Where is truth — in knowledge or learning? If truth is processual, it is therefore also non-definitional; if it therefore exceeds classification, it annihilates a priori any possibility of its subtraction or division as such. Hence truth is impossible; yet this “impossible” subtraction of truth from an inconsistency, once postulated, nonetheless functions, it even begins to produce something, the impossible even becomes possible — and so perhaps produces everything. Thus the question remains, like a bone in our throat: how?

Just as it is the subtlety of silence to express that which language cannot, it is the very non-being of truth which is the origin of being. This answer may sound like madness, but it is actually a calm and clear way of speaking: behind both the world and the word, a silence lingers. And just as the voice emerges from a background of noise, from sublime meaninglessness the truth is subtracted. It traverses the warp of both language and experience. Knowledge bursts along particular lines, through circuits of learning which are in no way arbitrary and contingent, but rather the expansionary fault-lines of history, the exposure or blistering of time itself which results from precisely this trace of impossibility exuded by the irreversible relation: a pure non-functioning, a subtraction and division of an irreversible flow, a growth which is only as biological as technological.

The machine is again the proper metaphor here, and yet it is not even a metaphor: against time itself, learning struggles to function, and functions only so long as it does not understand — hence this struggle is not a spirit but a trace of the spirit, a flaw in the univocal sense of Being, a break in the signal which itself signals. Like a halo, the flaw is a messenger, a fragment which doesn’t belong and never did, and is included only by being excluded. From this inconsistency the wor(l)d inevitably and irrepressibly flows.

We could say that Heidegger’s introduction to Being and Time is rigorous and formalized to the extreme, like any other great (self-satisfied) German philosopher. Yet Heidegger also denounces any smack of self-satisfaction that would creep up in a philosophico-ontological investigation. What I want to do here in this short essay is to illuminate how Heidegger formulates the question of Being through Dasein, what this has to do with the ontological tradition and its destruction, and also what Heidegger thinks this has to do with the foundations of any science whatsoever. Due to the shortness of this essay, I will attempt to articulate these concerns simultaneously (bear with me).

Heidegger mentions that the structure of an explicit questioning does not become explicit until all the constitutive factors have become transparent (5). It is in this sense that Heidegger analyzes the Being of Dasein insofar as the latter is equivalent with the inquirer par excellence. Thus the elucidation of Being requires that the entity with a pre-ontological understanding of Being (Dasein) be analyzed explicitly. Heidegger will also talk about this as the existential analytic of Dasein or as the hermeneutic of Dasein, since this hermeneutic is the possibility for any ontology or any analytic of the existentiality of existence (38).

However, this question cannot become explicit until a few fundamental concerns are addressed. For example, Dasein’s pre-ontological understanding of Being is only possible because of the former’s being-in-the-world. In other words, for the existential analytic of existence to become fully transparent, Dasein’s ontical constitution (i.e. it’s being in a world) must be taken as the standpoint from which any ontological relevance is to be fathomed. This is why he claims that the roots of the existential analytic of Dasein are existentiell/ontical. Only through existence itself (our existentiell belonging to a world) can existentiality be analyzed into existential data (suitable for the foundation of a real ontology).

Some of Heidegger’s claims become more understandable when we present them in this way. For example, he argues that this analytic of Dasein is only possible through a “radicalization…of the pre-ontological understanding of Being” (15). In other words, since the world is reflected ontologically in Dasein, the latter’s everyday experiences in the former (its ontical constitution) must be taken as data from which to set out upon our quest to rigorously found an ontology. Another way of saying this is to claim that the question of Being must become historiological (42).

What does historicity/historiology imply though? In a sense, if historicality is the basis of any history whatsoever, historiology is involved with the way in which history is passed down through tradition along with the way in which this passing becomes concealed or self-evident in its movement from generation to generation. This is precisely where the question of the destruction of the ontological tradition comes to bear its philosophical fruits. For example, when Heidegger claims that ontology must be self-critical, he is not saying this in an arbitrary way, but he means that for any science whatsoever to evolve in its field, it must takes its problematic historiologically, i.e. it must become suspicious about the traditions that promote it so as not to lose sight of the fundamental question of Being that gets so easily concealed (36). Another example—which is really not an example but a way of reading Heidegger’s project through his reading of others, here Kant—becomes more clear when we read that Heidegger faults Kant for merely presupposing the relations between time and the “I think,” which he has inherited from Descartes. Kant’s procedure is not historiological since it doesn’t question the sources from which he obtains his arguments about the subject, nor does he make Being into a question (this is obvious). Where we see Heidegger actually formulating his own project is when he argues: “[Kant] failed to provide an ontology with Dasein as its theme or (to put this in Kantian language) to give a preliminary ontological analytic of the subjectivity of the subject” (24). If we look at the Kantian exposition of Heidegger’s task, we will see that he relates the problem at hand as one of the analytic of the subjectivity of the subject. This may be another reason why Heidegger begins with being-in-the-world.

What does this tell us about Heidegger’s stance on science? When we quoted the passage where he claims ontology must be self-critical, we were not arbitrarily providing an assertion out of context. Heidegger argues that the basic concepts undergirding any science whatsoever have to be taken as clues from which these sciences can be founded. He argues that the “real ‘movement’” of the sciences is determined by “how far it is capable of a crisis in its basic concepts” (9). It is in this strict sense that Heidegger envisions the destruction of the ontological tradition to be productive and positive, not simply negative. For as a science, ontology must be able to treat its own fundamental concepts—res cogitans, cogito ergo sum, etc.—as material to be reworked in order to make the real problem of Being transparent. It is also in this vein that Heidegger asserts that “ontological science is primary to ontical science” (11). This is why he claims that ontology is fundamental, whereas physics or biology deal with regional, ontical questions, i.e. questions concerning particular entities. However, since the Being of these entities has not become transparent until the advent of universal phenomenological ontology, science has to be subordinated to philosophy (in Heidegger’s view of things). My question is: does this not perpetuate the perennial struggle between science and philosophy? How is it that philosophy can have the pretentiousness to claim to ground real science, when, from the scientists’ point of view, philosophy is the mere recycling of concepts that do not have any factual basis in scientific inquiry? In other words, Heidegger continues the war between science and philosophy, even if he claims the latter is the most universal of sciences. How can we introduce democracy into thought and put science and philosophy on the same footing without claiming to give one or the other any sort of precedence? How can we break down the hierarchy that establishes itself in thought, i.e. how do we establish a peace treaty between philosophy and science, especially from the former to the latter?

Notes on the Preface of Laruelle’s Critique of Deleuze

“There is reason to revolt against the philosophers,” this is where philosophy, in its greatest triumph, only further encourages itself. This is the moment, when philosophy perhaps no longer recognizes the autonomy of science and art, that it denies their autonomy, and with the utmost subtlety.
Francois Laruelle, “I, the Philosopher, Am Lying: A Response to Deleuze”

Deleuze has discovered a secret — the secret or the property of philosophy, a secret which gives us the impression that it is very old and that it has been lost. He discovers the philosophical idiom, which now becomes alien to itself, but which remains an idiom precisely because it has become the language of the infinite. The language of the good news is absolutely private and absolutely universal. Their coincidence is the peak of the self-contemplation of the philosophical community. Hence the horror displayed towards transcendent artifacts like consensus and communication.

Laruelle, ibid.

1.
Francois Laruelle opens the preface of his remarks on Gilles Deleuze by stating that it is necessary to thank Deleuze for having said so clearly that philosophical discussion is neither interesting, or perhaps even possible, unless it is directed towards an outside of thought.

This praise should be read with more than a slight nuance. For Laruelle goes on to argue that the authors of What is Philosophy? have another interest than directing thought towards an outside: namely, in what Laruelle distinguishes as “laying claim to philosophical naivete.” [Laruelle, “I, the Philosopher, Am Lying: A Response to Deleuze” 1] Laruelle declares the object of such naivete to be to force us in the corner, figuratively speaking — to make us give up the secret to our tricks. They do it so well, it works.

The effect is generic, perhaps even all-too-human: through its innocent provocation, the laying-claim to “philosophical naivete” itself inevitably calls for the clarification of anyone else’s ultimate presuppositions as regards their own relationship to philosophy. Laruelle calls this “innocent” laying-claim a paradox — Deleuze abandons disputation, while succumbing to the worst excesses of communication.

It would still be wholly necessary, notes Laruelle, to explain the reasons for abandoning communication, and precisely in terms of the reality of thought. Laruelle notes Deleuze’s behavior in this case is symptomatic: the ashes of a critique of communication end up communicating only the reasons for abandoning communication.

2.

Laruelle is rigorous on this point in particular: philosophy, if it it is able to pass for the paragon of dogmatism, the most complete form, is also that which inscribes communication, “relation,” into the essence of Being.

Here we are asked to consider Leibniz, and his concept and practice of communication. They are dogmatic and destroy themselves, Laruelle says, for they are communicated from his philosophy itself.

But what about Deleuze? It is the same paradox in reverse which affects Deleuze’s philosophy, Laruelle argues. A great deal is communicated, little understood — and even less utilized. And so perhaps, Laruelle continues, the problem is undecidable, at least in philosophical terms, since each philosophy defines for itself a concept of “communication.”

By doing so, they scramble any codes which would allow an “objective” evaluation of both communicational and non-communicational powers.

The combination of these powers, along with the power of miscommunication, defines the philosophical, according to Laruelle.

3.

This book, What is Philosophy?, is highly anticipated, critically acclaimed, and widely successful — in short, completely assured of its own force. It makes the affect of the philosophical depend upon science and art, but not “themselves” or practically, rather upon the philosophical concept of science or art. Not upon geology, but the philosophical concept of geology; not upon x, but the philosophical concept of x. Philosophy denies the autonomy of science and art, declares their immanent practices without concepts to be heretical.

This is the point, precisely, where philosophy encourages itself to deny the autonomy of art and science with even more subtlety: Laruelle observes the “concordant” style of the work, its “local” style of reciprocal respect. He grants this is undoubtedly that within it which is opposed to communication — but is it not, he declares, also its most unapparent ruse, its greatest danger, and also the remedy itself for whoever knows how to identify in it — this last sleight of hand?

4.
The self-affirmation of philosophy does nothing but trouble other philosophers.

Laruelle wonders: how do we make this immaculate book into a problem — a new type of problem, since it’s already the solution to the problem of what a problem is?

Suppose there is a book, Laruelle says, and that it is called What is Philosophy? Suppose further that it claims to respond to this question, and through its own existence, in its very manifestation.

It would therefore be impossible to discuss the book, because it would be at the very center of philosophy, and philosophy would be at the very center of this book. Because one does not converse with God, one does not communicate with natural phenomena.

One does not argue with Spinoza.

This book is absolute, Laruelle writes.

It has written, spoken, and made itself into a response to this question: ‘what can a book do — what can a philosophy book do, especially?’

In other words, it can do nothing but auto-write, write itself right in front of you.

And so, Laruelle asks, what could readers do — but get off on a philosophy being done without them?

Laruelle admits he can no longer give in to the tone of Deleuze’s voice, that is: if it is indeed a question of doing what they’ve done, rather than saying what they’ve said.

And perhaps, Laruelle quips, there still remains one last situation they have not foreseen: really doing what they have said they have done, or what they have only done by saying it, once again mixing doing and saying under the name of ‘creation’ — as all philosophers have.

It remains to do the immanence they say, Laruelle asserts. Laruelle is clear about the point here: not to comment on the work, not to make a problem of it, is “perhaps to no longer want to do something besides what they have done.”

Is it still perhaps possible, Laruelle asks, to really do what they have thought to do?

How to begin to understand? Yet what is knowledge but the degeneration of learning? “Knowledgeable” thought waits, jealously, to snatch away our hard-won jewels of real experience — why this false patience, this impatience, this now-congenital haste? Thought and speed: thinking, the very light of speed in which all distinctions are blurred, internalized, folded — made significant again, logicized, facified. As though it lived only upon a vulnerable or delicate surface, in which it consumed itself in rapture; as though it perhaps experienced another thought within its detachment which, like the widening mouth of a bell, opens onto the world. Beyond time, the force of thought resonates with an irrevocable futurity: against the fold of the other, against the driving force of time itself, thought breaks free — hearkens and follows, a service without slavery. Thought specifies operations inflecting smooth space, the domain of an essential anti-principality: invention is discovery, a dangerous Gift. To estimate the spiritual progress of man: what else but this is Thinking, that dangerous remedy, the poison which, for a time, “cures” our illegibility? –We must not behave as though everything depends upon the existence or non-existence of an element, a relation, a system, even less a linguistic machine, to anchor thought. Stop interpreting and begin to think. Defy that cur(s)e which incurs, invokes, reverts: procure the logos wrapped within a mythology, unfolded only to become — ashes, a stone, nothingness. Dust. In the place of the sacred, we have substituted this heathen diagram; against the wall the burst recoiled — the remains, artifacts, lost or fallen: a coil of rope, a cross, a star. A map to dawn. Open thought to an outside, by any and all means available. Force your way free. Open the figure, draw without tracing. Begin, again.

Does objectivity, whose harshness and universal power is revealed in war, provide the unique and primordial form in which Being, when it is distinguished from image, dream and subjective abstraction, imposes itself on consciousness? Is the apprehension of an object equivalent to the very moment in which the bonds with truth are woven?

Levinas

I will not say that the disaster is absolute; on the contrary, it disorients the absolute. It comes and goes, errant disarray, and yet with the imperceptible but intense suddenness of the outside, as an irresistible or unforeseen resolve which would come to us from beyond the confines of decision.

Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

Levinas begins the preface to Totality and Infinity by asking whether war is not the most serious objection to the lucidity — the sanity — of ethics. For war robs our institutions and obligations of their eternity; it is the concrete suspension of the ethical. In war morality vanishes. The violence of war does not only affect us as the most real, the most palpable fact, but as the very truth of the real. Thus it is not just one of the ordeals morality lives. War renders morality derisory, rescinding its imperatives for the interim. Politics, winning at any cost, is enjoined as the very exercise of reason itself — opposing itself to morality as philosophy to naivete.

Fragments of Heraclitus are unnecessary to show that being reveals itself as war to philosophical thought. Reality rends the words that dissimulate it. War is produced as the pure experience of being, cracking the veils which covered its nudity. The ontological event of war is mobilization, a casting-into-motion of beings once anchored in identity. The trial by force is the test of the real. Yet the violence of war does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating people, but in interrupting their continuity — forcing them to play roles in which they can no longer recognize themselves.

People are made to betray not only commitments but their own substance, and made to carry out actions that destroy every possibility for action. “Not only modern war but every war employs arms that turn against those who wield them.” War produces and establishes an order from which nothing and no one can keep their distance. Nothing remains outside. War does not manifest exteriority, the other as other; it destroys the identity of the same. The vision of being glimpsed in war is “totality,” a vision-in-one which dominates Western philosophy.

Individuals become bearers of forces commanding them unbeknownst to themselves. The meaning of individuals, invisible outside the whole, is derived from the totality. The implicit univocity of each present is sacrificed endlessly to a future appealed to bring forth the objective meaning. The ultimate meaning alone counts, and only the last act transforms beings into themselves. Thus we are what we will appear to be in the already plastic forms of the epic.

In this context, oracular discourse would seem to accept the ontology of totality issued from war; but in fact the real import of prophetic eschatology lies elsewhere. It does not introduce a teleological system into the totality, but rather consists in teaching the orientation of history. Eschatology institutes a relation with being beyond totality, beyond history. It is not a relationship with a being beyond the past, beyond the present, nor with the void surrounding the totality where one could, arbitrarily, think what one likes — thus promoting the claims of a subjectivity free as the wind. Rather it is a relationship with a surplus ever exterior to the totality. It is as though the objective totality does not fill out the true measure of being.

It is as though another concept, the concept of infinity, were needed to express this transcendence with regard to totality, non-encompassable within a totality, and yet as primordial as totality. The eschatological, the “beyond” of history, draws beings out from the jurisdiction of history, of the future, and arouses them in and calls them forth to their full responsibility. Submitting history as a whole to judgment, exterior to the wars that mark its end, it restores to each instant its full signification in that instant: all the causes are ready to be heard.

The eschatological notion of judgment is contrary to the judgment of history in which Hegel imagined its rationalization, and implies that beings have an identity “before” eternity, before history is accomplished, before the fullness of time — in other words, while there is still time. It implies that beings exist in relationship but on the basis of themselves and not on the basis of the totality. The idea of being overflowing history makes possible an existence both involved and personal, beings that can speak rather than lending lips to an anonymous utterance of history. “Peace is produced as this aptitude for speech.” The eschatological vision breaks with the totality of wars and empires in which one does not speak.

The first “vision” is eschatology reveals the possibility of a breach in the totality, the possibility of a signification without a context, in short, the very possibility of eschatology as distinguished from the revealed opinions of positive religion. The experience of morality consummates this vision, rather than simply proceeding from it. Ethics is an optics, but yields a vision without image, bereft of the “synoptic,” totalizing virtues of vision. It is a relation, or intentionality, of a wholly different type. Of peace there can only be an eschatology, Levinas claims. Yet this should not be taken to mean that when affirmed objectively it is believed by faith instead of being known by knowledge. It means that peace does not take place in the objective history disclosed by war, as the end of that war, or as the end of history.

But does not the eschatology of peace, beyond the evidence and experience of the philosopher — coinciding with war and totality — live on subjective opinions and illusion? Unless, Levinas writes, philosophical evidence refers from itself to a situation which can no longer be stated in terms of “totality”; unless the non-knowing with which the philosophical knowing begins coincides not with pure nothingness, but only a nothingness of objects.

Without substituting eschatology for philosophy, without philosophically “demonstrating” eschatological “truths,” it is possible to proceed from the experience of totality back to a situation where totality breaks apart, a situation conditioning the totality itself. This situation is the gleam or glare of exteriority — or of transcendence in the face of the other. Rigorously developed, this concept of transcendence is expressed by the term infinity. What remains exterior to thought within thought is thought within the idea of infinity. It is conditions every opinion and every truth. It is the mind before it lends itself to the distinction between what it discovers by itself and what it receives from opinion. The relation with infinity cannot be stated in terms of experience; it overflows the thought that thinks it. Its infinition is produced precisely in this overflowing, which accomplishes experience in the fullest sense of the word.

The eschatological vision does not oppose to the experience of totality the protestation of person in the name of his personal egoism or even his salvation; such proclamations of morality based on the pure subjectivism of the I are refuted by war and the totality it reveals — the objective necessities. Rather a subjectivity born from the eschatological vision is opposed to the objectivism of war. The idea of infinity delivers subjectivity from the judgment of history to declare it ready for judgment at every moment — called to participate in this judgment. War does not break up against an impotent, detached subjectivism, but against the infinite, more objective than objectivity. Do particular beings yield their truth in a Whole in which their exteriority vanishes? Or, on the contrary, is the ultimate event of being enacted in the outburst of this exteriority?

Infinity is produced in the relationship of the same with the other; the particular, the personal, magnetize the field in which production is enacted. It both brings about and brings to light: effectuation and revelation at once, ambiguously. The idea of infinity is not an incidental notion forged by a subjectivity reflecting the case of an entity encountering nothing on the outside which limits it, overflowing all limits, and thus infinite. The production of the infinite entity is inseparable from the idea of infinity, for it is precisely the disproportion between the idea of infinity and the infinity of which it is the mode of being, the infinition, of infinity. Infinity does not first exist, and then reveal itself. Its infinition is produced as revelation, as a positing of its idea in me.

Responsibility is what first enables one to catch sight of and conceive of value.
Levinas, Otherwise Than Being 123

Beyond the question of being and non-being, language is not the event — but rather a process of assembling unformed and unspecified elements, an abstract machinics which imagines new forms for itself by correlating the various distinct orders of reality with a plane of consistency in which a unified vision becomes possible — in short uncovering the infinite possibilities of the event. But this apparition of the event in its infinity would be only terror, the dark depth in which all mixtures are possible — and nothing is outlawed — were it not for the ambiguity of silence, the “not-yet” which the event, the “given” or gift, makes possible, and which makes possible the infinite time of cohumanity.

In speaking, reality opens itself up to an order without signification or concept, lost neither in the depths or heights but in the very shape of the world, the surface itself, a topological mode or order of being issuing neither in sound or light but in an idea given me by the other, the gift of language. In expression being can become free. Language is the discovery not only of novelty but justice itself; the enjoyment of discovery is essentially social. The event is not revelation but a secret apology, a map of the vortex. Turbulence is lucidity.

Black holes are everywhere, and this prohibited prohibition permits everything: the torsion of language disarticulates the tension of the soul. Beyond the face there is a paradoxical and two-sided barrier, an apparition which interrupts the symbolic order of discourse, as though by a lateral or diagonal movement between the signified and the non-signified. By an astounding finesse, speech uncovers the world as a lesson or donation.

Debt and faith are born simultaneously. Language is justice — a gift — only when it sheds its anonymity to become universal, not by inventing a world-beyond-the-world, but by reconciling us to one another. It calls us to hear a there-is rustling behind the void.

Hence the notion of event correlates at least three distinct orders of relationship between possibilities: a relative-absolute conjuncture uniting singular events and possible worlds; an absolute disjuncture prohibiting certain events from certain worlds; a trans-evental function sweeping up worlds and events.

From an oblique angle, the terrifying and brilliant luminosity of Lacan’s thinking fell upon this problem of sweeping, being-swept-up: for him the function of the signified is not to represent the signified — the significative mechanism works only as long it has no relation to the signified, that it abolishes or absolves itself from this relation. A line of flight glitters, if only for an instant, in the turning of the faces. An almost-glimpse, of what is invisible anyhow — an imaginary trace which breaks with a consistently-functioning (discursive) structure. In other words: a relative rupture of signifiance which threatens the integrity of the dominant mediating forces (however well-localized such a threat may seem.)

Paralysis is not the worst fate; then the worst corruption remains completely unfelt. The media of the media, the hyper-parasites, are yet extremely well-hidden. We hear them long before we see them; the sign resonates, and in its frailty, we hear the echo of a familiar tone. Dissonance, death, decay: the essence of tranquility. Nirvana is flesh. The impossibility of harmonizing distinct progressions is the condition of the function of the sign: $. We can only fix what we imagine is broken, solve what we imagine to be a problem: a problem of distraction.

Neither an immanent nor transcendent principle, the question is entirely one of the asymmetry between the orders of signification and non-signification — words and wars. I indicate only the possibility of a transversal movement, which seeks not to mediate, to interpret, but rather to reconcile: to resonate, saturate, eliminate and amplify. No concept, no feeling is sufficient to demonstrate the movement of clarity, the gift — only its actual performance, or presentation “as such,” which threatens only as much as it is resisted. Pollution, for example, can serve as a concept which aids in settling otherwise uncertain moral issues; more broadly, whenever the integrity of the social structure as such is at issue.

The relation between me and the other commences in the inequality of terms, transcendent to one another, where alterity does not determine the other in a formal sense… It is produced in multiple singularities and not in a being exterior to this number who would count the multiples. The inequality is in this impossibility of the exterior point of view, which alone could abolish it. The relationship that is established–the relationship of teaching, of mastery, of transitivity–is language, and is produced only in the speaker who, consequently, himself faces. Language is not added to the impersonal thought dominating the same and the other; impersonal thought is produced in the movement that proceeds from the same to the other, and consequently in the interpersonal and not only impersonal language. An order common to the interlocutors is established by the positive act of the one giving the world, his possession, to the other, or by the positive act of the one justifying himself in his freedom before the other, that is, by apology.

Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity 251, “Beyond the Face”

Levinas argues forcefully that the truth of our being is compromised when we submit to tyranny. It is neither suicide nor resignation to declare this truth, but rather love itself, revolted by the violence of reason. There is a plane of reality that must be indicated, whose very existence at once presupposes and transcends the revelation of the other, wherein the I bears itself beyond death.

Yet in this movement, where subjectivity itself is posited as a function, the I also recovers from its return to itself. This plane is certainly love: the other who faces us arouses an infinite desire, and reveals a mode of subjectivity which is the meaning of language, or justice, and which is the very actuality of love, living for others. The mere existence of this plane implies both separation and transcendence — a revolt against the violence of a “reason” that would reduce interpersonal discourse to silence.

Subjectivity cannot accept silence — but it can cease its apology. This is not suicide but love. Resignation to a universal reason compromises our very being. Even if it is “rational,” it remains a form of submission to tyranny. Levinas writes that existence in history consists in placing my consciousness outside of myself, in “destroying my responsibility.” (T&I 252) Nonetheless, my individuality is very different from an animal partiality — even when supplemented by a “reason” issuing from organic-inorganic assemblages of contradictory “animal” impulses. When the self has its consciousness outside of itself, a kind of inhumanity resides in the consciousness of violence within oneself. A singularity is already at the level of reason — one is a personal discourse, an apology, issuing from itself to the others:

“I am in truth by being produced in history under the judgment it bears upon me, but under the judgment that it bears upon me in my presence–that is, while letting me speak… The difference between ‘to appear in history’ (without a right to speak) and to appear to the Other while attending one’s own apparition distinguishes again my political being from my religious being.” (Levinas, Totality & Infinity 253)

Impersonal reason does not leave us magically outside the state or spare us from violence. Our freedom reads shame in the eyes which look at me; our freedom is an apology, meaning only that it refers already from itself to another’s judgment it solicits. As a result of this apology, my being does not equal its appearance in our awareness, and is not called to appear to itself in reality. Yet it also does not equal what it has been for others, in the terms of an impersonal “universal” reason: “If I am reduced to my role in history I am unrecognized as I was deceptive when I appeared in my own consciousness.” (252) My historical existence is the movement whereby my consciousness is placed outside of “myself,” and this difference is not only theoretical: our awareness of the tyranny of the State makes it actual, even if this consciousness is “rationally grounded.” The violence death introduces into my being does not make truth imposible. The violence of death appears to reduce to silence a subjectivity without which truth could not be produced; unless the subject renounces itself without violence. This is not suicide, not resignation, but the meaning of revolt against the tyranny of impersonal reason. Love presupposes and transcends the epiphany of the other. Not apology, but submission to tyranny compromises the truth of my being.

Who’s in Control?

Heidegger and Technology

We have for a very long time presumed to be in control of machines. We have claimed to be the masters, and pretended to “govern” technology. So Heidegger is more poignant than usual when he reminds us (in the 1969 Der Spiegel interview) that we do not even control that within us which drives us towards technicity. We are not masters of the secret desire which compels us to encircle more and more of the world within our productive networks.

For better or for worse, Heidegger is one of the first to honestly assess the strangeness of this phenomena — the machinic turn in our relationship to the earth and to being. In the ’69 interview, he was asked what the problem with technology was — after all, aren’t we better off than ever? Heidegger declared it was precisely the pure functionality of the machine which terrified him. The machine is problematic as such; but even more so is the static regime of inhuman operativity which the development of modern technology inaugurates.

In this absolute functioning of the machine we discover a surprising, pure and uncanny kind of nothingness. Heidegger reminds us of this in order to pose a challenge about our relation to the earth. Is it possibility that behind the beneficent face of advanced technology is the same noise and turbulence revealed and concealed at once by the ancients as pure ideas — a nonsensical self-annihilation co-extensive with an absolute determination of beings — a “reality” where all life, all possibility, all energy is merely (or finally) standing-reserve for “our” use? But who are we?

We do not master the machine by our own power. It has taken us a long time to realize that a machine is like a science. It functions in a certain way, and there is nothing else. Functioning propels everything towards further functioning; technology dislodges man, uproots us from an authentic relation to the earth. But what is this noise, this nothing else which keeps interrupting us…?

As ever it is the parasite which interrupts the relation, and in doing so, founds “relationality” itself. Machines conduct existence, they drive life — both into and away from itself. We can no longer “be” here, we are no longer masters even of our imaginations, of our desires. (Parts of us are disappearing all the time.) Machines dig into the earth, rivening it, transforming it and everything related to it — maybe even seeding, in a way, the entire cosmos, for new and alien revolutions.

What is the machine? A corporeal and an incorporeal transformation, welded together. In terms of the form of the machine itself, or its function, it may not make much sense anymore to ask: who is in control? A machine functions and nothing else. But what is this ‘nothing’?

Control is thus the object of the most urgent critical question — posed here as an opening question — pointing towards (and possibly beyond) the deterritorialization of the planet, and the un-worlding of the world by the machine. Face to face with the machine — the day is likely not far off. Is Heidegger’s horror justifiable? Are we witnessing the beginning of a departure of Being from the earth — or on the contrary an opening onto multiplicity?

In “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger writes:

“Modern technology, as a revealing that orders, is thus no mere human doing. Therefore we must take the challenging that sets upon man to order the actual as standing-reserve in accordance with the way it shows itself. That challenging gathers man into ordering. This gathering concentrates man upon ordering the actual as standing-reserve… We can now name the challenging claim that gathers man with a view to ordering the self-revealing as standing-serve: enframing.”

Technology is alienating at its core, a gathering which challenges us in return to order the actual in accordance to itself. The machine reveals an inhuman order — we are always discovering machines encircling noisy abysses of pure energy — so in some way technology mediates, supplants and erases “eidos,” the outward aspect of sensibility, the essence which is presented through flux — so the essence of technology is not human, or even  technological. The machine is inhuman speed, “pure” operation — an acceleration of the essence of beings — un-grounding that which in everything and in each thing is present enduringly.

Heidegger admits his usage of “enframing” [Ge-stell] here will thoroughly unfamiliar. It will be even stranger for English readers; it is helpful that Ge-stell can also be used to refer, as he notes, any kind of ‘apparatus’ generally (a bookshelf, for example.) But the usage Heidegger requires is uncommon, and seems eerie even to him — “Can anything be more strange” than the meaning of this way of revealing the uncanny stability in the essence of technicity? (Enframing [Ge-stellen] is a “challenging,” but is closely related to “production” and “presentation” [Her-stellen and Dar-stellen].)

Finally, enframing relates in an essential and uncanny way to poesis itself. We find an enframing in all revealing, even in that which first allows presences to come forth into unconcealmeant, the “originary” production that brings forth… Heidegger writes:

“In enframing, the unconcealment propriates in conformity with which the work of modern technology reveals the actual as standing-reserve. This work is therefore neither only a human activity nor a mere means within such activity. The merely instrumental, merely anthropological definition of technology is therefore in principle untenable…. [But] it remains true nonetheless that man in the technological age is, in a particularly striking way, challenged forth into revealing. Such revealing concerns nature…”

Despite our material prosperity, is an uncanny horror slowly but surely awakening around us, through the multifaceted vector of biotechnology? Or are we just suddenly and surprisingly aware that, rising from beneath the earth, an even larger ungrounding was already always occurring — one which opens onto a smooth space, a “world” without horizons (a cosmos…) ?

Is this difference, this distance (only) philosophical? But our world is already made up of these distances or differences, and we are just scratching the surface. The essence questioning us in technology relates to the meaning of being, that is, to life, to reality, to the world, to possibilities — to unspoken potentials which can be activated through questioning. So we will let the question stand as unanswered (and perhaps unanswerable): who is in control?

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

(Karl Marx, from the introduction to Grundrisse)

Between being and language there is an interval, a purified difference articulated through individuation, a difference in time or development: language is in such a way that it always is yet to be as a being. Language becomes through the production of alteration or mutation: we can and cannot formulate the sense or direction of writing — it is always in a process of developing into an exotic, immaterial, and “purified” being — or even into a different kind than “being.”

Through a coincidence of non-identicals, language plunges into becoming in order to reverse its temporal structure: pure language is tachyonic, a signal reversed in time, whose being unfolds in waves, inverting the radiation of light and noise, subverting distribution of space, producing an unusual, internal co-resonance which unfetters time (alterity) itself.

Language is radiation, interference; thus linguistics is a kind of harmonics: a science of language without phonetics, a science of noise and parasitic diagrams, which would already in some sense be reducible to a violently “purified” mathematics (the “post-modern” is but footnotes to Aristotle, a fervently anti-idealistic “clarification” of ontology.)

The analysis of linguistic structures unconsciously proceeds in (genea)logical fashion: yet should we not also seek language in its positive or generative aspect (which correlates with a larger sense of language as expressivity, productive recording,) that is also to produce new languages of pure forms, and also to invent mathematical and scientific languages; and between and underneath both to produce instructions for pure machines?

The difference between being and language is produced through the process of language itself — that is, it is expressed in expression, this difference is what is produced in production, it is the expressivity innate or inherent within all production.

All generation is linguistic, all genealogy is rhizomatic. There is “truth” in the signifier as such only to the degree writing itself is degraded, misunderstood, improperly measured or approximated. Linguistics is already dangerously fragmented; we do not even know any longer either the way to language or where writing is going (and this impossibility or incredulity of knowing is perhaps what rescues us, what “redeems” genesis from the brink of madness) — nor indeed, if writing is already gone.

Perhaps historians will someday place an arbitrary mark somewhere in the dense folds of the 21st century, saying: “Look, this is where writing becomes something else, where the signifier failed and something new therefore had to be produced.”

Or re-invented…– Writing experiences degeneration and salvation more intensely than human beings, it is a more intense activity to revive language than to “simply” attempt a direct revival of the being or essence of humanity (whether singularly or as a multiplicity or even as something else entirely) — yet in practice these different impulses, which are by nature so profoundly divergent, cannot be distinguished.

Writing precedes speech as both a degeneration and transcendence, as the possibility of science, perhaps more profoundly as memory itself: a science of language which is not a writing, a non-serial or “first” writing which comes (“chronologically”) last.

Language is analyzing and recreating itself, despite our conservatism.

The patterns of intensity only amplify through time; radically divergent investigations more and more often intertwine. Time is inter-linked, history is alive.

Memory and the future, science and the humanities: twins, embryonically interwoven, yet as divergent, as radically other to one another as extraterrestrials to ourselves. Degeneration and transcendence: a science of language without being a writing, a first science which imposes upon philosophy a new challenge.

Insofar as it tends towards a studied negation (or counter-actualization) of our numb existence, endlessly dramatizing the existential narrative of escape, contemporary cinema conveys an intense and disturbing truth about modern reality. It is not just the easy and everyday dissociation that life is a movie, but more surprisingly, that movies have become indistinguishable from our real lives. Drama is not merely a terrifying absence, simply the dissolution of the synchrony of the One, but an enigma even more puzzling still– the cinematographic interface is already an incontrovertible diachrony, a renegade communication across an abyss of broken myth. Cinema: the art of time turned in upon itself. The surface story splits the world in Two, by drawing a sacred circle (or rectangle) in which larval intensities can escape from their segmented order of time (or space.) Images transcend history.

Drama, in its fiery and stormy heart, is the story of the becoming-One, the becoming-Image, the imaginary One whose becoming exceeds the “legal” or “logical” boundaries of the story world. Above all the telling draws together the one who can answer a profound question, that is, the one who tells responds to a specific call. While a matter may hold terrifying secrets, and suddenly seem to overflow the encircled space with dark and terrible visions of other worlds, nonetheless, like a vampire, the storyteller would not have come without being asked inside. Who knows, it may even be that the real story cannot even begin without a pre-original apology, a gift or other crude offering of gratitude, on the part of the interlocutor. For drama is not recitation, it is spoken reverie.

Only original impressions are magical. Only if God were a playwright, could existence be so profoundly miserable and magnificent at once; and in such a delicate symmetry! Who must be convinced the universe expresses themes which are by turn unfathomable or tragic or transfiguring? We feel becoming as dramatization, already “actualization.” Now what is needed is to digitize creativity, to automate the playwright, to quantify writing. For becoming is the body upon which the author, the artist, the cinematographer play, these mad directors of active and reactive forces of intensity. All elemental and narrative forces are available at their palette. The complete artist — who is thus in absolute hell, for he knows a little about horizons. Now it is revealed: God writes straight in crooked lines, or put another way: being is indifferent.

And becoming is a black hole. Yes, the movie is our life. Why deny it? It is already over and the story hasn’t even begun. The medium itself is fluid, full of noise. Yet, despite its transience, cinema is still richly traversed by pure elemental forms. There are sublime moments of crystallization in cinema that rival or exceed anything I have ever experienced.

For the space of the drama, the screen functions as a turbulent transparence.

Preface (Emergence from Noise)

This study seeks to explore the relation between dramatic theory and artificial intelligence. The goal is to shed light on a broader and more difficult question: how do we reconcile authorship with autonomy? In terms of this deeper question of creativity, it will suffice for the purposes to investigate only peripherally the question of human expressivity. Indeed, almost our entire concern will be with a-linguistic feedback systems, and in particular, systems of non-human communication. The first goal of this study will be to develop a theory of “autonomous” interfaces. This model is then applied to several particular examples of interactive systems, followed by a description of the computational as well as phenomelogical features of ‘deeply generic’ interactivity.

Consider the problem of dynamically generating a dramatic story. Since playable characters would be to some degree autonomous to the plot, how do we achieve dynamic interweaving with the plot? The future parts of the story must be actively rewritten, the world must be warped about the active characters, entities in the game-universe controlled from somewhere outside. The space of user behavior is precisely the critical gap of narrative control between the plot and the characters.

In terms of developing interactive drama, we are still awaiting some legitimate cybernetic interconnection across disciplines. In short, we have need for generic representations of plots and characters and then rules of mixing them up, arranging and transforming them to respond to user interaction. In terms of design, then, we need to create a machinic interface between the author and the story space. Even though the fields are abstract, a real engineering is required here. We need to build literary machines which can resolve this break between plot and autonomous characters.

Efforts similar to our study have in the past produced conceptions of drama-managers (micro-agents who arrange plot-atoms combinatorically to conform to certain desired dramatic functions.) Eventually most studies have concluded that the problem lies in the authorial interface. You don’t want to have to program a thousand different variables to describe a character, but on the other hand, you don’t want very few variables. In fact, you want a natural interface which develops a full character based on a partial description, with a lot of creative guessing and inventing in between. That is, you want to be able to describe in natural language what a character is going to act like.

This behavioral dimension of activity is difficult to characterize; certain languages (like ABL) even make behaviors the elemental basis of programs. Again, we run into similar problems, if almost all the drama and narrative is being generated by the plot subsystem, how do you account for the uniqueness of new users? How do we dynamically generate characters without simply scripting behaviors? The answer is to have many layers of evaluation, and more complex levels for more complex interweavings characters and plots. The key is pragmatic variation: it is a tool which can be used at the lowest level of language generation as well as at the highest level of overall dramatic management.

Let us briefly anticipate our results in order that the situation be made clear. There is an inescapable gap in the philosophical and computational discourse on interactivity, the explicit question of bridging this gap together narratively. Now, in many ways, the problem of natural language understanding is strictly beyond the scope of this study, though obviously the theoretical apparatus we develop is intended to be generic enough to effectively model certain interesting features of human languages and stories. Examples of such models will be sketched out in the final section.

(sorry, more on this soon)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Limits of the hylemorphic model

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simondon, Gilbert. “The Genesis of the Individual.” Trans. Mark Cohen and Sanford Kwinter. Incorporations. Ed. Jonathan Crary. New York: Zone, 1992. 296-319.

At the same time that a quantity of potential energy (the necessary condition for a higher order of magnitude) is actualized, a portion of matter is organized and distributed (the necessary condition for a lower order of magnitude) into structured individuals of a middle order of magnitude, developing by a mediate process of amplification (304).

Simondon’s chapter in the Incorporations volume constitutes the introduction to his L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. In his review on that book, Deleuze stresses that Simondon articulates a rigorous distinction between individuality and singularity due to an examination of the principle of individuation. Simondon begins with the problem of inferring a principle of individuation because current schools of thought tend to view the individual as a given. This confers an ontological privilege to an already constructed individual. But Simondon sees this view as a backwards approach, or what he terms reverse ontogenesis. In fact, because Simondon believes that individuation is merely one stage in the becoming of a being and thus is not the totality of a being, individuality falsely attributes a unity and identity to a heterogeneous milieu of forces from which the pre-individual nature of a being enters into communication with another order of magnitude. Thus, instead of focusing on the individual in order to infer the principle of individuation, Simondon asserts from the beginning that his project is to understand the individual in terms of individuation, which can be considered now as ontogenesis itself.

The milieu is swarming with potential energy. This flux forms the basis for the pre-individual singularities or quanta that will actualize the process of individuation. However, it is important to note that individuation does not exhaust the potentials embedded in a pre-individual state. Instead, the individual carries this pre-individual nature along with itself because the process of individuation is only a partial or relative resolution of the conflict within a being. Simondon refers to this as a process of doubling the pre-individual being so as to push the individual out of step with itself. This being-out-of-step is necessary insofar as metastable systems (as opposed to static equilibria) require a movement of disparity wherein entropy and order can correlate variably within different modes of becoming. Put another way, the metastability or potential energy within a system is the problem that becoming tries to resolve due to the tension between the determined forms an individuation takes and the indefinite amount of potential alternatives for the selection of a solution. Only if a being constantly throws itself out of step with itself will it ever allow for the disequilibrium necessary for the movement from a lower order to a higher with the aid of a definite quantum of energy.

–Taylor Adkins

Roger Brown, ‘Talk Show Addicts (1993)

Events are named after the prominent objects situated in them, and thus both in language and in thought the event sinks behind the object, and becomes the mere play of its relations. The theory of space is then converted into a theory of the relations of objects instead of a theory of events… If you admit the relativity of space, you must also admit that points are complex entities, logical constructs involving other entities and their relations.
Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature

Immanence is, upon its surface, just a word which indicates that amongst the present relationships we observe, we perceive them as interlocking — that reality is ‘inner space.’ Another way of saying this would be to say that we do not believe there to exist a deepest space. Thus when we make a claim of ‘pure’ immanence, we assert that there are no ‘extra’ layers of being above or beyond the situation, and that nothing spontaneously intervenes from another order of time. Immanence implies something special about the initial conditions of any space it is applied to: namely, that they open onto multiplicity, and fold in upon themselves without reference to an exterior. That there is no ‘outside’ of Being: this is pure immanence.

Nothing encapsulates an anti-immanent perspective more closely than the delicate epistemological framework inaugurated by Plato (but exemplified best, perhaps, by the cogito) which asserts that knowing and experiencing are but modalities of a fundamental distinction. Life is essentially separate: both within and without, split between thinking and acting.

In fact, a closer look reveals a complex topology of theoretical spaces. We find sense separated from truth, yet mysteriously contained within it. We ask: if reality is just what is contained in our modes of experience, how can we account for the existence of undistinguished situations (out of which our ‘distinctive containers’ evolved)? The answer is — we cannot! Because of the ‘implicit transcedence’ in a distinctive geometry of experience, we literally cannot speak them — because we “aren’t them.”

Is it really so clear and distinct that such separated spaces would not communicate? Whatever the case may be, in every theory advancing a transcendent distinction as primary, there emerges the necessity for an enduring interface produced by a geometric projection between the distinguished spaces. In the ontology of Alain Badiou, ‘fidelity’ names the connective operation between elements of an enumerated network of forces. In the clarity of this fidelity, the distinctions between subject and event, process and underlying ‘reality’ become critically blurred and radically ambiguous. The void can no longer be absolutely distinguished from the situation. That radical reflection which discerns the indiscernible becomes autonomous by this same maneuver — in his somewhat classical conception, the subject-space is divided between art, science, politics and love. But we should not judge from this that these spaces are indeed so indubitably separated (in reality or in Badiou’s ontology,) nor should we conclude from his idiosyncratic treatment of the ontological question that his project is without precedent.

For example, when Deleuze and Guattari say that “Love is an index of the reactionary or revolutionary investments of the libido in the socius,” they are indicating a requirement not only for political thought, but for creative activity in general: when we participate in sociality, if we do not do ‘it’ with love, the engagement becomes reactive, anachronistic, even “passive-aggressive.” Badiou’s sort of fidelity has a similar requirement: you belong to the event only when you have made it what it is–and by this process, we become what we are. You either enter with love in your heart and hands open in passivity — or you do not really enter at all, or only to critically misjudge the nature of your relationship to the event. For without love there is no revolutionary necessity.

Love is most important when it is immediately political, when it is immediately ethical. When love is so intense that it resonates, when it is totally without jealousy, this is when love unfolds its mysterious potential: its capacity to inspire, to dominate, to intensify a flow of desire. Love is reality: it’s affect is most closely claimed by the word ‘infusion.’ An unasked-for love is indiscernible, if only in its inclusivity — which is why love is an ethical intercourse, or else a tragic ignorance: “If you do works of faith and you have not love, you do not know me.” I think it has been forgotten that Nietzsche descries not only pity, but also philanthropy, for within he could smell the vulgar desire to be praised. There is a kind of giving which is a selfishness posited for a love of mankind, and there is a kind of “love” founded upon God looking upon us and thinking of us as blessed. But love without jealousy is love without guilt, and a self-praising lifestyle is unfit for the faithful. Love is first giving in, not giving out.

We say love is perhaps the revolutionary impulse, for it is that emotion which first reminds us, with piercing clarity, of our real condition. Suffering is not guilt; pain relates to situations which are not eternal, to arrangements which evolve and change by their nature. To love means we could not stand the shame of another’s degradation; to love is to know the shame of the situation and to not accept it. Hope is only for a truth which is wagered upon, but love engages our responsibility to create new spaces for living-togehter. Thus to wager on an event is to become an intense potential for difference. We wager our singularities, and we have faith; only then can we create a new kind of situation. Faith has to be propelled; it doesn’t exist in rest. Ontology is the science of rest, the psychology of sleep: it provokes the deepest revelations, but not the deepest joy. That there is still a non-ontological space for thought today we perhaps owe to the endurance of joy. Our experience of political reality is intimately shaped by an careful community ‘surgery’ which conditions potential expressions of value. In practice, only a delicate subdivision accomplishes the total vision of faith, or ontology. A numerical theory of the event aims at continuity through becoming, where a genetic theory of society aims at becoming through intensity. The political is the abstract: the question of politics is that of clarity, and the truly political desire is a progression: from the will to transparency, to the will to distinction, and finally, the will to loyalty — or the will to power.

Thus the rise in vivid experience of the Good and the Bad depends on the intuition of exact forms of limitation. Among such forms Number has a chief place.
Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (107)

0. Empiricism lives and studies in the future anterior; thus order and number appear, as though already in their most sublime perfection, and involve themsleves in the experiment as though always fully formed from the outside. They are a key to the symbolic universe and thus a virtual island of hope — but survival demands we must be harder than mere forms. Faith in number, the pure form of being, isn’t even ironic; it’s messianic, a hermits’ opium dream. For truth can be unveiled only on the basis of differences, and among these only those which make a difference; therefore sets already contain a measure of sublime violence. Any enterprise ironically founded upon the abyss cannot overcome its own implicit transcendence and lapses into reaction– if it fails to rise forward towards any kind of ‘bright future’ other than one already fully formed. And in any case, science is never an end, but a means; and insofar as this remains true, it will function transcendentally, and even ironically, as a form of institutional violence.

1. For upon what does reason does stand, if not itself — if not upon it’s own virtuality, it’s unconscious investments? Reason is like freedom because it speaks upon its own authority: it does not dominate, yet effortlessly counters every effort towards domination. Could we not identify it as a species of sublimely misplaced aggression, purged first of violence, and finally — even of the sacred?

2. The experimenter is a creature of an obscure delight, whose most intimate and secret desire– is to become invisible; in the wake of this daring closely follows the ‘moral’ scientist who wants nothing more than to be a “good” and “shameless” observer. In terms of bearing witness to the singular ‘truth’ of a process, our testimony is only as good as we have become equal to the process in question. The experimental subject thereby becomes the secret and esoteric origin of the scientific situation. Not that science is to be relegated to narration; on the contrary, it may be that the path of the shaman and that of the biologist in the future could converge…

3. The scientist dreams of a time when knowledge will spread and conquer fear. Collective reason abhors the abyss, and cannot authentically envision the emptiness of the void as constitutive; yet for all our higher reason, as science approaches the edge, it grounds more and more of itself upon its own shadow. Science must rather illuminate: the void is not the ground but a kind of sickness, and the paranoid certainty of a egoistic-rational framework already demands a recovery– a transvaluation. On this point, our position ought to be that the global and the local are neither distinct nor indiscernible. Thus we can observe (and without paradox) that the universe is evolving in time, that it is both orderly and chaotic, that some parts are hidden and others are revealed, that the whole is both being and becoming, all this at once, and in very many different kinds of ways. Thus we also must understand, and henceforth without mysticism, that existence — visible or invisible — is only ever spoken about in one sense.

4. Of course, there may be unseen dimensions of being– but this is a conceptual boundary. For even these belong upon the same material plane when we indicate ‘being’ in its pure verbal and infinitive sense: to be as an infinite multiplicity.

5. We can now easily understand how reason is a meta-strategy: it is the thinking behind thinking, a sort of combinatorical game. More precisely, meta-strategy is calculating odds on the duration that a certain method (of prediction, explanation, control) will (continue to) succeed in ‘approaching’ being. So even though scientists are attempting to find ‘universal’ answers, transcendence is rarely explicitly invoked in scientific discourse. Yet the subject of science is such that experimenters cannot escape that they are concerned, in a specifically human way, with illuminating a species of ‘timeless’ truths.

6. The ‘science’ of language makes this particular paradox clear: enunciation, is after all, only a bridging of two different ways of measuring time.

7. Let us introduce a new understanding of the term by saying that analysis begins with the mutual understanding that something in a situation is existentially intolerable. This is, as it were, the heart of the vortex — an (or even ‘the’) object which will not ‘let us alone.’ Thus the fundamental operation of analysis is the inscription of a transversal line through the heart of the obscurity, it is a kind of torturing which could possibly heal. It could turn out to be the creation of a new science, but undeniably more often it is simply the scientific creation of a desired objective process (removal of the feared or dangerous object, etc.) In light of the preceding arguments, we can now present the thesis that analysis traces these transversal lines of flight towards new senses of being. The displacement of aggression into a process of healing is a particularly fascinating inversion to which we shall have to return.

8. At the time, it is enough to say: for too long has the scientific position been tainted by irony, been thought refuted even by its ‘refined’ position. Science certainly must play the role of the ‘ignorant,’ but of course it is already an elegant and Socratic ignorance– laced with irony towards public opinion, and for ‘established but unfounded’ explanations. The ambiguity of the position of science does not account for its ironic origin. Latent hostility towards authority can indeed open spaces for dialogue, but is this really the production of the possibility of a experiment? So it will perhaps seem unusual to suggest that the ironic may in fact be the classical basis for all scientific knowledge, though even Descartes’ reformulation of the basis of knowledge in terms of doubt and Lacan’s in terms of paranoia seem to indicate a deep psychological connection between science and the position of irony — of the “not so ignorant”!

Fantasio
(You can find more of his and other excellent original artwork here.)

Life explodes and bursts ontological boundaries in its rampant and chaotic proliferation. But does life transcend being? If so, we must understand such a transcendence in the erasure of the gap between ontological layers, or in the ‘splits’ between, and productive of, generations. Such gaps are ‘magically’ or ‘miraculously’ mended by fecundity.

Being, on the other hand, never truly carries multiple names. As Deleuze emphasizes it is only ever spoken of in one sense. Yet life, if it ex-ists, must speak on uncountably many ontological layers simulatenously. If it is being which stretches and folds, that is, whose curvature is produced by motion– then it must collapse under a folding which converges geodesics (metrically differential spaces.) Being is folded into itself, but is only itself– which is why it cannot bear being stretched or folded without decomposing into fractal spaces: the universe of the observer.

Life, which is the highest expression of the autopoetic force, is an unfolding and self-organizing, and therefore fractally active on an infinitely complex though immanent field. Language exemplifies this sort of transcendence-within-immanence. Words are alive though language appears to enjoy an independent existence. The independent perspective is not to be found in the transparency of sense, nor the opacity of the text, nor even of the pure a-signifiying bodies around which the texts are adjoined. The independence of language from its referent is an illusion, just as the independence of perception from a subject is a rather transparent illusion.

Sensation itself is political, so nothing is neutral. Only our hypocrisy, or desire to maintain an illusory distance, is universal. This leads us to believe that a scientific study of sense would be a sort of pseudology. We call simulation the essence of the sensical because of this illusion, sense founds itself violently, through a sort of a-signifying pseudo-bifurcation. Life itself in the contamporaneity of fractally divergent ontological zones presents simulation as such, that is– a decoding… which encodes.

Nothing escapes this.

Our very being is overcoded. Our lives are seemingly free, yet we are enslaved to the sociopolitical responsibilities of speaking. Even the creative energy which animates our bodies is treated as a sort of universal commodity, for sale on the open market. No aspect of our life or existence is free from political influence, from the process of producing separation by subdivision. No sensation as such is a-political, because sense is a differential articulation of masses.

Sense is simulation because life suffocates in ontological isolation and only exercises power, only draws surplus value from a coincident inter-relation of ontologically distinct realities, which may fractally resemble one another, but then again–may not.

In fact this fractal self-similarity is really only characteristic of the ontological unity of the immanent field of existence, which as such can only be spoken of in a single sense. There are not and could not be multiple ontologically distinct realities.

Yet life multiplies realities as independent unities, and thus all life (and sensation) in inextricably political. Life coordinates topologically complex ontological arrangements. Sense is a science of rigorous hypocrisy because living is social. Perhaps life is even ultimately one, but such that it is a one which could never be actualized as a univocity of being. Life articulates its organiazation on infinitely many layers and levels at once. We even say: life organizes the empty spaces of a mechanistic universe into an instrument for song…