, causes thought to question itself. The other is why ontology is insufficient, and why it always already demands a meta-ontology, and perhaps even explains the disconcerting rigor of ontology’s essence: a code of codes designed to produce a generalize, cosmic decoding. Multiplicity is the outside: ontology grasps the Other only in the form the void-set, thereby grounding multiplicity in the void. The ontologist prays: the void is One, being is empty, God is dead. Anarchy and servitude, chaos plus transcendence: strangely enough, this is precisely how ontology forces an overflow, an excess, which causes it to precisely catch sight of its other. An agitation which awakens.

Transiency hurls itself everywhere into a deep state of being. And therefore all forms of this our world are not only to be used in a time-specific sense, but should be included into those phenomena of superior significance in which we partake, and of which we are a part.

 

Rilke

Ideas arrest and extrude contents from a flux and thus illuminate forms from chaos. An inversion or involution, not the simple highlighting of a pattern or introducing a context — but rather through a constant, asymmetrical, positive communication with the flux, and so in a sense a commingling with the essence of form itself. Yet a bifurcation defers any discernment of the origin of ideas, they are not a memory. 

They do not come from you. (A code has an inventor, to be sure; but like a strand of DNA, these codes are always secondary, indirect, relative — a map with moving parts, not the tracing of a blueprint.) Codes ensure the maintenance of a form only to an approximate degree; in this sense they mimic the behavior of soap bubbles which appear spherical — the question is whether an ideal form exists, or whether we are interpreting patterns from the turbulent interaction of forces. 

Does matter dramatize ideas into reality, or do ideas awaken things into being? A code documents a becoming, hence it is not a relationship as such, though it may be connected or disjoined from other codes. What is coded does not necessarily resemble the code which is applied: in fact these cases constitute rather singular exceptions, which have formed the morphological substructure of the concept itself. 

A strange kind of concentration is required to distinguish abstract lines from concrete, a balance which thus glimpses the purity of the unformed. Ever more rigorously is the implicit demand of communicating multiplicity, which thus is identical to real thought in an essential sense. Both being and becoming, the void and the multiplicity, are required: their origin is an orbit: a sun of pure light and a decentered relative emptiness, always two foci about which the endlessly varying expressions of successive ideas sketch a slow ellipse. 

Two axes of pure thought are distinguished in the revolution of the concept: an involution by which the idea interrupts itself and places itself in question, and an evolution which now appears to follow, and now appears the lead these involutions. A turbulent geometry, at the very least: and so it would seem a sense for singularity, a kind of implicit differential topology is required to catch sight of this tightly controlled turbulence, this uncanny becoming — the essence of form.

“We define the abstract machine as the aspect or moment at which nothing but functions and matters remain. A diagram has neither substance nor form, neither content nor expression. Substance is a formed matter, and matter is a substance that is unformed either physically or semiotically. Whereas expression and content have distinct forms, are really distinct from each other, function has only ‘traits’ of content and expression between which it establishes a connection: it is no longer even possible to tell whether it is a particle or a sign. A matter-content having only degrees of intensity, resistance, conductivity, heating, stretching, speed or tardiness; and a function expression having only ‘tensors,’ as in a system of mathematical, or musical, writing. Writing now functions on the same level as the real, and the real materially writes. The diagram retains the most deterritorialized content and the most deterritorialized expression, in order to conjugate them. Maximum deterritorialization sometimes starts from a trait of content and sometimes from a trait of expression; that trait is said to be ‘deterritorializing’ in relation to the other precisely because it diagrams it, carries it off, raises it to its own power. The most deterritorialized element causes the other element to cross a threshold enabling a conjunction of their respective deterritorializations, a shared acceleration. This is the abstract machine’s absolute, positive deterritorialization…

“Defined diagrammatically in this way, an abstract machine is neither an infrastructure that is determining in the last instance nor a transcendental Idea that is determining in the supreme instance. Rather, it plays a piloting role. The diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality. Thus when it constitutes points of creation or potentiality it does not stand outside history but is instead always ‘prior to’ history. Everything escapes, everything creates — never alone, but through an abstract machine that produces continuums of intensity, effects conjunctions of deterritorialization, and extracts expressions and contents. This Real-Abstract is totally different from the fictitious abstract of a supposedly pure machine of expression. It is an Absolute, but one that is neither undifferentiated nor transcendent. Abstract machines thus have proper names (as well as dates) which of course designate not persons or subjects, but matters and functions. The name of a musician or scientist is used in the same way as a painter’s name designates a color, nuance, tone, or intensity: it is always a question of a conjunction of a Matter and Function. The double deterritorialization of the voice and the instrument is marked by a Wagner abstract machine, a Webern abstract machine, etc. In physics and mathematics, we may speak of a Riemann abstract machine, and in algebra of a Galois abstract machine… There is a diagram whenever a singular abstract machine functions directly in a matter.”

(Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, ”587 B.C – A.D. 70: On Several Regimes of Signs”)

“There exists, if I am not mistaken, an entire world which is the totality of mathematical truths, to which we have access only with our mind, just as a world of physical reality exists, the one like the other independent of ourselves, both of divine creation.

Charles Hermite

“By keenly confronting the enigmas that surround us, and by considering and analysing the observations that I have made, I ended up in the domain of mathematics. Although I am absolutely without training in the exact sciences, I often seem to have more in common with mathematicians than with my fellow artists.

M.C. Escher

At the height of its concentration, the art of the [twentieth] century — but also all the other truth procedures, each according to its own resources — aimed to conjoin the present, the real intensity of life, and the name of this present as given in the formula, a formula that is always at the same time the invention of a form. It is then that the pain of the world changes into joy.

Alain Badiou, The Century 146

To move beyond an age, a century, an image of thought — what, today, does this require, and what would it allow? What does it mean to exit the territory, to proceed beyond the limits of a century, that is, while still maintaining oneself firmly within it, and thus despite constituting a series of processions within it? 

Immersed in the viscous flow of time, to turn over a new leaf, to work out a new concept, to produce a new kind of humanity, for a new kind of world. The concept of novelty is fraught with internal fissures and cracks. It is neither wretched nor glorious, but already an experiment in formalization, the process of deactivating a mythology, a path.

To deactivate a machine, there must be an overflow, a glitch or fault, topologically speaking a bursting, as though the paradoxical new formula itself unfolded in order to become a smooth space of thought. The notion escapes in two directions, a new earth rises within the old.

Alain Badiou argues the new is neither an inexplicable sacrifice of tradition nor a mediation of the various dimensions of human becoming, but rather the production, the education, and the very culmination of a new humanity, ready for a new thought, a new world. There is here, perhaps, more than a parallel to the work of Gilles Deleuze. The paths by which one leaves the territory, the lines of flight or vectors of deterritorialization, are exacting experiments — a cautious but unsparing dislocation of cognitive and cultural coordinates.

But he [Lacan] did not realize the consequences of his rupture with Freudian determinism, and didn’t appropriately situate “desiring machines” — whose theory he had iniated — within incorporeal fields of virtuality. This object-subject of desire, like strange attractors in chaos theory, serves as an anchorage point with a phase space (here, a universe of reference) without ever being identical to itself, in permanent flight on a fractal line. In this respect it is not only fractal geometry that must be invoked, but fractal ontology. It is the being itself which transforms, buds, and transfigures itself. The objects of art and desire are apprehended within the existential Territories which are at the same time the body proper, the self, the maternal body, lived space, refrains of the mother tongue, familiar faces, family lore, ethnicity… No existential approach has priority over another. Thus it’s not a question of a causal infrastructure and of a superstructure representative of the psyche, or of a world separated from sublimation. The flesh of sensation and the material of the sublime are inextricably interwoven. Relationship to the other does not proceed through identification with a preexisting icon, inherent to each individual. The image is carried by a becoming other, ramified in becoming animal, becoming plant, becoming machine and, on occasion, becoming human.

Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different. (Aldous Huxley)

Through saturation an artist brings all the diverse elements of experience into a real interfusion, an affirmative disjunction. The artist opens passageways, a vessel for engendering a pure becoming. An encounter with an outside, presenting a pure force which art can only express — art as transistor, as angel. As the cruelest resistance, which dispassionately disentangles the varieties of forces of essence, cautiously (even systematically) allowing the new to break free.

Art is certainly multiple, social, plurivocal. But our harmony is also a hint — we remind each other at every turn that force is also musical, cosmic, vegetable, molecular, animal…

Greatness in art is the power of resonance, not of reflection. Communication is certainly not the point. An experiment approaches the real precisely in order to catch up, to leap behind it, to stop time. Great art harbors no secret soothing, no escape into transcendence, but real insight into an immanent transformation. The human spirit — that greatest of resistances which causes even the stars to resonate — can overcome even itself.

The dimension called “aesthetic” could perhaps be distinguished as a singular torsion in the soul, a kind of critical overcoming of an internal limit, from which emerge limitless variations. A dangerous dimension of pure becoming which has always been working, in secret, just narrowly breaking free from this abyss overflowing with thorns, diverging lines, machines, animals, molecules, stars.

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying. (Nietzsche)

The scientific enterprise of extracting constants and constant relations is always coupled with the political enterprise of imposing them on speakers and transmitting order-words.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 101

Deleuze and Guattari admit that the notion of “minority” is very complex, with references and correlations in all dimensions of human and non-human existence. The opposition is not simply quantitative: “Majority implies a constant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by which to evaluate [it].” (ATP 105) Thus the majority need not be in numerical majority; for majority supposes only the assumption of a “state of power and domination, not the other way around” — the standard measure, when it is assumed to be the standard, thereby becomes major. Minorities, on the other hand, are not determined by constants — they are not systems but subsystems, outsystems — seeds of potential, creative and created, crystals of becoming.

These considerations are deployed together in one of the most significant points in Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of linguistics, which is this: that grammar is a system of power primarily, not a prototype but a protocol, directly connected to an economy and a politics more primarily than to a network of syntagms and semantemes. Thus even though grammar cannot be presented as an invariant linguistic substructure, it nevertheless possesses singular structural features — political ones — namely, functioning as the medium of transmitting commands, “order-words.” Thus language is shaped directly by political and economic forces; it is a prerequisite for the individuals’ submission to social laws. “No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions.” (101)

A language is a war machine bursting with positive lines of flight, inherent lines of free variation. Grammar’s unifying and homogenizing function, far from being the result of purely philosophical or structural considerations, is rather an immediately political phenomena. We are never going to find — and ought to stop looking for — a homogeneous system still unaffected by regulated, immanent, continuous processes of variation: “The unity of language is fundamentally political.” (101) Deleuze and Guattari outline two general treatments of language corresponding to the major/minor distinction. We can (1) attempt to extract constant relations from variables, or we can (2) place the relationships themselves in constant variation. The point here is that certain linguistic categories only make sense when we are doing the first (extracting constants) — for example: speech/language, synchrony/diachrony, distinctive/non-distinctive. Only the second treatment offers a contrast to linearized segmentation and the presence of “constants” — style, prose, the pragmatic function of language — for “their very characteristics give them the power to place all the elements of language in a state of continuous variation…” (103-104). Minor languages “proliferate shifting effects,” possess a taste for “overload” — they restrict constants, extend variations, deploy continua which sweep away every component. This so-called “poverty” of minor languages, Deleuze and Guatarri write, “is not a lack but a void or ellipsis allowing one to sidestep a constant instead of tackling it head on, or to approach it from above or below instead of positioning oneself within it.” (104)

They emphasize several times that “major” and “minor” do not indicate two languages but rather two usages or functions of language. Language itself is a battleground without clear boundaries, but rather lines of variation, transitional zones, limitrophes. Deleuze and Guattari remind us that the notion of a dialect itself is entirely relative, since we would need to know with what major language it relates and exercises its function. Minor languages themselves define dialects, precisely through their own possibility for variation. “Should we identify major and minor languages on the basis of regional situations and bilingualism or multilingualism including at least one dominant language and one dominated language, or a world situation giving certain languages an imperial power over others (for example, the role of American English today)?” Let us consider several clear reasons it would be unthinking to do so. A minor language is not immune to the treatment of language which draws homogeneous systems. Furthermore, it is difficult — especially politically — to see how users of minor language can operate without giving it a constancy and homogeneity making it at least locally major. Yet Deleuze and Guattari remind us of the opposite, and perhaps much more compelling argument: that the more a language acquires the characteristics of a major language, the more it is affected by the continuous variations which transpose it into a minor language. If American English is dominant, a major language on the global scale, it is also by necessity worked over, intensified, amplified, and transmuted by every minority in the world. Again, the distinction between major and minor is not really between two kinds of language, but two kinds of use of language.

Events are volcanic. The event opens upon an outside, a beyond, a resonant and enigmatic depth. Events move the world, releasing free and untamed vibrations within and without us. They place being into relation with exteriority. But how does evental resonance work?

When the new breaks free it is almost like it suddenly becomes “permitted” to us to learn to see all over again. Perhaps it would be better to say: we are allowed to learn to feel all over again. Events never fail to connect up with an outside; they are erupting continually from underneath those powerful, serious and “grounding” forces which served to maintain the distance, to suppress the joyous escape of the event.

Flight annuls gravity, or more precisely, exploits it. These overturning or outbreaking forces dramatized by the event pre-exist the intervention itself. I emphasize this point since events break history apart from end to end, setting its diverse elements into frenzied motion. The event is a kaleidoscope, or a glittering crystal. It is easy, in other words, to get distracted. For the “same” turbulence operates at every level, from the cosmic to the microscopic.

Forces break free over any duration — whether we consider the cosmos at the scale of millennia or a small region of space in terms of fractions of a second.

Events cannot be captured ontologically since they rupture the equilibria on both planes, bridging the microscopic and the cosmic. In this sense the only real ontological question has ever been the identity of the event. For events are metaphysical; but are they also metaphors?

Nonetheless — ontologists, those dangerous conceptual vultures, sharpened on cruel paradox and hungry for warmth, creativity, delight, joy or, renouncing all of that, a single shred of certainty — have they really managed to analyze themselves deaf to the turbulent clamor of becoming?

Dionysus used to ask Ariadne: is it still the same if it occurs only once?

The point is not that the events are unstable in their identity, but that the event deceives us regarding its unity and originality — and the problem is not just that we’re looking at it under different metrics. The question is not about categories. Univocity is not universality; and anyway, infinite polyvalence is the point, events are matter becoming cosmic.

Process (or production) is always doubled, recursive, and anticipatory. Events escape repetition — as through by growing hard and sinking to the bottom of the stream.

Events coalesce along lines of inherent variation.

Events scramble being, inflect it towards an involution, making of singular being a vorticial flow, a black hole leading infinitely deeper — but nonetheless, some stray intensities manage to escape the black hole or the white wall of infinity.

Events, then, are also machinic operations — disintegrations, dissolutions, dislocations, dismemberments… The real is the ceaseless whirring of machines.

This is how revolutions begin. It really doesn’t matter why; it happens. All the same, saying that the break, the gap, the hole which caused the initial swerve is ‘real’ is like saying what is beyond the horizon, or directly behind our heads, can be ‘seen’ directly.

We are dealing in metaphors, and we are not. The ‘sober’ point about the Real is that this kind of ‘seeing’ is always indirect. This is why the psychoanalysts can claim, for example, that separation, just like connection, does not signify, but is the ground of signification itself.

This incidentally is Freud’s truly revolutionary point, the opening of a critical discourse into the profound enigma of affectivity. Freud is especially curious, for whatever reason you like (it doesn’t matter,) about events exhibiting an extreme of affectivity, or situations involving breakthrough or “transformative” experiences and emotions — in short, cases of enormously powerful or compulsive social and spiritual intensities.

Freud’s point is simply that we cannot interpret these events — though he is mainly concerned with psychical events — directly. For are but they part of a larger social story which nonetheless upsets and overturns that order. The libidinal code or ‘machine’ of the unconscious is at once political. Hence the ultimate anxiety of psychoanalysis is its originary event: the “real” problem before them — a suffering patient — mirrors the “theoretical” problem — a discourse structured by interpretation.

It is Freud’s uncanny but blazing insight that especially here we must resist directly interpreting the suffering experienced (not only the patients, but especially in this case the analysts’ own desire for a cure…)Why is it necessary to radicalize this hypothesis — to resist interpreting events as such directly? Because it is the case that events participate in a general mobilization of the entire field of possibilities. Yet even here, the event is still a metaphor — simply a declaration of turbulence: events escape, they liberate and break free.

Approaching thus, the real intensity or difference which “matters” completely escapes through our web of concepts, the mysterious ‘outside’ of our abstract dualisms. Interpretation covers over affective reality, our singular sense of the world and the universal reality of our senses. In covering up this explosive reality of affects, there is also produced an organism with desires — in short, a social organization or body.

We should not be surprised the body also has its double. The psyche cannot be reduced to sociality, but neither can it be purely extracted from it. It is affective — a powerful, dangerous, harmful distortion of perception closely tied up with the interpretative faculties (or overcoding machines) themselves — and produces an ceaseless series of events, which are, taken singularly, generic and indeterminate.

The real event resists direct interpretation — precisely because it is affective. To assert affectivity is primary is not enough; we must feel it, create it, like artists — and do we yet appreciate their new role today, and how we all are artists?

Do we realize how simple it is to disseminate yourself throughout the Cosmos? For events fragment our subjectivity, they split the Cosmos from end to end; in this turbulence everything is blown apart, galaxified, molecularized, liberated. Do we realize how frequently we produce our own bodies without organs?The event is neither yet-to-be nor already passed. The event breaks down, but sometimes, is also a breaking through.

We slip instantaneously and effortlessly into animal life, molecular life, cosmic life — a profound and pregnant life, in direct relation to the becoming of the cosmos. Can we emphasize enough how easy this celerity is — how everyday and even trivial it is? But can we emphasize enough the dangers, how easy it is to botch it, to fling ourselves headfirst into the vortex, to end up only painting — our God upon every wall…?

It is not the event nor its intervention which awakens the mystery. Rather it is something entirely within the event which opens onto the entire universe — an effect.

“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)

If we listen closely to the breath of the spirit as well as to the word of being, an entirely new kind of history may become possible.

Disclosing a lethal truth (into) power, organization trembles before the disorganized generativity of decentralized multiplicity.

Are we transmitting history backwards through time? Are languages transforming themselves through us?

Is it by nature that we are socially-oriented creatures? Or does “humanity” on the contrary mark with precision a moment of originary disarticulation of (biological) organization — is a “human” a swarm?

The machine precedes the apparatus and the model just as noise precedes the relation, swarms precede the face, and an absolute nothingness precedes the other. The grinding of war machines, the art and engineering of multiplicity, networked disciplinary techniques — all these emerge long before the complex “legal” apparatus like tribes, states and religions.

How do we become world-oriented? How do we open onto manifold processes of becoming?

Segmented procedures carefully separate of bodies from capabilities — the social articulation of the “human,” the technologization of the body. Segment-rules inscribe society upon itself, through the operation of collective assemblages of enunciation.

Mass confinement of bodies and minds within the illusory ‘certainty’ of a segmented social process. A false naturalization of the organism upon which follows the miraculation of pure operativity — war, religion, capital, psychoanalysis, cybernetics. A natural history of celerity.

Multiplicity does not exist in a substantive but an operative sense. The “being” of a network (an ensemble of interdependent elements including their relationships) is a very nearly nonsensical question, for it unites the fertile middle ground between universals and particulars — intensity.

Does spirit, force, intensity, or “breath” in fact name a machinic phylum underlying reason, nature, even life itself — as the very process of production?

We must catch multiplicity operating in a field of intensities.

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?

Caspar David Friedrich, Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon (1824)

On The Origin of Duration

(Notes towards a “Genealogy” of Time)

Time is invention, or it is nothing.

Henri Bergson

Time is a stutter, a clue, a signal from beyond which comes from within. The concept “temporality” breaks itself, already expresses divergence, it forever escapes our control.

The flow of time outruns itself, it is always diachronous, bringing thought straight back to its origin, to the quality without quantity, to an intensity issuing neither in number nor form, but rather in pure expressivity itself, in the depth and fullness of experience. Memory is the form of this recurrence, through the continuous variation of matter along certain axes of symmetry, the flowing solution of a complex problem of folding events, unfolding new durations.

Becoming is a transmission received in convoluted mazes, actualization is labyrinthine: not only a million decisions, but a million ideas — and so a million qualities, varieties and dimensions of time, tucked away and tiny, alive in the cracks between the problems and the idea, between memory and the future, waiting to be explored.

Let us take as our starting point the distinction made by Bergson regarding the dynamic and non-instantaneous nature of time; that is, that time is not formed simply of seconds, minutes, centuries, and so on, but is already a continuous and dynamic flow of experience, a more or less intense duration and not an evenly-divided series of instants.

Temporality therefore presents two salient aspects for our consideration: flow and divergence. In what sense does time present us with difference? Consider the rate of the flow of time. A pure temporal differential, the self-referential speed of speed: one second per second. But is this still an abstraction? To what extent are the models of flow and division themselves a false clarity, an imagined orderliness to cover over a deeper mystery?

That we feel the flow of time seems incontestable. We experience duration not initially as divided but precisely as continuous, a dynamism as opposed to a series of static instants. In this sense, time embodies itself as matter, resistance to difference, as the power of connection and solidarity, indifferent to differences. Such time oozes along, eternally viscous, resistant to other times rhythms, allergic to alien meter.

Nothing dangerous, fluid, or unusual can occur in these sticky one-way channels — except for an unexpected intervention, from somewhere beyond. Adhesive surfaces in particular are naturally generative of strange ruptures.

But there are many other phenomenological classes of temporality. Already the non-instantaneous approaches from another kind of time altogether, a more profound order of time, in the sense of being extruded from deep beneath the earth, allowing the spontaneous ascent of new celerities from out of the non-human depths of bodies: the emergence of an alternate temporality from within the body of an already-existing, mobile temporal order. Birth. In a real sense, then, these phenomenological categories are not, in fact, separate modalities of time; but these divergent aspects are welded together into a machine, a concept which must then become intractable paradox: for just as an expression is inseparable from its content, flow is inseparable from divergence, from an initial declination.

It is curious that the two faces of time echo the two faces of science, human and non-human; and more curious still that the division seems to have been idealized as a classical theoretical foundation, a substitute for a material investigation of time as a diachronous vector of transformation, a materialism of time as the constant deterrence of other flows of time.

The process of the individuation of time is ontologically prior to any particular regime of temporality. Time lacerates, it opens the state onto new kinds of flows of energy.

Transformation makes possible the impossible. The question is not only about mobility but receptivity, not only celerity but capacity to become informed, to learn. The anxious power of ideas… It’s like Victor Hugo’s voids and lanterns, and Caspar David Friedrich’s generative mists: obscurities produce revelations, they are able to be dispersed, capable of being pierced by the light of a lantern.

Ideas burst open the iron bars of prejudice, of habit. But ideas become exposed themselves to a relational milieu, as they move through expression into actualization, they begin to take on the status of events as son as they become stated. How does the idea become folded into the event?

How do events become folded into ideas? An event already reflects the irresolution, the spontaneous rupture between the two “modes” of temporality (which are also the same.) An event lives only through a relational milieu it is born into and through which it intervenes onto an outside.

This exposure to multiplicity of the idea or the event is a receptivity towards structuration, the pre-individual field necessary for genesis. Diachrony is the metaphysical principle naming the structure of time, as a active dimension between two rates of developments, conjoining and disjoining at once without synthesis. Permanent imbalance: continuous development.

Every idea can be dramatized as a series of spatio-temporal dynamisms, but there are non-spatial, non-temporal ideas. The process of actualization is not inevitable, it is the most difficult thing there is. Forward progress. It’s as easy as falling down: behind the too-clear equilibrium, a mobile shift or varying imbalance which is real.

The flow of time is the anti-relation which grounds relations, pure abstract field in which events inter-individuate one another. Again– two inter-related faces of time:

1. Time is a decoding flow which extrudes buried formations (pre-individual field)… [memory, duration, depth]
2. Time is a coded division of a development into generic segments (pre-informational field)… [instant, sensation, event]

Time is produced, in short, by a creative flow of energy. The fall into error, irreversible transformation, the result of knowledge. The ontological schism itself.

Time is not inherently dualistic, only ontologically so: diachrony is the fundamental fact, one perceived indeed as a continuity across a break, so that the fracture in the subject is total, but pervaded in every piece by larval luminosities, new orders of temporality struggling to remember. The universe is trying hard to learn.

Phenomenological unity is the essence of the temporal; this can be amplified or obscured by the ontological consideration of division. Flow are only as primary as breaks, from which they are themselves produced. Does asymmetry precede relation?

Topos (biocosm)

In the beginning all things were mixed together; then came understanding and created order.

Anaxagoras [1]

What had to be accomplished in that chaotic pell-mell of primeval conditions, before all motion, so that the world as it now is might come to be, with its times of day and times of year, all conforming to law, with its manifold beauty and order, all without the addition of any new substance or force?

How, in other words, could a chaos become a cosmos?

Friedrich Nietzsche [2]

The true difficulty for psychology is that the field of the unconscious is also the site of the production and interpretation of reality. With the unconscious we encounter thoughts and bodies mixed together heterogeneously, without the clear ontological divisions we tend in other disciplines to take simply for granted.

It is no wonder then why Lacan has suggested the reality of the unconscious is the most difficult subject for philosophers to approach [3] — for there is no ontological method which could aim to find handles on this incorporeal assemblage, on this “body without organs.” In the enfolding of the psychic within the material we discover a phenomenological reality of the unconscious which is necessarily presupposed by any ontological analysis.

Why? Because the unconscious functions as an unground for structures, obstructing original pathways to being, blurring images and spaces for thought. In the unconscious, only becoming matters.

The unconscious is a passageway and a field of differences: both a coded transfer and an imaginary matrix. Psychology is not a narratology, not grounded in the process of interpretation or the gestures of metaphor, but rather ceaselessly questioning these symbolic foundations, the formation of the signifier itself. Thus the “ontology” (and this word is already inappropriate) proper to the unconscious is transitive, abyssal, possessing a “structure” like that of an eternal recurrence of a minimal difference, a break within the identity of the concept; already, however, this difference is a working system, a living machine, even a whirling chaotic milieu which produces the conditions for heterogeneous development of all kinds.

Therefore, a phenomenological account of the unconscious must be beyond representations, beyond the egoist separation from the real, endeavoring to move life-negating philosophy to its topological limit. Precisely the operation of the unconscious(as revealed in the production of significance, the forms of discourse and the theory of abstract structure,) would be in question in such a rigorous thinking of becoming.

It is already obvious that (perhaps until quite recently) only Nietzsche’s philosophy could be our exemplary model here, for it is a philosophy at once cosmic, molecular, machinic and abstract; his project is an atheistic and profound philosophy of becoming, a thinking of pure difference, of singular intensities and diverse assemblages of forces.

By blurring the ontological division between thought and being, a passageway is opened beyond the transitory figures of discourse which is the field of the unconscious. In order to study the production of the unconscious, we must already move our discourse beneath and beyond discourse; this, perhaps, is not even enough. We must move ourselves beyond good and evil — that is, beyond representatives, beyond idealizing fictions, pretexts and excuses for hatred, for shame and lust for power.

Thus this pre-ontological phenomenological position aims beyond power and knowledge, and radically reformulates the question of the production of desire as a non-totality, open to multiplicity. The philosophy which could describe production generically, i.e., of reality and the unconscious at once, could not be primarily anthropological. It would make no teleological or ontological presuppositions.

We must go back as far as Anaxagoras and his concept of the nous to find an adequate model of this mode of pure becoming beneath expression. Nous is the infinite and self-ruled movement of spirit upon itself, operating via the thinnest of things, through the purest and lightest of beings. The abstract machine of the cosmos is expressed or instantiated in the self-organization of matter which takes place in transduction, and works not just by exploding the existing organized fields of intensities. Rather, by pervading even the pre-original field of becoming with a kind of free and constructive energy, nous accomplishes a primordial return, from to earth to its turbulent ungrounding and back, all as a single and simple free movement: play.

In this sense, the spirit is a real body, a uniquely free inclination, originating rotary movements at random in the field of intensities gradually extending until everything is turbulently in motion. Nous is the pure abstract machine, the ungrounding motor of becoming, the simultaneous vehicle of cosmic and psychic separation.

In Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Nietzsche dramatically presents Anaxagoras’ account of cosmogenesis. In his elegant formulation, “the order and efficiency of things are but the direct result of blind mechanical movement” produced in the dead intertia of chaos by “a free and undetermined spirit” guided by “neither causes nor ends.” [4] The primary reality is chaos, a differential field of intensities: a minimal change anywhere begins the whirling and gyrating process of centrifugal development through which a chaos becomes a cosmos, unearthing unconscious forms buried beneath the ground, transcoding them into explicit information.

This turbulence of turbulences is process itself, genesis, a revolutionary anti-structure which expands radially outwards in ever-widening orbits, encompassing the entire universe.

There is no representation, no anthropomorphic teleology in such a conception: begin randomly, at any susceptible point in the chaotic mixture. In the whirling vortex, similar elements are naturally joined together: the heavy, dark and moist are forced into the center, compressed by centrifugal forces, while everything that is warm, light, ethereal becomes concentrated around the outside. That there is some free independent force which initiates the process is the really crucial point; again, an ontology of flux, thought liberated from teleology.

The Anaxagorean nous is the principle of individuation itself, the primordial impulse which is also the ordering and governing principle of all things. It is the elemental medium communicating with and organizing itself. The centrifugal forces in the vortex are the means by which nature tears light from darkness, and wrenches darkness from itself so it can be purified through fire. In nous we have the production, the source of potency itself, the force of force which dominates in complete freedom and reckless abandon, a violent and real conception of strength. Nous is lightness itself at play, engendering the genesis of the real, pure power: the infinite and free force of becoming.

Eros (opening/being-opened)

All psychology so far has got stuck in moral prejudices and fears; it has not dared to descend into the depths. To understand it as morphology and the doctrine of the development of the will to power, as I do – nobody has yet come close to doing this even in thought – insofar as it is permissible to recognize in what has been written so far a symptom of what has so far been kept silent.

Friedrich Nietzsche [5]

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

Friedrich Nietzsche [6]

Time begins without warning, at random and without purpose. It comes in bursts, stuttering, flowing endlessly towards us across an infinite abyss. From this initial movement and circular ramification, chaos begins to develop into increasingly complex forms, unfolding alternate and internal dimensions of time.

At this point, to ask why it begins at all is really to ask why it begins at a particular time; but in fact there is no singular starting point. Rather we always begin with the field of pre-individual intensities, with pure multiplicity. Plurality is anterior to unity. Anaxagoras’ account must not be confused with those who would attribute a purpose to becoming. The nous is undetermined and free, and from its random intervention the genealogical development of the universe follows.

The cosmos and the unconscious are not totalities but assemblages of singularities, heterogeneous complexes of machines, all engendered by the nous and in some sense completely determined by its anti-foundational, originating indeterminacy. These machinic fields of desire are productive of new assemblages and varietes; that is, they are engaged in experimentation, engendering new differential surfaces upon which new kinds of transductions, new modalities of events are possible. Hence, by definition none of these fields are singular or complete, and though they unfold “mechanistically,” they do not therefore express a totality (whether in single purpose, homogeneous development, or final state.)

The evolution of fields of intensity endlessly produces more and more novel forms without a fixed horizon. There is no origin or destination, but only an eternal return to the edge of chaos, enriching the earth and language; this conjunction itself is the form which is continually ungrounded, folded and fragmented, laid open, wrecked upon infinity. Time is this recurring passage and return to the exterior.

Therefore the modality of opening should be understood both from the inside and from the outside. For opening onto… is also to be opened, to be lacerated, to extrude from deeper within a new ontological dimension yet more primordial than the orders of interior and exterior. Thus the unconscious is transpierced by reality as well as by expression; when we write, we are violently opening bodies, being opened by words. With thought there begins a new inward and abyssal dimension which reinscribes desire upon surfaces and objects, hijacking a transversal signal which circulates through new regions of becoming, bridging each ontological “jump” into a more or less complex field of intensity.

A subject is conjured into being through interpellation by speech. It exists by virtue of becoming pressed into place, made to conform to a role, made to assume itself as (guilty) One — transfixed by judgment. In other words, the space of thought cannot be thought outside of its biocosmic implications; as Deleuze poignantly notes, politics precedes being. So how is consciousness produced in the midst of life?

Hegel answers this question by pointing towards a mystical negation of life which is nonetheless mysteriously tied to life. Ironically, Nietzsche might approve of this formulation as a historical (and not metaphysical) description. That is, consider the same abstract story without the mysticism. In the Nietzschean terms of Genealogy of Morals, we see that the life-negating processes of guilt, bad conscience and shame are in fact the productive furnace of individuation which is prior to the necessarily self-hating individuals themselves. The individual is an impossibility as a subject, produced only in order to be controlled. The perfect subject is calculable, a commodity.

The mystical and exploitative dissociation of energy and desire found in both theology and capitalism also accounts for the compulsive fascination of psychoanalysis with power. In other words, psychoanalysis characteristically tends to hide the historical fact that the only subjects we’ve ever been able to create are always self-hating, resentful, impotent herd types, whereas in terms of the state precisely these are “good individuals.” Democracy is born from slavery, it is an internalization of the external confinements of slavery, whose over-all structure is articulated through the people. In a sense, this is true of all behavior insofar as it is expression: its form can never separated from some kind of collective enunciation.

In particular, this frozen diachrony of freedom within slavery is not merely a tense turbulence isolated to politics, but is a symptom of a dangerous double-becoming which modern society cannot help but feel profoundly. This internal agitation causes us no little amount of anxiety, mirroring as it does the profound external agitation of the modern urban space, and so further contributes to our alienation from reality; again often stimulating the compulsive construction of more and more intricate mechanisms of observation and social control. More fundamentally, separation and micro-segmentarity are the reality of the social, the cruel movement of culture dividing bodies into organs, horrifically opening organic bodies onto more primary machinic systems of control.

Machina (creativity)

…in the determination or behavior of each citizen or singularity there should be present, in some form or another, the call to a world democracy to come.

Each singularity should determine itself with the sense of the stakes of a democracy which can no longer be contained within frontiers, which can no longer be localized, which can no longer depend on the decisions of a specific group of citizens, a nation, or even a continent.

This determination means that one must both think, and think democracy, globally…

Jacques Derrida [7]

Unlike the pure intellection of the nous, historical and individual self-consciousness does not develop freely or at random. It’s origin is tied to machines of social control, to one-way exchanges and asymmetrical power relations. According to Nietzsche the origin of self-consciousness is tied to the development of morality and culture, social processes which Nietzsche identifies as originating historically in debtor-creditor relationships. In order that life could be made “responsible,” man’s incalculable inner depths had to be constructed precisely in order to be made calculable. The truth of man’s being, the historical essence of his conscious activity in the world, became real through the formation and social ordering of debt and recompense. Capital is shame, spirituality the desire for punishment, and “democracy” silence.

Thus the rational, creative and ethical dimension of life is born ultimately in fear and laziness, through conscious and unconscious processes of resentment, shame and jealousy. All history is a history of contradictions. On the individual scale we find religion born in horror at the terrifying depths of the other; on the global or cosmic plane, philosophy awakens to the misery of being alone, nomadic, untimely and so therefore evil, incomplete, archaic, marginal, separate, dangerous, repressed, and in short, terrified. All culture is already the terror of the other within us, the movements of the alien war machine within our bodies, opening us up from within.

Capitalism names a post-human machinic order emerging gradually from the biopolitical space of human activity, constructing a new dimension of control by the transformation of existing power structures. Theology seeks to separate bodies from their power, the unconscious from what it is able to do: this is the sublime cruelty of conventional morality, the existential meaning of being made calculable. The horizon of this moral calculus is its own proliferative ungrounding; as Nietzsche writes: “To be ashamed of one’s immorality: that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one’s morality.” [8]

In short, the field of the unconscious is social, productive of social desires. We are immersed in an unconscious machine, a self-organized field of pre-ontological desire. What cannot be expressed in any space is forcibly silenced; there is no guarantee that positive experimentation, however exuberant, will lead to liberation. Affirmation as the production of a smooth space is not enough; to affirm a belief is also the transitive closure of intensive social space, a limitation of interpretative dimensionality; it is being-opened rather than opening onto…

Perturbation in Semi-fluid Space

The psychological function of a traumatic disruption of space is classically identified with signification, intervening from an alternate order of being incommensurate with the material ground of psychic becoming. The psychoanalytical model of the unconscious is as a lacerated space, a space with a hole punctured into it, a non-organic space extruded from another body: lacerated or opened spaces functions to dissolve the compromised partial object (or fractured subject to power!) in a differential field of morphogenetic intensities, actively diffusing boundaries between words and things.

The experiment converges obscenely upon theoretical models. Which means: if we represent our models only as models, and not as experiments themselves, they will therefore lack the ability to actually provoke the meltdown of static theoretical, political, and ontological categories. In other words, engendering new hybrid modalities of interconnection and transformation cannot occur without experimentation.

Otherwise, we are left simply with the old paradoxes — the subject dissolves in chaos to become a cosmos, and then there is no subject anymore: the I is suddenly all the names in history. But in many ways this remnant of archaic chaos is the hidden truth of the absurdity of system itself. The rigid separation of freedom from reality is merely an illusion. Ideology is a gesture, immaterial, a transient locus of separation which disappears even in its own construction, permanently virtual, a truth without extension and, precisely for this reason, of possibly infinite intensity.

To live safely in confinement is domestication; the problem is that this is what we often secretly desire. But isn’t it a little like living on the shore of a great ocean without ever peering beneath the surface? Desire is only ever made calculable through a long and subjective process of negating life. Yet there is always already an infinitesimal escape from onto-theology, beyond self-interest, which is actual: creativity, joy, the ever-renewing erotic potential for opening the world and for being laid open by it; intoxication is not always negative, it can become an affirmation, a tidal wave in the desert, unearthing power structures, refusing to play any role but completely embracing its own in its entirety. This is reality, the actual decision, eternally recurring, the “meaning” of life. There may not be wrong or right when it comes to life, but there is a very clear yes and a no. Are you a yes?

In order to open the possibility of a psychology operative beyond the horizon of signification, of sonority and sociality, we advance the thesis of desire as energy, as the life-blood of conscious and unconscious assemblages, intrinsically mobile, conjoining and disjoining real machines to one another. Desire is not in-itself, but composed of and even immersed within other complex flows of desire. It is an intensive space, the pre-affective ground of the unground, the pre-individual field of the nous itself (which is therefore a pure intensity operating without shame or pity, but with complete freedom.) Desire is the substratum of the world-governing nous which sparks the turbulent disruption of fields of intensity.

Not by necessity but pure freedom are worlds and time born, through the overflowing exuberance of metaphysical desire for what is beyond becoming. The question is not whether machines can desire, but how desire is made calculable, ascetic, turned against life itself: in short, captured by power, enamored with punishment, made willing to enter into a tyrannical regime of renunciation. In this process of being made calculable, subjects are invariably produced which desire their own repression. This in itself should no longer be mysterious, but the production of investment as such still remains problematic: after all, desire can be reactionary or revolutionary, but it is impossible to predict.

Subjectivity is never reducible to a relation as such, never a pure connection to a transcendental surface (figure, model, face, etc.) Yet many individuals proclaim such a reduction to be true of themselves; this is a contemptuous self-deception, a willing degradation. This kind of individuality is precisely superfluous, a sham upon a sham, produced ultimately from an excess desire for punishment and cruelty, an excess of self-hatred. (After all, it is a rather naive discovery that culture almost always tends to betray a repressed, but repellent and resentful, desire to control and dominate and destroy.) This desire is also actual joy — a sublime and corrupted joy in cruelty…

The path was once shining before us, but  the night has fallen; and now the way to dawn itself must be produced by our hands. We have accelerated morality to the horizon of calculability, beyond the uncertain boundaries of time and logic. Dare we go further, and pierce the abyssal depths of the glittering chaotic outside? Dare we venture beyond good and evil?

The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness. – Friedrich Nietzsche

(footnotes)

(1) Attributed to Anaxagoras (500 – 425 B.C) Diogenes Laertius’ Lives and Opinions (II. 6)

(2) Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks 107

(3) Jacque Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

(4) Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks 117

(5) Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil 23

(6) Friedrich Nietzsche, On Reading and Writing

(7) Jacques Derrida from “Nietzsche and the Machine,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 7 (1994), 7-66

(8) Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil 95

1. Affectivity -This term designates a relation between an individualized being and the pre-individual milieu; it is thus heterogeneous to individualized reality. This is why Simondon claims that affectivity, more than perception, indicates a spirituality that is greater than the individualized being (the Sublime) because perception is merely the functions of the structures interior to this being (L’Individuation psychique et collective, p. 108–hereafter cited as IPC). Simondon writes that affectivity is the ground of emotion, as perception is the ground of action (107).

2. Allagmatic - The 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 in Simondon’s usage.

“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, from 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 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” (L’individu et sa genese physico-biologique, 44–hereafter cited as IGB).

Simondon will also define the allagmatic as “the theory of operations” (IGB, 263), complementary to the theory of structures that the sciences elaborate. On the same page, Simondon will define an operation as “a conversion of a structure in another structure.”

3. Becoming – Simondon writes that “becoming is not a framework in which the being exists; it is one of the dimensions of the being, a mode of resolving an initial incompatibility that was rife with potentials” (Incorporations, 301). In IPC, Simondon writes: “In a theory of the phases of being, becoming is something other than an alteration or a succession of states comparable to a serial development. Becoming is in effect a perpetuated and renovated resolution, an incorporating resolution, proceeding through crises, such that its sense is in its center, not at its origin or its end” (223).

4. Disparation – This term is especially well defined in Alberto Toscano’s notes in his translation of Deleuze’s review of IGB. Also, Toscano writes in his book Theatre of Production: “Rather than the substantial support of relations that would inhere within it, (preindividual) being is defined as affected by disparation, that is, by the tension between incompatible–as yet unrelated–dimensions or potentials in being” (139). Disparation is the process of the integration of disparity or difference into a coordinated system. Deleuze himself will say in Difference and Repetition:

“Gilbert Simondon has shown recently that individuation presupposes a prior metastable state–in other words, the existence of a ‘disparateness’ such as at least two orders of magnitude or two scales of heterogeneous reality between which potentials are distributed. Such a pre-individual state nevertheless does not lack singularities: the distinctive or singular points are defined by the existence and distribution of potentials. An ‘objective’ problematic field thus appears, determined by the distance between two heterogeneous orders. Individuation emerges like the act of solving such a problem, or–what amounts to the same thing–like the actualisation of a potential and establishing of communication between disparates” (246).

Simondon himself defines it in footnote 15 on pg. 203 of IGB:

“There is disparation when two twin sets that cannot be entirely superimposed, such as the left retinal image and the right retinal image, are grasped together as a system, allowing for the formation of a single set of a higher degree which integrates their elements thanks to a new dimension.”

5. Emotivity -Simondon strictly denies that emotion is simply an internal change; instead, he characterizes it as “the sense of action” (IPC, 109). Emotion allows the subject to be oriented in perceptive worlds; or, it allows these worlds to have a sense because of the fact that emotion is the orientation of the subject to the world.

6. Ensemble – In the first endnote to chapter 1 of IPC, Simondon defines an ensemble as having merely a structural, and not an energetic, unity. Thus it can only modify itself by degrading or augmenting entropy. It has no means of truly incorporating metastability into itself because it does not possess information by which to carry out such a project.

7. Form – This is the standard abstraction that dominates the hylemoprhic (form-matter) model. Simondon shows how this model comes from a disposition in social organizations to conceive of form as completely active, and matter as fully passive. These two abstractions (matter-form) cannot get to the heart of the process in the operation, which requires potential energy to actualize its products.

8. Hylemorphism – This is one of the primary approaches that Simondon opposes in his work. Simondon most thoroughly defines it in the introduction and first chapter in IGB. Generally speaking, Simondon criticizes hylemorphism for emphasizing the presupposed requisites of an interaction (form and matter) instead of the necessary requirements for the process to take place (metastability, information, potential energy). As Miguel de Beistegui writes in Truth and Genesis:

“Contrary to the clams of the Aristotelian, ‘hylemorphic’ model–a model born of a simple reductive interpretation of simple technological operations, such as the molding of a brick–the individual is not the result of a molding which, in a single blow as it were, provides a homogeneous and formless matter with its determinate form. Rather, it is a (temporal process) through which the crystalline form acts like a ‘recurrent germ of information’ in a medium already rife with singularities and energetic differences” (303).

9. Individuation – Simondon writes:

“Individuation corresponds to the appearance of stages in the being, which are the stages of the being. It is not a mere isolated consequence arising as a by-product of becoming, but this very process itself as it unfolds; it can be understood only by taking into account this initial supersaturation of the being, at first homogeneous and static [sans devenir], then soon after adopting a certain structure and becoming–and in so doing, bringing about the emergence of both individual and milieu–following a course [devenir] in which preliminary tensions are resolved but also preserved in the shape of the ensuing structure; in a certain sense, it could be said that the sole principle by which we can be guided is that of the conservation of being through becoming” (Incorporations, 301).

10. Individualization - This term is distinguished from individuation on pg. 132 of IPC as “the individuation of an individuated being, resulting from an individuation, [and creating] a new structuration within the individual.” Also, Simondon will write: “Psychosomatic unity is, before individualization, a homogeneous unity: after individualization, it becomes a functional and relational unity.”

11. Information – Simondon argues that we must replace the idea of form with the idea of information. This notion (information) is omnipresent in Simondon’s work; the best place for an outline in Simondon’s words would be his introduction to IGB and chapter 1 of ICP. He will write in section 2 of this chapter that perception does not seize upon a pre-established form, but instead seizes upon its orientation in an ensemble. In this sense, perception is really about a mode of engaging with the world so as to retrieve useful information about its orientation. More importantly, Simondon argues that information, through perception, allows the subject to be oriented in a situation, a world.

12. Metastability – Simondon argues that it is impossible to understand metastability without introducing “the notion of the potential energy residing in a given system, the notion of order and that of an increase in entropy.” (Incorporations, 302). This term designates a situation that is far from equilibrium. Metastable situations have higher magnitudes of energy than simply stable ones. Thus Simondon writes:

“Individuation must therefore be thought of as a partial and relative resolution manifested in a system that contains latent potentials and harbors a certain incompatibility with itself, an incompatibility due at once to forces in tension as well as to the impossibility of interaction between terms of extremely disparate dimensions” (Incorporations, p.300).

It is because systems are defined by the type of information that they possess that one can talk about systems in terms of their ‘metastable being.’ Muriel Combes writes:

“a physical system is said to be in metastable equilibrium (or false equilibrium) when the least modification to the parameters of the system (pressure, temperature, etc.) is sufficient to break the equilibrium of the system…Before every individuation, being can be understood as a system that contains potential energy. Even though it exists in actu within the system, this energy is called potential because in order to structure itself, that is, to actualize itself according to certain structures, it needs a transformation of the system. Preindividual being and, in a general way, every system that finds itself in a metastable state, contains potentials which, because they belong to heterogeneous dimensions of being, are incompatible” (11).

13. Modulation – Simondon says in section 2 of chapter 1 of IGB, “Molding and modulation are the two borderline cases whose modeling is the average case.” In the same section, Simondon will write: “modulation is molding in a continuous and perpetually variable manner.” Thus, for Simondon, living beings are not necessarily molded in a final way; each new individuation modulates a living being through the maintenance of metastability that serves to produce the tensions whereby the individual must reorganize its limits through an active integration of information. This is why it is necessary for Simondon to talk about perception in terms of problems and solutions.

14. Ontogenesis – For Simondon, ontogenesis must be made to designate the development of a being, or its becoming; in other words, as he writes in his introduction to IGB, seeing the individual as the product of individuation, and not the reverse, makes it so that individuation truly becomes ontogenesis in its own right. Or, as Simondon puts it in IPC:

“According to this perspective, ontogenesis would become the point of departure for philosophical thought; it would really be first philosophy, prior to the theory of knowledge and to an ontology that would follow the theory of knowledge. Ontogenesis would be the theory of the phases of being, prior to objective knowledge, which is a relation to be individuated in the milieu, after individuation. The existence of the individuated being as subject is prior to knowledge; a primary study of the individuated being must precede the theory of knowledge.” (163).

15. Signal -For Simondon, the signal is distinct from the signification:

“Signals are spatial or temporal; a signification is spatio-temporal; it has two senses, the one through relation to a structure and the other through relation to a functional becoming…According to this manner of seeing individuation, a definite psychic operation would be a discovery of significations in an ensemble of signals, the signification prolonging the initial individuation of being, and having in its sense a relation not only to the ensemble of exterior objects but also to the being itself. As it contributes a solution to a plurality of signals, a signification has a bearing towards the exterior; but this exterior is not foreign to the being as a result of individuation; because before the individuation this being was not distinct from the ensemble of being that is separated in the milieu and the individual” (IPC, 126-27).

16. Signification -Simondon writes: “language is the instrument of expression, vehicle of information, but not the creator of significations. Signification is a relation of beings, not a pure expression; signification is relational, collective, transindividual, and can not be furnished by the encounter of the subject and the expression” (IPC, 200). Earlier in the book, Simondon will write:

“According to the distinction between signals and significations, we will say that there is an individual when there is a process of real individuation, i.e. when significations appear: the individual is that by which and that in which significations appear, whereas between the individuals there are only signals. The individual is the being that appears when there is signification; reciprocally, there is only signification when an individuated being appears or is prolonged in a being that is being individualized; the genesis of the individual corresponds to the resolution of a problem that could not be resolved by means of prior givens, because they did not have a common axiomatic: the individual is the auto-constitution of a topology of being that resolves a prior incompatibility through the appearance of a new systematic; that which was tension and incompatibility becomes functional structure…the individual is thus a spatio-temporal axiomatic of being that compatibilizes previously antagonistic givens in a system to a spatial and temporal dimension” (127).

17. Subject -Simondon writes in chapter two of IPC:

“The problem of the individual is that of perceptive worlds, but the problem of the subject is that of the heterogeneity between perceptive worlds and the affective world, between the individual and the preindividual; this problem is that of the subject in as much as it exists: the subject is individual and other than individual; it is incompatible with itself…The subject can only coincide with itself in the individuation of the collective, because the individuated being and the preindividual being that are in it cannot coincide directly: there is a disparation between perceptions and affectivity…” (108).

In a certain sense, the subject is situated on the surface between the dimensions of perception (related to action and associated with collectivity) and affectivity (or, the realm of emotivity and that which is interior to the individual). Thus, Simondon raises the question of the problematic of the unity of action and emotion in relation to the individual and the collective as the same problematic of the subject.

18. System – In the first endnote to chapter 1 of IPC, Simondon calls a system a “metastable unity made from a plurality of ensembles among which exist a relation of analogy, and an energetic potential.” In the same note he will say that information “cannot be quantified abstractly, but only characterized in reference to the structures and schemes of the system in which it exists.” Thus for Simondon, information owes its existence to a system, and thus “that which forms the nature of a system is the type of information it receives.”

19. Transduction – Adrian Mackenzie, in his book Transductions, writes:

“For the process of transduction to occur, there must by some disparity, discontinuity or mismatch within a domain; two different forms or potentials whose disparity can be modulated. Transduction is a process whereby a disparity or a difference is topologically and temporally restructured across some interface. It mediates different organizations of energy” (25).

Muriel Combes writes in Simondon: Individu et collective: “We will call transduction this mode of unity of being through its diverse phases, its multiple individuations” (15).

Simondon himself says at the end of his introduction to IGB:

“The transduction that resolves things effects the reversal of the negative into the positive: meaning, that which makes the terms fail to be identical with each other, and that which makes them disparate (in the sense in which this expression is understood in the theory of vision), is integrated with the system that resolves things and becomes a condition of meaning. There is no impoverishment in the information contained in the terms: transduction is characterized by the fact that the result of this process is a concrete network including all the original terms. The resulting system is made up of the concrete, and it comprehends all of the concrete. The transductive order retains all the concrete and is characterized by the conservation of information, whereas induction requires a loss of information. Following the same path as the dialectic, transduction conserves and integrates the opposed aspects. Unlike the dialectic, transduction does not presuppose the existence of a previous time period to act as a framework in which the genesis unfolds, time itself being the solution and dimension of the discovered systematic: time comes from the preindividual just like the other dimensions that determine individuation” (Incorporations, 315).

20. Transindividual – This term encompasses a large portion of L’Individuation psychique et collective: Simondon devotes the second part of his book to the foundations of the transindividual and individuation. But Simondon also devotes section 4 of chapter two of the first part of his book to the concept of the transindividual. Simondon generally conceives as the transindividual as encompassing knowledge, affectivity, and more generally, spiritual life (104). He will also say that religion is the domain of the transindividual (102). The best and most concise definition comes from the second part of IPC:

“…life is a specification, a principal solution, complete in itself, but leaves behind a residue apart from its system. It is not as a living being that man brings with him what is spiritually individuated, but as a being that contains in it the preindividual and the prevital. This reality can be called the transindividual. It is neither of a social or individual origin; it is deposited in the individual, carried by it, but it belongs to it and is not made a part of its system of being as individual. One should not speak of tendencies of the individual that carries it towrards the group; because these tendencies are not properly speaking tendencies of the individual as an individual; they are the non-resolution of potentials that have preceded the genesis of the individual. The individual has not individuated the preceding being without remainder; it has not been totally resolved in the individual and the milieu; the individual has conserved the preindividual within itself, and all individual ensembles have thus a sort of non-structured ground from which a new individuation can be produced. The psycho-social is the transindividual: it is this reality that the individuated being transports with itself, this load of being for future individuations” (193).

Simondon distinguishes this from the interindividual:

“The interindividual relation goes from the individual to the individual; it does not penetrate the individuals: transindividual action is that which makes it so that the existent individual ensembles as elements of a system calls for potentials and metastibility, tension and expectation, then the descovery of a structure and a functional organization that integrates and resolves this problematic of incoporated immanence” (IPC, 191).

Thus the transindividual traverses both the inter-individual and the preindividual.
Bibliography:

Barthélémy, Jean-Hugues. Penser l’individuation: Simondon et la philosophie de la nature. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005.

Chabot, Pascal. La philosophie de Simondon. Paris: Vrin, 2003.

Combes, Muriel. Simondon: Individu et collective. Pour une philosophie du transindividuel. Paris: PUF, 1999.

de Beistegui, Miguel. Truth and Genesis: Philosophy as Differential Ontology. Indianapolis: Indiana, 2004.

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York : Columbia, 1994.

—. “Review of Gilbert Simondon’s L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (1966). ” Trans. Alberto Toscano. Pli : The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 12 (2001) : 43-49.

Mackenzie, Adrian. Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed. London: Continuum, 2002.

Simondon, Gilbert. L’Individuation psychique et collective. Paris: Aubier, 1989.

—. L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (IGB). Paris: PUF, 1964.

—. “The Genesis of the Individual,” in Jonathan Crary & Sanford Kwinter (eds.), Incorporations (New York: Zone Books, 1992): 297–319.

Toscano, Alberto. The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and Deleuze. New York: Palgrave, 2006.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.
Friedrich Nietzsche

In early 1872, the same year The Birth of Tragedy was published, Nietzsche delivered a series of lectures entitled “An Investigation into Rhythm and Meter.” (The lecture which interests me, “Toward a Theory of Quantified Rhythm,” appears to still be untranslated!)

Music is at the heart of Nietzsche’s effort. In a very important sense, without a musical ear, his work cannot be understood. Music is his framework. Not only that he writes in arpeggios, but that his thought is arpeggiated; to make sense or value from his work, we must hear it performed; that is, we must realize through ourselves all the properly musical moments of discord and accord in his thought, all the contradictions and harmonies which resonate not only through his critique but also through his concepts.

The moment of accord between morality and genealogy (or discord between truth and science) must be felt; they cannot be simply understood. His account of the origin of morality, for example, only seems not to be completely rational for the reason that it is perfectly and even sublimely rational; it is in fact a mathematical argument! Just as the infinite overflows reason, Nietzsche’s style, his thoughts and ideas, must be heard and felt, not only read but performed. His voice must become as a pulsation or rhythm seizing us; or else it remains, merely a contradiction, merely a static critique.

So what does it mean to say that the movement of Nietzsche’s writing is essentially or spontaneously rhythmic? I mean that he strategically opposes meter at every turn, by a free and resonant new rhythm, which affords new modes of expression. By rhythm (as opposed here to meter) I mean a pulsation which decomposes structured space, even as it generates the possibilities for whole new kinds of organizations (meters). [On this point, free rhythm is almost liberation; it lacks only an active form, a metric space to liberate. All the universe needs is to be activated; all the potentials are there, tomorrow can be grasped today through a thousand signals.]

The question of discursive movement is about the sign-signal matrix we move through, the medium of distribution between co-present signals, in short: how to allow the proper signals through, how to achieve the perfect balance of speed and slowness. Prejudice thinks in metre, and even rhyme; but sense and value speak in rhythm, in sparks and bursts of intensity, in swirling vortexes of affectivity, taking the meter apart in order to open up new (human and non-human) expressivities.

Nietzsche tactically transforms metric spaces into rhythmic spaces. Critics often tends to linger a little too long at precisely this point: whether (in whatever particular case) we are dealing with a metric space (where pulses are regularized, achieving identity through sub-division, i.e., by external modulation) or a rhythmic space (where differences are distributed through spontaneous self-organization)? But this dichotomy is confused: all spaces are metric, are spaces are rhythmic. There is only interplay between: rhythms create new meters, meters provoke new rhythmic expressivities.

The coalescence of all forms of being into a single pulse, a single urge: this is an idea of the creative, form-generating power of pure energy — the captivating power of vibration. Resonance is a signal caught in a feedforward loop, engaged in various transductions through differently-structured spaces; power is realizing this energy (these spaces) can be organized in a new way so as to allow the feedforward loops to fold back in upon themselves. Then the resonant signal can become amplified, and new feedforward mechanisms are need to contain the flow of intensities.

An inter-related system of transducers of this kind is a composition, or an aggregate; it forms the common basis of music and mathematics, a sort of blank template. The actual composition is always a modulation of the virtual one; the virtual being the mold; the thing has virtue because it has been molded. The shaping or modulation of subjectivity is already a question of a much different order, but we recognize that the spaces are homologous: we are confronted with a mixture of metric and rhythmic spaces of potential expression and transformation.

Nietzsche’s text is engaged in a long and difficult creative process of becoming music. It would be the end of philosophy as we know it; and we know he struggled to bring the day closer, to capture the future and bring us towards it. To overcome music is to become music, it is precisely not to be overcome by it, enraptured in its pleasurable aspects; it is to so throughly deconstruct the experience that not one shred of prejudice remains, so that the profoundest resonances and deepest sensitivities of which we are capable are exposed to light, re-activated.

The interesting twist is that we have already done this before — we have all experienced profound deaths and rebirths. We have experienced it, if nowhere else, in love. We can yet reawaken to life and light, to sound and color; daybreak is never far off. Yes, it is easier to forget, and over time it becomes harder to reactivate lost sensitivity, lost expressivity. But despair is ugly, and weakening; the eternal return is not to console us, it is to terrify us. That nothing is lost or ever can be is not necessarily a spiritually comforting idea. This is why hope and pity are really weaknesses; they are not full or powerful expressions, they still react. They are not enough, and they deceive us into thinking they are enough. Illusions begone, let’s transform the world. Let our thought find new rhythms; life is waiting, a brief time of postponement between new and old songs. In this tiny intermission, let us not take pause, but unflinchingly experiment upon the future, and strategically compose our becomings without hesitation. Let us allow space and time for our ideas and words and bodies to become intense, to become molecular… to become music.

Logic of Sense: Preface

Here Deleuze begins by highlighting Carroll and the Stoics for their theory of events; he says that there is a marriage of language and the unconscious at work.

Paradoxes imply that sense is a nonexisting entity (xiii). Deleuze claims that the Stoics formed a new image of thought [how can this be linked to Difference and Repetition wherein Deleuze claims that it’s imperative to move beyond a certain dogmatic image of thought? Ultimately, in the preface Deleuze claims that Logic of Sense will attempt to develop a logical and psychological novel (xiv).

Series 1: Paradoxes of Pure Becoming

Alice in Wonderland—simultaneity of a becoming whose characteristic is to elude the present. Good sense affirms that in all things there is a determinable sense or direction—but paradox is the affirmation of both sense or directions at the same time (1).

Plato—limited and measured things, fixed qualities vs. pure becoming without measure—becoming-mad. We can see this distinction in the Philebus where the becoming-mad introduces a certain rebelliousness into matter (thus subverting the identity of the concept).

There is a subterranean dualism—that which receives the action of the Idea and that which eludes it—the icon-copy as good image, the simulacrum as bad image.

Simulacrum eludes the action of the Idea and contests both model and copy; thus it is not enough to say that the simulacrum is a copy of the copy.

In Plato we find that this pure becoming might be a problem related to language (Cratylus and Philebus). There is a flow of speech that constitutes a wild discourse, incessantly sliding over its referent. Might then, as Deleuze suggests, there be two languages, and two sorts of names?

There are those names that designate pauses (substantives and adjectives/qualities) and those that are essentially movement (the infinitive). One is always concealing or enveloping the other dimension (2). There is also a paradox of infinite identity (D+R on the infinity of representation, plus Appendix 1). Language fixes the limits but also transcends these limits (2-3).

Sense moves in both directions at once—there is a reversal of the active and passive—all these reversals contest Alice’s identity and her proper name (3). Name is guaranteed by the permanence of savoir. (Here we see not only an affinity with Badiou’s theory of knowledge but also we come into contact with one of Deleuze’s own conceptual pairing of knowledge and learning in Difference and Repetition). When these names dissolve, the substantives and adjectives that envelop personal identity slide into the language of events and the verbs of pure becoming (3). All identity disappears from the world, self, and God. Everything happens as though events enjoyed an irreality (or as Deleuze will expound more later, a virtuality).

Personal uncertainty is an objective structure of the event itself, insofar as it moves in two directions at once, and insofar as it fragments the subject following this double direction (3). Paradox destroys good and common sense (link this to the notion of para-sense in Difference and Repetition—also pg. 300 in Difference and Repetition on a good summary of the interaction of series).

2. Paradoxes of Surface Effects

Stoics contend that bodies are: tension, physical qualities, actions and passions, and ‘states of affairs’ (Wittgenstein’s Tractatus will be key to some of the passages in LoS). These are determined by the mixtures of bodies (4). At the limit there is a unity of all bodies in a primordial Fire. The only time of bodies and states of affairs is the present. The living present accompanies the act. Cosmic present—immobile sections.

All bodies are causes—this unifying, cosmic tendency is called Destiny.

All bodies are causes in relation to each other and causes for each other—their effects, however, are ‘incorporeal’ entities. They are logical or dialectical attributes, as opposed to physical qualities. They are not things or facts but events (Can Wittgenstein think the event?). They subsist with a minimum of being. They are verbs—the results of actions and passion—impassive results. They are not living presents but infinitives—the unlimited Aion.

There are two times—one for bodies and one for incorporeal events (5).

Only the present exists in time, but the past and the future subsist in time and divide each present infinitely (thus there is an actualization of the present but a virtual memory of the past and future as a whole, etc.).

Brehier and the Stoics—real and profound being is force; the plane of facts on the surface (5).

Mixtures and qualitative states of affairs constitute depths; incorporeal events arise at the surface as a result.

Deleuze claims that the Stoics displace all reflection: the genius of a philosophy must be measured by the new distribution which it imposes on beings and concepts (6).

Cleavage of the causal relation—declension of causes and conjugation of effects. There is a causality without destiny (6).

The extra-being and quasi-cause of the effect (7). Highest term is not Being but Something (Adorno’s Negative Dialectics). The Stoics are the first to reverse Platonism (although Deleuze will also say that Plato points to this reversal in the Sophist).

The Idea is impassive—it constitutes itself through an extra-being on the surface—the ideational is nothing more than an effect (7).

Everything now returns to the surface: the unlimited returns—Becoming-mad rises to the surface.

The surface now represents all possible ideality. Simulacra cease to be subterranean rebels and constitute phantasms on the surface.

The impassive event allows the active—passive to be interchanged more easily (8).

Events envelop quasi-causes in their relations.

Stoics use paradox as an instrument for the analysis of language and as a means of synthesizing events. Dialectics is the science of incorporeal events as they are expressed in propositions and of the connections between events as they are expressed in relation between propositions (8).

(Remember the dialectic as discussed in D+R, Plato (Philebus) and in Hegel.

Dialectics is the art of conjugation (or confatalia of the series of events).

Paradox is a sorites—series of interrogative propositions which, following becoming, proceed through successive additions and retrenchments (8). Chrysippus and nonsense: chariots.

Paradox appears as a dismissal of depths—Humor is the art of surfaces—Irony of depths/heights.

With the Stoics, humor found its dialectic (9).

Carroll and the Stoics: events, things, states of affairs.

Events are like crystals and grow on the edges (9).

Alice’s move from the depths to the surface—follow the border, there is an ethic of surfaces (9-10).

Only little girls understand Stoicism, or a stuttering, left-handed boy (10).

Continuity between reverse and right sides—surface effects communicate in one and the same Event (11).

Appendix 1: Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy

Reverse or reversal of Platonism? Abolish essence/appearance duality (253).

Motive of a Theory of Ideas must be to select and choose—Platonism—method of division, the dialectic of genuses and species (254).

The purpose of Platonic divisions is to select lineages and to distinguish from the impure; this is a dialectic of rivalry (254). There must be a way to screen for claimants (Difference and Repetition and the ground of Justice p. 9?).

An elective participation is the response to the problem of a method of selection. Unparticipated, participated, participant—justice.

Myths construct the immanent model or foundation-test. The Sophist is the being of the simulacrum (256).

Plato points the direction for the reversal of Platonism by an analysis of the simulacrum in the sophist. Copies are secondary possessors, but simulacra are like false claimants (256).

Copies—icons vs. simulacra—phantasms (256)

Plato must distinguish well-founded copies from simulacra (257).

Icons are good images endowed with resemblance—this is due to an internal relation to the idea (Poinsot).

Internal and spiritual, resemblance is the measure of any pretension—Simulacra have an unfounded pretension and elude the action of the idea—Derrida, writing as false suitor (footnote 2) (257).

Simulacra are not copies of copies, they are different in kind—simulacra are images w/o resemblance (257).

Simulacra internalize dissimilarity—they are based on the model of the Other (D+R—the Other-structure).

Good copy = right opinion/ bad copy = the knack (technique without rationality).

Simulacra offer huge depths, dimensions and distances that the observer cannot master [mastery, sublimity of the sense] (258).

Simulacra include a differential point of view that subsumes the observer—always more and less at once but never equal (258). How to tame the becomings with icons? Platonism founds the domain of representation (D+R and the 4 chains of representation).

Abstract determination of the foundation as that which possesses in a primary way (259).

PlatoàAristotleàChristianity (categories to infinte)—Hegel + Leibniz—infinitely large and small. Leibniz and compossibility (259-260) Convergence and exclusive disjunctions. Monocentric Hegelian dialectics.

Iconology and selectionàexhaustion of pretenders (260).

Aesthetics as duality—theory of sensibility as the form of possible experience and theory of art as reflection on real experience (260).

Work of art as experimentation—more than one story told at once—divergent stories (metalepsis) (260).

Internal resonance of basic seriesàinduces a forced movement which goes beyond the series (261).

This is the simulacra that affirms its repressed power (261).

Conditions of real experience and the structure of the work of art are reunited (261).

–Divergence of series

–Decentering of circles

–Constitution of the chaos which envelops them

–Internal resonance

–Movement of amplitude

–Aggression of the simulacra

These systems put disparate elements or heterogeneous series in communication (261).

Signal-sign systems—signal is a structure in which differences of potential are distributed assuring the communication of disparate components—the sign flashes across the boundary of two levels, between two communicating series. All phenomena respond to these conditions inasmuch as they find their dissymmetry. In order to speak of simulacra, we have to highlight inclusive differences and internalized series.

2 ways of thinking difference—world as icon/world as phantasm. Constitutive disparity and the unity of measure and communication-resemblance is produced on a curve (262).

Reversing Platonism means to make simulacra affirm their rights among icons and copies.

Simulacrum’s positive power—2 inclusive divergent series of the simulacrum. Resemblance makes the series resonate.

Simulacrum as machinery—Dionysian machines. Power of the false (phantasm). Nomadic distribution and the unground as a joyful, positive event (263).

Simulation designates the power of producing an effect (263). Hence ontological and simulated sense.

Simulation and eternal return—distinguish from Platonic return.

Zarathustra’s refusals of the dwarf and the animals.

Chaodyssey (chao-errance).

Only a simulated Same and Similar.

Eternal Return is still selective—it makes the extremes return and denies the mediocre, the mediated, the negative.

Developing an untimely philosophy—three times—distant past, present, future—(reversal of Platonism, critical modern edge of the simulacra, future and the phantasm as belief in the eternal return).

Artificial vs. simulacrum and the two modes of destruction/nihilism.

The following is the first half of chapter 1 from Jean-Hugues Barthélémy’s book Penser l’individuation: Simondon et la philosophie de la nature. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005. p. 37-48. Original translation by Taylor Adkins on 10/22/07.

Chapter 1

The concept of object and the concept of subject, in the same virtue of their origin, are limits that philosophical thought must overcome. –Gilbert Simondon

1. Ontology and ontogenesis: from Bergson to Simondon

The philosophically fundamental watchword of all Simondian thought undoubtedly resides in the idea according to: the process of individuation cannot be ob-jectified by knowledge, since the former is produced by the latter if the knowledge of individuation is itself the individuation of knowledge. This is why the principal introduction of his thesis ends with these lines:

We cannot, in the usual sense of the term, know the individuation; we can only individuate, individuate ourselves, and individuate in ourselves; this seizure is thus, in the margin of knowledge properly stated, an analogy between two operations, which is a certain mode of communication. The individuation of the real exterior to the subject is seized by the subject thanks to the analogical individuation of knowledge in the subject; but it is through the individuation of knowledge and not by knowledge alone that the individuation of (non-subject) beings is seized. Beings can be known by the knowledge of the subject, but the individuation of beings can be seized only by the individuation of the knowledge of the subject.[1]

To know individuation is to individuate knowledge, and this is why there is “analogy” between the two “operations” which are here the object and the subject. The individuation is thus a “field” in which subject and object are no longer opposed. A field which is also not really one, if it is true that it includes the physical as well as the vital or the biological and the psychosocial or the transindividual, as so many regimes of individuation. But since with each one of these regimes corresponds a scientific regional ontology which solidifies the individuation of the beings in these same beings of which it disengages the generic structures, it is appropriate to add to these regional ontologies, to find the movement of individuation hidden by the same beings which result in it, a philosophical general ontogenesis which disentangles the genetic operation of these beings. This is an ontogenesis to which Simondon grants the statute of “first philosophy:”

According to this prospect, ontogenesis would become the starting point of philosophical thought; it would really be first philosophy, prior to the theory of knowledge and with an ontology that would follow the theory of knowledge. Ontogenesis would be the theory of the phases of being, prior to objective knowledge, which is a relation to be individuated in the milieu, after individuation.[2]

Simondon thus clearly distinguishes ontogenesis from an objectifying knowledge that follows scientific regional ontologies, reunited here under the total name of “ontology.” This term designates here the whole of scientific regional ontologies rather than traditional philosophical ontology, which comes from the fact that ontogenesis replaces traditional philosophical ontology as preceding what is however named “ontology.” It will have been understood, “ontogenesis,” in Simondon, designates the theory as well as the process of which it is the theory, and this process of ontogenesis which is identified with the individuation, is at the same time becoming of being in general. We will say in the next chapter what justifies the becoming of being in general, then what justifies that the theory, which is also the process itself, is ontogenesis. In this initial chapter we want only to specify a filiation which is revealed by the preceding elements, and whose setting in evidence will in the long run make it possible to better understand that which simultaneously comes from some of the virtues and some of the limits of Simondon’s thought. This filiation is of course that which has shown our author as an heir to Bergson, and for which two reasons at least can as of now and already be raised.

The first of these reasons is the assertion that becoming is not ob-jectifiable because it is that which precedes the subject itself. The general “ontology” which thinks this becoming is then a genetic “ontology” which makes it possible to refuse a classification of beings in kinds which does not correspond to their genesis, but with a knowledge taken after the genesis. Here Bergson is a source, he who, like the phenomenologists[3], first tried to subvert the traditional alternatives, but while allotting to philosophizing the task to think of becoming as that which constitutes, as “duration,” the essence of consciousness itself, and thus makes proceed all “essence” of an other, quite as relative. Initially indeed it is a question for Bergson of subverting the traditional alternatives, and notably that opposing mechanism and finalism[4], by subverting the opposition subject/object which makes their ground by the means of the intuition of the Whole conceived as becoming: “philosophy can only be an effort to be based again in the whole. The intelligence, being re-absorbent in its principle, will incorrectly revive its own genesis.” The “Bergsonism” of Simondon is all the more clear here that this last statement will give reason to Bergson against Husserl with regard to the means of carrying out the subversion of the traditional alternatives: this means it is “reduction” with becoming, and not with intentionality.

In a second time Bergson shows how this thought of becoming, this “true evolutionism,” proper to philosophy, is necessarily a thought of the continuous sub-jection to all apprehended discontinuity by scientific intelligence. The cutting of reality into genres and species reinstates an essentialism that spatializes duration. Simondon, even if he will complexify the question of the discontinuous—displaces towards microphysics in the view of a subversion of the alternative continuous/discontinuous–, with its manner the Bergsonian thesis will renew however, and it is through it that he condemned the scholastic views mentioned above. The result that is more surprising than every Bergsonian denunciation of the classification of beings according to their generic structures cut out from their genetic operation, or according to their separate being of becoming which founds it, is the assumption according to which the living would be an individuation which, understood either only as a phase or mode, is not based on an achieved physical individuation, but rather constitutes the perpetuation of an inchoate phase of physical individuation.

It is habitual to see in the vital processes a complexity larger than in the not-vital, physicochemical processes. However, to be faithful, even in the hypothetical conjectures, with the intention that animates this research, we should suppose that the vital individuation does not come after the physicochemical individuation, but during this individuation, before its completion, by suspending it at the moment when it has not yet reached its stable equilibrium, and while making it capable of intending and propagating itself[5].

As we will have the occasion to show, “the intention which animates this research” is however less in Simondon a will of elaborating a vitalist cosmogenesis than the requirement of a non-reductionist ontogenesis. Creative Evolution is said to subvert the alternative between mechanism and finalism only in favor of a different position which has renovated finalism. However any renovation is also, for its part, conservation. Bergson also acknowledged it as finalism and did not abandon its vitalist form. And when it sometimes happens that Bergson relativizes the expression “élan vital” by anchoring the physical and vital itself in a common source which is neither physical nor properly vital, it is not to qualify this source as simply pre-physical and pre-vital, but to call it spiritual: “it is the consciousness, or better the supra-consciousness, which is at the origin of life[6].” On the contrary Simondon does not renew these oppositions between the order of the modes of individuation and the order of the phases of any individuation, the vital individuation constituting the perpetuation of an inchoate phase of the physical individuation, which avoids the reductionism that threatens any radical ontogenesis as a thought of the superior starting from the inferior. And it is precisely because he thinks genesis in terms of individuation that Simondon veritably subverts the alternative between mechanism and finalism, the latter being simply too vitalist: the pre-physical and pre-vital is what is not individuated, and could not a fortiori be spiritual. But because we only want to treat here one filiation between Bergson and Simondon, we need to differentiate the development of such a divergence and to now devote ourselves to the second of the immediate reasons for the filiation that we announced.

This second immediate reason for a filiation between Bergson and Simondon is the repeated opposition to Kant through the assertion of the priority of ontogenesis, as “first philosophy,” over criticism. In a fundamental passage from Psychic and Collective Individuation, Simondon writes that “philosophical thought before posing the critical question prior to any ontology, must pose the problem of a complete reality, prior to the individuation from which the subject escapes the grasp of critical thought and ontology[7].” There still, Bergson is a source. We already pointed out that for him also “philosophy can only be an effort to be based again in the whole.” But what is important to notice here is that this fusion in the whole was already in Bergson as it is in Simondon: a return to becoming “from which the subject escapes the grasp of critical thought and of ontology.” This is why Bergsonian criticisms bearing on Kantian reflexivity could not be read as an abandonment of all reflexivity. Consider, for example, the first extraordinary synthesis of his thought that took place at the conference “Consciousness and Life.” The passage which interests us is the following here:

Where do we come from? What are we? Where do we go? Here are vital questions, in front of which we would place ourselves immediately if we philosophize without passing through systems. But, between these questions and us, a too systematic philosophy interposes other problems. ‘Before seeking the solution, they say, should we not know how we will seek it? Study the mechanism of your thought, discuss your knowledge and criticize your criticism: when you are ensured of the value of the instrument, you will see how it is useful to you.’ Alas! This moment will never come. I see only one means of knowing where we can still go: it is to get under way and to go. If the knowledge that we seek is really instructive, if it must expand our thought, any preliminary analysis of the mechanism of thought could only show us the impossibility to also go far, since we would have studied our thought before the expansion which it is a question of obtaining from it. A premature reflection of the spirit on itself will discourage it to advance, whereas while advancing purely and simply it had approached the goal and had realized, by surcroit, that the announced obstacles were for the majority of them effects of mirages[8]..

Looking more closely, it is not because it is reflexive that Kantian reflexivity is for Bergson an error, but only because such “preliminary analysis” is also for the same reason a “premature reflection.” True reflexivity can also be in this sense revindicated by Bergson, since Kantian reflexivity is marked as a seal of the illusion, which signifies that the course of knowledge to Bergson only guarantees an authentic knowledge of itself. What however distinguishes such a radical reflexivity from what one traditionally names “reflexivity,” is the “expansion” preached by Bergson and under the terms of which the knowing subject was recognized in its object: here the reflection does not renew the subject to itself, but at its origin. An origin whose question is posed by Bergson before the same criticism addressed to Kant and as what justifies this criticism: the first of the philosophical questions is the question “from where do we come?”An origin of which any reflection, which is Cartesian or “critical,” is only a mask since it produces the “mirage” of a subject out of becoming. The intuition alone, of which Simondon will renew the category but by specifying it and by removing from it what orders it with the Whole of which it shares in a profound nature that is duration. This last concept could certainly not be taken up again by Simondon, the reasons for which it is not yet time to expose. But if it is true that to understand a thought is also to reconsider its origins, it were necessary for us here to attach Simondonian ontogenesis to the Bergsonian thought of becoming[9].

2. Remarks on the specific contribution of Teilhard de Chardin.

Contrary to Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty[10], Bergson benefits Simondon from a living education and a human encounter as Simondon prefers them[11]. And this is here the contemporaneity of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, quoted by Simondon in his unedited work, which establishes the living link with Bergson, to whom Teilhard was so near. What is thus exactly the impossible relationship to circumvent between Teilhard the “priest” and Simondon the agnostic? Although the Simondonian exegesis is still only being born, we are amazed that these relasions have not been evoked by anyone, as they are narrow—with the double sense of located and forts. The Bergsonian ontogenetic prospect, of which we briefly pointed out the still metaphysical character, initially takes in Teilhard de Chardin a cosmogenetic sense suitable to make the transition to the anti-metaphysical character, because Bachelardian, of Simondonian ontogenesis. As one can note while reading the synthesis which is the work Man’s Place in Nature, the bond with Simondon certainly revives so many simple themes and terms of true theses. But on the one hand, these themes and terms are completely central at the same time in Teilhard and Simondon, and sufficiently rare in the philosophical tradition so that the heritage is undeniable. In addition to the shared theses, sometimes also central, exist at the interior of the framework, already common, of cosmogenetic ontogenesis

We thus begin with the themes and terms. Man’s Place in Nature thinks “Personalization” as being a “phase” which makes the “synthesis” of “Socialization” and of “Individuation:”

At the end of the ‘expansional’ phase of Socialization that comes to close itself, we had believed that it was in a gesture of insulation, i.e. by way of Individuation, that we were going to reach the end of ourselves. At this point (i.e. since Hominization is entered into its phase of convergence), it becomes manifest that it is on the contrary only by one effect of synthesis, i.e. by Personalization, that we can save what really hides the sacred at the bottom of our egoism.

In Simondon, “personalization” will enter within the framework of the regime of individuation which is the “transindividual” as indissociably psychosocial. Such is the displacement of the synthesis, “individuation” not being simply one “more phase”—another concept which will establish itself as central in Simondon also—but designing the ontogenetic process itself, and personalization coming after the physical individuation and the vital individuation—or “individualization”—,therefore constituting this mode whereby the individuation becomes “psychic and collective” in the same grasp. In Teilhard, Personalization is also unification of the individual and the collective, but Socialization, Individuation and Personalization are succeeded as in speculative dialectics or overcome, and they are only three times of the process of “Hominization,” still too essintialized, too cut out from the living through what Simondon will describe as “anthropological” thought. However these differences do not therefore veil the undeniable thematic and linguistic filiation.

The general framework of this filiation is, as we said, ontogenesis as a thought of being as becoming. It is also in the fact that Teilhard, to our knowledge, invents the theme—celebrated from now on—of what he names “Complexity[12],” for which Simondon seems to us to have placed in a position of mastery. At least this is what our study should leave apparent, on the one hand through the sources of inspiration of thermodynamic, microphysics, cybernetics, systemics, and into the definitive encylopedia of Simondon, on the other hand in virtue of the real complexity of his thought of individuation as a process of “complexification,” to speak with Teilhard. What the latter names the “combination,” characteristic of complexity in its difference from “aggregation” and “repetition,” will be named “composition” by Simondon, and will be distinguished from simple “transposition.” Crystallization will be, in Simondon as in Teilhard, a central paradigm for thinking the ontogenetic process of which this complexity-complexification consists.

Such a general, common ontogenetic framework then introduces us with the shared theses. In Man’s Place in Nature, Teilhard was known to want to subvert the opposition of “materialism” and “spiritualism,” and this intention, even if it is judged as non-realized, is not only Simondonian as it aims at subverting an opposition. It is also undoubtedly what led Simondon to name “materialism” and “spiritualism,” obviously rather well concerned in its matter, to which we will come soon, mechanism and vitalism. The “corpusculization” in which consists, in Teilhard, the complexification is then what must explain in the long run what Simondon himself will name the “quantum character of consciousness.”

We stop ourselves at this delicate expression. In the principal conclusion of his thesis, Simondon says “to suppose” that “individuation operates in a quantum way, by abrupt jumps, each stage of individuation can also be compared to the following as a pre-individual state of being.” However the quantum character of consciousness, supposed also in Chapter II of the first part of Psychic and Collective Individuation, does not amount to the quantum character of individuation in general: it takes its sense rather as the particularity of “psychic” individuation in question in the first part of this work. In addition to the psychic, we will explicitly reveal “transitory path” towards a “transindividual” individuation placed beyond the alternative between immanence and transcendence, and from this difficultly conceptualizable fact, it is possible to see in the “quantum character of consciousness” a resumption and a deepening of the Teilhardian “corpusculisation,” in the form of the following intuition: the transindividual “personality” would be a psychism whose cellular level almost manages to modify the quantum level, while the psychism of the living organism as a “transitory path” would remain entirely attached to a cellular level only able to modify the molecular level. The physical individual itself would be made up for him on the superior scales through the inferior scales, but without any reciprocity. The Simondonian thematic of the “orders of magnitude,” to which we will come, also encourages Simondon to favor this intuition.

What is then the principal difference, if it is necessary to give only one of them among so many others, between the Teilhardian cosmogenesis and Simondonian ontogenesis? In Teilhard the stress is laid on a finalized and residually anthropocentric process:

Man occupies a key position, a position of principal axis, a polar position in the world. So that it would be enough for us to understand Man to have understood the Universe,—as also the Universe remains incomplete if we will only arrive at integrating in a coherent fashion the entirety of Man, without deformation,–all of Man, I say, not only with its members, but with its thought.

In Simondon, this integration of human thought in the Universe is translated rather into a necessary relativity of any knowledge of individuation as the individuation of knowledge.

[1] IGPB, p. 34.

[2] IPC, p.163.

[3] As Francoise Dastur shows in her book Husserl. Des mathématiques à l’histoire, Husserl felt very close to the Bergsonian distinction between time and duration, which Ingarden, through his work, had exposed him to Bergson. Several affinities between Husserl and Bergson also explain the interest of Merleau-Ponty then of Simondon for Bergson, even if Simonon were, as for himself, returned to Bergson by this second way which represents “French epistemology” resulting from Bachelard. The priority of a subversion of the traditional alternatives is undoubtedly the common goal from which these affinities proceed. In “Bergson se faisant,” Merleau-Ponty writes: “The intuition of my duration is training oneself generally to see the principle of the fact of Bergsonian “reduction,” which reconsiders all things sub specie durationis, –both what is called subject, and what is called object.”

[4] Cf. Creative Evolution.

[5] IGPB, p. 150. For a reciprocally and audaciously Simondonian reading of Bergson, but also of Ravaisson, Tarde, and Nietzsche, see P. Montebello, L’autre metaphysique, Paris, Desclé de Brouwer, 2003.

[6] Creative Evolution.

[7] IPC, p. 137.

[8] In L’énergie spirituelle, Paris, P.U.F., 1966, p.2.

[9] In “L’individuation en biologie” (Gilbert Simondon, une pensée de l’individuation et de la technique), Anne Fagot-Largeault does not fail to say from the start that Simondon’s ”ontology of becoming” registers “in the line” of Bergson (p.19). It is this point that we come to develop and specify. She then insists for her part on certain oppositions, which we will also have to evoke but which takes place inside the simple framework provided by the reasons for the filiation presented here. As for the more
secret and implicit encounter” (ibid, p. 20) that she evokes between Simondon and Whitehead, it will greatly interest our examination of criticisms addressed to Simondon by Isabelle Stengers, who prefers Whitehead over him.

[10] On readings of Simondon in general, see our Introduction. Bergson, Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty are the three great names to which Simondon owes his more profound philosophical ambition: the subversion of classical alternatives. The fundamental relation of Simondon to Bachelard will be exposed in detail in the second volume of our study.

[11] Simondon, who has suffered from not being able to communicate in philosophical fraternity, has without doubt acquiesced to our conviction that the veritable philo-sophical profundity, those of the true “grand spirits” of which Bachelard speaks in the exergue to our Introduction, is always human as much as intellectual.

[12] On the actual scientific thoughts of “complexity,” cf. Réda Benkirane, La complexité, vertiges et promesses, Le Pommier, 2002.

Four Birds Mixed media on paper (Catheryn Austen)

Openness only comes in the imperceptible recesses of infection: A faceless love. (Reza Negarestani)

Michel Serres never fails to remind us of something simple and indispensable. It is that all relationships are founded upon noise. In the beginning, there is noise, not silence. Even the simplest words arrive much later; and, at any rate, our words are still noise. The din and clamor of the many is sometimes frightful; and Serres’ work can be singularly terrifying. But Serres’ reminder is highly rational, even a joyful reconsecration of science.

Serres delights in showing us old meanings of new words, and vice versa; but it particularly to this word, noise, and its French cognate, parasite, that he gives unique expressivity and sonorousness. One of the primary meanings of noise in his work is chaos: the pure multiplicity behind things, without any pre-existing order or organization. All our knowledge is an organization of unorganized noise; noise is being-in-itself. In this context noise can also mean static, a cross-signal or lawless irruption, witnessed in the chaotic permutations introduced by chance into a flow of information, perhaps even from another physical system entirely. Static can also mean stationary, the white noise which persists even in the stillness of non-existence: in this sense noise also stands for the ever-present background noise, the racket and din of human and inhuman machines, over which it is often necessary to speak loudly in order to make oneself heard. Noise means that no system is without turbulence for very long, that there is always chaos, multiplicity and deviation; in short, there is always a parasite, always background noise, always depth and darkness beyond order and disorder. No system is an island, without relations, above the sea; but there are islands of ordered relations upon an ocean of noise. The universe is turbulence, but — and this is the strange and subtle turn — the converse is not true: turbulence is not universal, but local. It is absolute and relative at once: the violent sea becomes calm, a top falls, an earthquake ends. Still there are always larger forces, larger closed systems tumbling into chaos. Every system is an image of a system free from turbulence, an abstract or virtual composition. But reality is always chaotic, always in minimal deviation from every possible model: everything is in motion; everything falls.

An infinite multiplicity of divergent forces in motion, turbulence as the inner being or struggle for a deeper order to become actual: we begin to get a picture of Serres’ trembling, self-organizing world. In many ways we are somewhere not far from Deleuze; the similarity in some ways is quite plain: they share an undying passion for creation (of concepts) and convergence (of disciplines); they both evoke “strange” or overlooked but profound continuities between the present and the past; finally, they share a deep-rooted curiousity for minor expressivities, for hidden multiplicities, and for indeterminacy.

Recently I have discovered a wonderful Iranian theorist named Reza Negarestani whose work ought be discussed more often. Negarestani continues the cryptogenesis of Deleuze and Guattari, and much like Michel Serres he is quite spontaneously poetic even at his most intensely personal. Like all of them he speaks an eccentric language, or maybe it is just an untimely language. At any rate, Negarestani studies a dizzying variety of subjects: “Subsurface Political Geography; Surface Globalization; Underground Facilities and Chthonic Militarization; Archeology as the Science of Military Education in 21st Century; Tora Bora and the Cappadocian Complex; Worm Factor; Middle Eastern Necropolises and Underground Nuclear Facilities; Petropolitics, Guerilla-states and Architecture of Holes; Videogame Rhetoric and Memory as the Models of Alien Incursion; Poromechanics of War.” (From his website.)

He also has written a number of articles which are available online at Cold Me . One of these that I particularly enjoyed was “A Good Meal,” where (among many other things) Negarestani writes that during Deleuze’s investigation of becoming-woman, he (Deleuze) misses out on the properly parasitic or viral moment in the process, that is to say: the moment of return where the process of becoming-animal, becoming-intense, becoming-imperceptible establishes a ground which it can use to turn against itself, and become affirmatively engaged in this strategic negation, the return to zero. Thus we should not follow lines of flight all the way to a “point of destruction” but rather just to a “mutating and compositional mess,” an “exhumed architecture.”

It’s a very interesting point, but I’m not sure he’s completely right. However, Negarestani may be able to legitimately get away with this, because he just asserts that Deleuze forgets this; that is, he doesn’t mention Guattari! His point is that Deleuze becomes anonymous in the process of becoming-animal, becoming-intense, becoming-imperceptible, but he does not become external, he does not travel to Poe’s “outer darkness.” Maybe, I’m unconvinced. At least in terms of A Thousand Plateaus, the concept of machinic assemblages (likely largely inspired by Guattari) is quite critical to D+G’s project. Also consider the importance in other sections (specifically to double-articulation, the formation of holey space, and individuation) of counter-evolutionary parasites. Deleuze himself certainly reaches the level of the necro-depth, the permutational inhuman abyss in his own fashion; and no doubt Guattari has reached it by another way with the machinic unconscious. And it is also no accident that these two concepts offer key handles for A Thousand Plateaus. They’re critical turning points in our understanding of the way we must strategically engage new experiments, in what way we must undertake new becomings. Is Negarestani really going beyond Deleuze and Guattari here, what is he really saying?

For Negarestani becoming-woman is also not just a model. Like Deleuze and Guattari he claims becoming-woman involves a return to the “fibroproliferative unground” that allows us to begin a project of strategic affirmation of any becoming whatsoever: becoming-woman, becoming-child, but also even other, stranger becomings: becomings-machine, becomings-molecular, becomings-cosmic. Even Deleuze points out, that becoming-woman is the first becoming, the depth and darkness from which all the others emerge. Similarly, Negarestani writes of the ‘Mother of Abominations,’ the horrific black origin of multiplicity and pestilence:

She is the blackening Mother who ruthlessly opens up (epidemic lines, contaminations, contagious machineries, alliances, etc.) … through a strategic epidemic which is nothing but the ungrounding depths of openness, openness as the plague. [Cata, Remarks on Depth and Darkness]

This depth and darkness figure largely in Negarestani’s work; his treatment connects up well with Deleuze’s discussion of a dark precursor of deterritorialization. The very establishment of a ground for the processes of becoming is already a precursor of its ‘ungrounding’ by the same forces, it’s laceration, its being sliced open. Negarestani’s concept of the unground is at least partly a weapon against the Heideggerean ground, it is not a form but “fibroproliferative,” it is used to turn the tide against the process of territorialization.

He offers an analysis of the ancient Persian Satanists in order to illustrate his idea of an unground. These Satanists discovered they had to think strategically about darkness. In order to truly affirm Satan, they needed to lure his wrath by strategically make themselves targets. In order to make good meals for Satan, they had to purify themselves, to become decoys. In short, you have to “take a quotidian and in the same degree extremely systematic and institutionalized life as your own life-style (living), [you] both physically and mentally attempt to be away from defilement.” Negarestani is quick to point out that these are not nihilist-Satanists, like their modern Western counterparts. Rather, by becoming good meals they release themselves to Satanic ecstasy; they summon Satan through Asiatic peace, through pure horror. It is only in this way that:

“[Y]ou strategically lure the life-Satan to tear you to shreds; in this case, the intensity of life-Satan you experience is unthinkable … you become an unground to all defilements, horrors, and darkness which life-satan pours into the systems and organizations. According to Yazidian, the Satan, always lands on those who live and we must live (in the most organizational aspect of this process) to affirm such a catastrophic intensity of upheaval. It’s war and we must think both strategically and pestilentially. Now, you see the irony of the food chain which traverses not only theism, but also liberal politics, and socio-political survivals, angelic wings, etc. Every yang you drop in your pocket means accumulating more excitation for the life-satan.” (Reza Negarestani, A Good Meal)

He turns a will to live into a will to catastrophe: Serres’ angels’ wings turn black, and solid-state liberal politics turn on themselves, begin to demand their own turbulent ungrounding. Negarestani is definitely no less militant than Deleuze or Guattari, maybe he is even a little more ‘inhuman,’ a little more difficult to affirm. But I think he reminds me most of Michel Serres, — but perhaps Negarestani is even a little further out in the penumbra, a little more terrifying, though certainly no less penetrating. Negarestani is diagramming the abyss, exploring how epidemics are triggered from death and decay, how plagues howl through positive milieus, infecting nocturnal spaces of affirmation.

Depth, this pandemonium of compositions, movements and chromatism, through which one performs the darkness. The hunger for discovery and finding something in and through depth, even a monstrosity, is a dramatic attempt to reach a grotesque sublimity; in depth, only blindness awaits. (Reza Negarestani, Cata-: Remarks on Depth and Darkness)

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.

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Jacek Yerka, Port

Artaud writes that there is a possibility in theater for the creation of a new freedom, under the light of a “strange sun, [with] an unusually bright light by which the difficult, even the impossible, suddenly appears to be our natural medium.” His unusual description points to the possibility for a radical transformation of psychic and social capability; it also points to the very real likelihood (though not certainty) that all such efforts will fail for the time being.

Of course, culturally speaking, failure is relative; a work of art is only really as profound as its failures. (Not to mention that our own failures contrast our victories, a struggle without which poetry and religion would lose all their power over us.) However, Artaud’s curious image makes it possible to see a path beyond victory and failure, beyond destiny and chance. It is always possible to act in such a way that the situation itself is transformed. It all requires the most perfect timing, the most effective and delicate deployment of intensities. Becomings must be undertaken carefully; they are apt to lose control, overflow, and fly off the handles.

Nothing is certain — but also nothing is impossible. Yet failures are not always equivocal or even interesting. There are real dangers. Know that even the most extreme caution will not suffice to save you. The way is most likely still blocked, but change is always possible (though never certain.) All becomings flow into all others. A new space unfolds by itself. Thus it is possible to move beyond structure, beyond representation. We can create new structures, we can rearrange social or theoretical space. But even though it is not certain that we can create them, smooth or structured spaces are still not enough; we also need the power to move between spaces. Philosophy attains rigor through translocation; it advises us to not be haphazard in our striations and resmoothings. Religion is, in this sense, essentially haphazard (knowing in advance which spaces are smooth and which are complex.) In reality we do not know if the next space will be simpler or not.

Philosophy moves beyond chance and neccesity, between spaces. It operates from in-between society in order to critique social practice. It moves between spaces, integrates events in the interspaces between their becoming. Philosophy labors in the infinitesimal space between becomings, and is itself a new becoming (insofar as what it’s becoming is also already becoming something else); what I mean is that philosophy is differential. Whereas religion is integral, it generates new forms of becoming, but precisely by affirming unities, ones, closed spaces, limited complexity, simple machines. Religion affirms a Beyond, while philosophy affirms Reality. In the space between, there are only questions. But doubts can also sometimes inspire new psychic and social rhythms.

Religion comes before its time just as philosophy. The untimeliness of religious impulse is often taken to be an explicit endorsement; again, it is the disruption which is important, not the return to order. If religion is a complete fraud, and it is deceptive in its very essence, then we must further admit that it is therefore never what it appears to be. I mean that when we say religion always functions like this or that, we are denying the depth of the religious illusion, the turbulence it covers over. We are denying our secret complicity with the spiritual. Faith is never identical with a single structure or unified function; it is not simple transcendence, but a complex alliance which must be carefully taken apart. If we tear apart the machine too quickly, nothing is left, nothing remains — this is the religious illusion, the myth of stability.

Philosophy can see through promises to the changing reality underneath; only philosophy is really strong enough to affirm chance. Religion is an escape from chance, and therefore superficially resembles the philosophers’ discursive position and style; but philosophy strives to move beyond religion, it is accomplished by this very movement. Beyond transcendence, there is not only void; we return to the earth, and there is matter, there is movement, there is light and sound and diversity, turbulence and symmetry and chaos. Religion is the most perverse, the most dazzling object of philosophy. Why? Because it is already a subject, it operates by subjectivating, ‘blessing’ and ‘saving’ via magical transformations, through poetic becomings.

The philosopher’s questioning of the doxa of miracles, of becomings-anything, the questioning of mysteries, secrets and silence belongs to the essence of critical inquiry; it is often resisted by faith, which is certain that the world is grounded in impossibilities. Philosophy makes the double claim: no certainty, no impossibility. It is really a single affirmation. The religious nature is hungry for magical answers, and faith is an answer to an immaterial hunger; whereas philosophy is questioning by nature, hungry for powerful questions, for radical questions — even for new ways to ask questions. In short, philosophy desires; desire, not power, is the classical image of the philosopher’s habitual mode. Passionate questions are his duty, his categorical imperative. Morality and immoralist critique differ in style and in their relation to the historical order. But they are isomorphic in terms of gestural content — both offer prescriptions, criticisms, explanations — both are designed to provoke psychic or social transformation. The difference is form and style: religion ‘moves’ through tradition, spirit is ‘channeled’ through authority, energy flows through power. First and foremost, philosophy questions power, questions the lies which are used to support power; even questioning the conditions which continually recreate hierarchical power structures.

Philosophy poses the question of new becomings. Philosophy is a challenge, a dare: to move beyond mere faith, to finally become something, to make a change that coordinates new principles of difference. Religion also bears upon that which remains forever new, a protean and formless principle of (in)stability. Thus what the soul is for religion is, to philosophy, the act. All philosophies are philosophies of action or philosophies of memory. A philosophy of duration, or speed, unites both by moving beyond morality, beyond specifically human becomings towards non-human modes or media of expressivity. Religion also makes a double claim: humans are the measure, and humanity is sinful. Alternating joy and shame is proper religious mode: shame and joy are the same affirmation to the faithful. There is no reality, there is only God and becoming human; a soul trapped in an illusionary world where every word and action are already guilty. Whereas critique first casts off shame, lets go of guilt. Philosophy does not merely try to describe the form of the real. Philosophy transforms it, it remembers and becomes real; thought involves both human and non-human becomings. Memory and creativity are by far the capacity of humanity that is the most interesting; but even matter remembers, the earth itself is creative of new forms. Geology expresses not only duration but struggle, by following the striations of minerals we remember, we become the pitched battle between tectonic forces, the long-pent up forces and sudden explosions written out, expressed on the body of the earth.

Philosophy struggles to remain capable of being sensitive to non-human expresions. Religion hates its own animality, it resents it; but philosophy is open to all kinds of becomings, human and otherwise: animal and plant and molecular becomings, cosmic and digital and quantum becomings, becoming-woman, becoming-child… Religion in the end wants only to become a child, to acquire the innocence of children, understood in its most terrifying sense: that they do not know good from bad, they are unindoctrinated. Their ‘innocence’ is political, and a real danger both to children and philosophy! For the real power of philosophy is shown when it makes itself capable of asking an untimely question: then we see the whole social order disturbed and called upon to ‘answer’ the innocent question; sometimes we see real change, power structures upset, overturned. Religion is closed spaces and human harmony. What philosophy is consists in moving beyond closed spaces, moving beyond specifically human forms of harmony, of social becomings. Philosophy is in between solid forms, it transforms spaces: philosophy is friction and the onset of turbulence, a tiny parasite which enlightens as it feeds.

Royal science is inseparable from a “hylomorphic” model implying both a form that organizes matter, and a matter prepared for the form; it has often been shown that this schema derives less from technology or life than from a society divided into governors and governed, and later, intellectuals and manual laborers. …all matter is assigned to content, while all form passes into expression. (Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus)

The difference between state science and nomad science is practice; the difference is as great and as narrow as that between geometry and poetry. The practice intrinsic to each mode of scientific exploration is implicit in their method, in their metaphysical categories, and especially in their respective divisions of labor. Nomad thought works continually against the grain of traditional categories and conventional methods; it upsets orders of scale, imparts unusual rhythms, creates social turbulence and sometimes, if it is fortunate, gives birth to new modes of expression.

The state cannot spontaneously create scientific assemblages any more than it can create poetry; the state struggles only with its habitat, its Other, its medium, never (or only in extreme cases) with itself. And in the end, nomadic science draws the state bloodhounds to its hide-out by its exotic odors. The nomads are not only killed formally and indifferently; they are annihilated precisely for their indifference to the state formalism. Nomadic signals hijack the royal message, forge the signature of the state; such floating signals are seeds, impressions of novel forms, sparks which sometimes inspire revolutions. Conventional science is quite effective at reincorporating these signals, as it is skillful at organizing prepared matter; but minor science contraverts every state by inventing new forms of matter, and just as easily a poet dreams up novel expressions.

Between the two kinds of science there is an epistemological difference and an ontological unity. On the one hand, we have the world-as-object, the knowable or intelligible world with clear properties which can be plainly examined in their palpability. Properties are infused with geometry by virtue of their position within a structure: the state space is a closed symmetric grid. On the other hand, we have the world-as-experiment or the world-as-song, the imperceptible or becoming world, whose properties are not encoded into relations, but decoded flows free from axiomatizations. Nomad space is smooth and open, transitive yet untraversed. There is an irreducible epistemological division between the two modes, but in fact, we need both kinds of spaces in order to ‘perform’ science. Ontologically, the two modes are isomorphic: deterritorialization and reterritorialization are two aspects of the same process, operating at different speeds, moving in different directions. And at any rate, to awaken to a scientific mindset is already to go much farther. To become-scientist is to awaken in a desert, or upon an island, with only the differential forces of wind and sand and sky by which to mark distances, judge paths, measure waves. The scientist trusts himself, but cannot trust the world, not even as as an object. Hence science is already a different practice than conventional object-oriented activity. Michel Serres writes:

We do not know what the world is like today; we are only beginning to know it and this knowledge differs from our knowledge of a circumscribed object. We are just beginning to act on the world and this practice differs from our action on circumscribed objects. (From ‘Revisiting the Natural Contract’)

Thus science forms an ontological unity outside of the consistency of appearances, a moving unity capable of penetrating and reconverging cloven discourses, and then of disuniting them again. Science flows: in its nomadic aspect, it chases becoming; as state geometry, it captures being. The shape of the unity is precisely a turn to the formless, an impression of chaos, and a return to the form, the sublimation of collectivity and noisy assemblages into consistent ‘objects.’ In short, both modes require experimental methods and ways of averting breakdown; the experiment must be guarded against self-destruction. The more experimental the method, the riskier and more difficult it is to follow, the greater the exposure to uncertainty, and hence the greater the potential becoming.

The nomadic mode priveleges multiplicity over unity, but only provisionally, not as a foundation. A home, an idea, a language is built from pieces of noise; chaos and turbulence are at the origin of rhythm, of method, of smooth spaces. Following Serres, we are not against rational unity as such, but as Phillip Schweighauser writes in ‘The Desire for Unity and its Failure,’ we are “against the arrogance of a rationalist discourse whose desire for unity turns violent in its exclusion of everything that does not fit in its rigid order.” Not only must we be watchful of experiments which secretly desire to dominate nature, but we must actually experiment upon our desires in order to transform culture.

The modern break with the authority of the past begins with critical history and the possibility of an empirical investigation into reality. A clinical eye belongs to the properly empirical, trans-historical observer — the one who is provocatively “unpersuaded” by traditional interpretations, metaphysical narratives of becoming, who is skeptical of all foundation myths. Through empirical investigation one discovers the curious historical double-articulation of religion and philosophy, i.e., spiritual or psychic forms and collective authority or wisdom. Truly historical science replaces past tradition with present custom as the proper object of study, and thus by thoughtful prediction, such an inquiry opens the possibility of a non-linear relation between history and the future.

In other words, what empiricism finally rediscovers is that the future is just as deep and infinite as the past. This symmetry is the flash-point of the unravelling of hierarchical social organizations, authority, tradition, religion, etc. In critical theory, that is to the clinical eye, all forms of social asymmetry are isomorphic, but none explain themselves, none are automatic. The past and future are neither absolute nor transcendent. What matters is the present, praxis, the transcendence of history through immediate activity. The project of critical liberation expresses itself through revolutionary social progress: (1) it undoes foundations in order to unfetter potential (singular) becomings, (2) it coordinates energy collectively to produce (new) subjectivities, and perhaps most importantly, (3) it socially plans (different) forms of society.

Empiricism annuls the logic of exchangability in order to allow the subject to awaken to itself, to constitute a world. It strives towards a phenomenology of the given, of the gift. Thus the empirical tradition is liberatory science, that is to say, a science of form, which follows a self-conscious method for creating new formations. On the one hand, the subject is distanced, with a clinical, transhuman eye. Science dehumanizes reality in order to possess, to overcome, to dominate, to control. The clinical eye “images;” it is a camera and an imagination, a project and not a theatre of cruelty. Empirical science is therefore vulnerable to teleologies, to a sort of hyper-self-referential ‘scientism’ which inverts nature into culture.

But there is really no difference: yes, empiricism is a state science of geometrizing difference, re-interpreting distinctions as topological discontinuities. But empirical science is also creative, a nomad science of experimentation, of imagination and doubt and becoming, a sorcery of the void and the abstraction of truth via imaginative induction. Science is half-real, half-imaginary, like a dream; we do not know how the rules of the game work, we must find them out by experimenting, imagining, exploring. We must struggle to become aware, to awaken to ourselves. Science is learning to trust our senses, to critically observe without shame or resentment, to dehumanize the world in order to positively intervene in the flow of events — and dominate.

The goal of science is a true description of Energy, that is to say, of Power. Social science is standing upon its head, trying to explain power in terms of social forces. We must understand social forces in terms of power, that is, pre-social energy, pre-individual fluxes. The singular force of differentiation proceeds from multiple energy sources, arranging and weaving them creatively together. Combining forces produces more than the same forces in isolation; collectivism is the lure of empirical science, some form of global consensus, a universal body of information. The dream of total surveillance is ultimately a dream of becoming invisible, to oneself and to all others; but it combines this relatively benign neurosis with a psychotic desire to be everywhere at once, to accelerate and intensify becomings beyond their limit of degeneration, ultimately the suicidal sacrifice of life for the void.

Fascism succumbs in the end to metaphysical suicide. There is beyond the joy of returning to health and self-consciousness even a certain sorrow in this. It is that we know we ought to always accelerate the destruction of imperialism, of capitalism, of fascism in every form. But we lose our ability to evaluate clinically when these formations look familiar to us, and seem benign or boring. The constantly clinical eye becomes paranoid; it possesses double-vision for every social gesture or political group; it has an evil eye for the decay and degeneration lurking beneath every rosy facade. Fortunately we do not have to choose between boredom and hyper-cynicism; this is more or less precisely the clinical illusion, the dream of radical critique: hygenic utopia. The secret fascist dream of every architect. It is critical piece of the false reality which we must overcome: a love for smooth spaces is also a love for the power of creating them, molding them, segmenting them.

Science is a projective engagement with the real, a clinical investigation into a transactional or segmented space. Empirical involvement discovers in the interactivity of components the possibility of accelerating specific positive becomings locally, and by imagination, globally. If liberation is possible for myself, it is possible for everyone. A vacuous truth, in a sense, but one which is here intended not only to be read and spoken. It is a truth which has not yet become, which must be realized in the present: it is the liberal dream of empirical science. Freedom is not painlessness; this dream is not about religion, but precisely about recuperation, from psychic and social sickness. The most passionate desire of modern science is a better thought of health, that is, of power; it demands a truly clinical conception of strength expanding beyond the ‘normal’ and the ‘sick.’ Liberal thought understands that mutation is always critical, always reframes history — no matter how tiny the deviation. A thousand minimal acts of deviance can disrupt and overthrow even the most complex and entrenched of social mechanisms. A liberatory science is also a science of capture, an inclusion of the beyond within the calculable; by our concession this is made real in hierarchical social organizations founded on exchange. We can escape from the marketplace of ideas only by hermetic sealing our ideas off from the body of society, and even then critique, the clinical gaze, is always parasitic to some degree upon the texts/bodies it exploits. A liberated science is freed from theater, and is able to strive for greatness in thought and in deeds. A noble science, at once static and dynamic, a sensitive feedback assemblage as well as a creative imagination for bridging the inductive gaps. Imagination is transduction, the exclusion of the future by induction which exposes secret lines of flight in the present moment. Praxis is dependent upon perspective; we must be made aware in order to struggle, we need a light to see the light. Ethics is the name of the underlying social principle of differentiation, that the whole transcends the components.

The abstract One of the ethical deed cannot be isolated from a singular process of becoming, without thereby becoming false; we cannot produce a generic ethic without fascism. There can only be ethics, but ethics — ethics is an optics… We must learn to see with inhuman eyes, to act with pure clinical compassion, to think critically without fascination or parasitism. Modern science opens the way onto radical transdisciplinary convergences; we already must learn to speak many languages, we must all learn to be language-creators, too. The modern is only the idiosyncratic, the peculiar mythology of the present. But in the ley lines of the sorcerer’s tome we can read the deep secrets of the future and the past. The social must be dreamed; but only when reality truly disappears does dreaming emerge with a fresh urgency. We desire new futures to escape the dangerous present, without realizing the future we seek will exponentially exceed ours in danger and irresponsibility as well as insight and moral clarity. The first is the price we always pay for the latter; knowledge is always disillusionment. The price of freedom is choice itself; the critical must displace, the clinical must intervene. Empiricism produces a general awakening of innovation, an acceleration of institutionalization, industrialization, individualization. Revolution in the abstract is just imaginative intervention; history tells us that once people realize they have been made fools, they no longer tend to do as they are told. This is when the realization of full humanity becomes possible — at the very moment it has been transcended.