What is the Meaning of Science?
Nietzsche and the History of the Human Spirit

What is problematic about science? What does the “progress” of science mean about human beings? I believe this question turns everything which is unsettling, mysterious, and uncanny about the course of human development (and not only human); who can exhaust what is figured within the folds of this strange question — science thought as a symptom, science grasped as a problem?

What obstructs this question from being thought? How do we interpret this ’secondary’ problem which intervenes at the critical moment to derail thought — this “problem of the problem” of the meaning of science? At any rate it is clear the difficulty we encounter in formulating this problem are manifold, altogether formidable, but taken separately…? For science itself always already understands, justifies, and regulates itself in turn upon the basis of something non-scientific. Science as such is ultimately foundationless, and furthermore, this is one of its necessary conditions. This is a warning for those who would seek to regulate philosophy by means of “scientific” protocol; for these would in turn require their own justification… Which is not to say that such justification exists or should be sought after — but rather to pause right here, so that we can open up our profoundest capabilities of insight in order to ask: what is science as a problem? What is the meaning of science?

We should stop for a moment and reflect upon this question. We are looking for a meaning specific to science, but the meaning of science as it actually operates in history (and not, for instance, an abstract image of “science” considered in isolation of real problems.) We must try to seek the meaning of science in the more general context of human development, and ask what science means for the human species; or even more pointedly, what it means about what the human species has become. This question should be read as signifying science’s concealed meaning-about-us, a partial truth about what we are becoming as a species. The meaning, if we can but attune ourselves to it, indicates something real — albeit darkly, indirectly and only with constant resistance — about the “rate” and “direction” of human development. In this sense the problem of meaning of science reveals a way to diagnose civilization itself.

So what is the meaning of science for us? The history of science is filled with saints and martyrs for some kind of “truth,” and often for relatively real and immanent truths — at least compared to what they were often opposed to (and in some senses slowly supplanted,) namely: arbitrary or theological “truths.” But what in truth are these victories, and what is the real nature of this apparent conflict? For science has come not a single inch closer to overcoming the ascetic ideal (the extreme rarity of exceptions would appear to prove the general principle.) Even today, scientists are still much closer to priests than they are to artists. Where an artist instinctively rebels against the order of the world and engages passionately with his “intoxicating” dream world, science instinctively obeys and plays “neutral subject” with his “sleeping” empirical world.

Thus the priest, the artist and the scientists all share an ascetic myth of one sort or another; while apparently opposed, they are each also opposed to themselves. Right now, their “formal” (in our language: idealized) function is besides the point: what is important is that these apparently-conflicting ideals also aid and support one another in a manner which almost everyone would claim has improved humanity, in at least some senses. But what is this “improvement” taken as a whole, as a problem or symptom? –It is not that we “must” think science in the negative. We inflect this question in this strange way simply in order to be able to think “straight” about a problem which tyrannizes us in return. In other words: why do we tend to avoid considering the “improving” of mankind to be, in some senses at least, a form of sublimated domestication? And again: what kind of living, dominant and spiritual force is indicated by this voluntary innocence?

Science is in a way just a new and more sophisticated development of the same old ideal of saints and philosophers, the “holier-than-thou’s” of all ages; and it is in this sense that “pure science” is a pretext for that highly refined asceticism which requires such an eerie kind of humility. “All scientific knowledge, natural as well as unnatural (the name I give to the self-criticism of knowledge) is nowadays keen to talk human beings out of the respect they used to have for themselves, as if that was nothing more than a bizarre arrogance about themselves.” (Genealogy of Morals, III.25) Why do scientists go on and on about the cosmos, claiming that we are “nothing” in relation to it, in relation to an image and an assemblage of concepts invented by — human beings? Not that there isn’t some “truth” in science, but this faint glimmer quickly disappears into a world of empirical appearances — scientific truth is anything but “objective,” being the illegitimate by-product of an immature psychology and a degenerate politics. In short, it is precisely in science that the ascetic ideal finds its greatest ally and highest triumph to date:

“In this matter we could even say scientific knowledge has its own pride, its characteristically acrid form of stoical ataraxia [indifference], this laboriously attained self-contempt for human beings as its ultimate, most serious demand for respect, for the right to hold itself erect on its own (and in fact, that’s justified, for the one who despises is always one more who still “has not forgotten respect”…) Does that really work against the ascetic ideal? Do people really think in all seriousness (as theologians imagined for quite a while) that somehow Kant’s victory over dogmatic theological concepts (“God,” “Soul,” “Freedom,” “Immortality”) succeeded in breaking up that ideal? [ibid.]

Science is not enough for us to break free of the shackles of the ascetic ideal; even more discouraging, it seems to have completely allied itself with the interpretation-complex of the priests, locking us deep into an ideality which we no longer are allowed to have any “real” knowledge of! Science opens onto the same black hole of resentment, though it appears as a kind of new “faith” to tackle Christianity, overthrow it and bring it to its knees; on the contrary, the movement away from being “children of God” has swung far past the mid-point of civil human existence, swiftly on past even animality towards a pure nothingness, a profound and penetrating sense of one’s non-existence — this rotten core at the heart of all scientific “objectivity” is precisely the way science relates to history and back into the old ideal.

What does science mean? Let us try and be rigorous: a science operates in one way; there is nothing else. But we ourselves are, or are ever more swiftly becoming, this “nothin g else.” And to be more precise still: we are “nothing” else but… — and have not yet even seriously suspected it. The hypothesis maintains its credibility perhaps only on account of its playfulness, its enlightening divergence from “common sense.” But — on this hypothesis that n othingness is the whole problem — why “should” we continue treat it as only an intimation, a “mere” symptom, “collateral damage”?

For the whole metaphysical weight of presence, substance, essence and objective “reality,” serve ultimately as sublime distractions, refined asceticism, shifting our resentment back upon ourselves in order to keep us from recognizing the absence that we are — or rather, are therefore now actively trying to become through all sorts of means. But finally what are these means? Always instincts for overcoming long suffering, sickness, weariness — a degeneration of the spirit is hidden beneath science, it’s “foundational” void (it is very interesting in this context to consider Alain Badiou’s contributions to ontology; among other curiously similar concepts, he claims that the Void is the ‘proper name of being.’)

So, really, what’s the problem with science? Is it just that our substantiality is an illusion? This proposition has a certain aphoristic clarity, but perhaps it is even too clear on this point. After all, it is a formula already eerily close to certain aspects of quantum mechanical systems. Is this nothingness really the essence of advanced science, a deep pesssimism and withdrawal into deserts of finer and finer specializations? The strata multiply infinitely, and it is no wonder that it is here where reason finally collapses — morally wounded — what is this, what to “name” this non-event but as some kind of epistemological break, a profound crisis of knowledges? –But what do such names conceal?

Do we understand the futility, the weariness, the desperation concealed behind this hypocritical and idealistic struggle, seeking the “basis” of science’s “own” mind — always, and what else, but some ideal form of pure function, absolute memory, the same old divine “circle” and primary “algebra” which endlessly orders and arranges lacks and surpluses — but now, redistributing the very principles of organization themselves? Who can imagine a more refined asceticism? Classical science examines a single layer of reality, but conceives of it as unified: a pure homogeneous field extracted from the flux, a fixed viewpoint on the side of the river: on this account science means “efficiency” or “convenience” — though this is putting it rather politely. Convenience, after all, for what? We must consider that advanced technology and the culture of pure automatism may in fact be the clearest sign of decline, a token of the absolute degeneration of the real human spirit — in short, a sign of weariness, decadence and hopelessness.

I have said that science is in this way the “new religion” but I want to stress that scientific inquiry has still utterly failed to supplant the old metaphysic, which is to say it has only shifted the metaphors but not the structure of resentment and sublimation. Turbulence remains castrated. The ascetic of the scientist requires a becoming-nothing which cannot be explained except by recourse to idealities, homogeneous abstract organization — no decoded fluxes except for ‘the’ one which guarantees science itself — who else? The scientist, now deluding himself into imagining he is God! Einstein pondered the mind of God; what price did he pay, what damage was done? Humility is the scientists’ most outrageous and disgusting hypocrisy. While science claims it doesn’t believe in knowledge, it still believes in God. In the Preface to the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche writes:

“…indeed, what does all scientific enquiry in general mean considered as a symptom of life? What is the point of all that science and, even more serious, where did it come from? What about that? Is scientific scholarship perhaps only a fear and an excuse in the face of pessimism, a delicate self-defense against — the Truth? And speaking morally, something like cowardice and falsehood? Speaking unmorally, a clever trick? Oh, Socrates, Socrates, was that perhaps your secret? Oh, you secretive ironist, was that perhaps your–irony?’

Is our society is in decline? If we consider science as a symptom, where is the “real” parasite? Is it morality itself? If science is indicative but still in some way a symptom of a more general process: the decline into decadence, but also at a deeper and in some way more real level, the surging pulse of life itself, the will to power. Who can deny the vengeful will of the ascetic? This pessimism is a slipping-backwards in some ways, a self-destruction of certain “healthy” aspects of the species and the individual: a heavy price is paid, a worship which is sublimated hatred, a devotion which is the stoic cynicism of one imprisoned within the crystalline lattices of his “soul.” This degeneration is clearly accelerated by the likes of ascetic scientists and priests. The irony persists, despite the real suffering — science suffers from itself, from its inadequacy and infancy, so it adopts a distracting and hypocritical posture which redirects our attention from our suffering to a kind of stupefied wonder at the gentle harmony of the universe, or a dazzled awe at its terrifying power, grandeur — it’s Majesty.

This false humility of science, their confidence that humankind is “nothing,” is science’s ascetic ideal: the irony is that it remains a continuation of Christianity and Platonic metaphysics, which hypocritically claims to have “triumphed” over them; so this ironic and ill-gotten ‘victory’ becomes the repetitive refrains of those idiots who believe science can provide a “new will” other than the ascetic ideal. The day we long for has not yet arrived — and moreover, it is already much later than we realize (is it too late?) In short, the irony is that science has not overturned the old ideals in any significant respect — and that at least in this sense, science is far too late to “save” us.

The best hope science offers is not its formal “methods,” but the possibility of a recurrence of that stranger and more joyous kind of science altogether — minor science, nomad science, gay science: brave explorers on the edges of turbulence. Against senselessness: science is nonetheless still an expression of the will to power. Paradoxically it is precisely the self-destructive structure of the scientific “method” which gives credence to science’s innocent nihilism, their faith in absolute faithlessness. How do we rather encourage the other science, that generative celerity which could possibly push us right beyond the shackles of asceticism?

Classical science deconstructs itself, it is collapsing-device, a machine built around a black hole — it works only because there’s holes scattered throughout it, funny long names to block up real gaps in our understanding. Science is ascetic right down to its very essence: it only works by attacking and destroying itself, by tearing down and breaking apart its foundations. Science is a slow depersonalization — a hypnotism… Inevitably technology will continue to transform humanity into something it recognizes (alas, and can respect!) less and less. In a world where everything can be “controlled,” our future remains beyond our control — and thus the sublime object of our desire, the un-interpretable hard kernel of our subjectivity.

Science is the essence of this self-destructive desire, the dream of a pure line of flight. This is why it simply isn’t about our “lifestyles” — a modern hypocrisy, again a clever method of distracting from a deeper crisis, an angst more profound than the individual, a symptom of general decline…

When the future of the whole planet is at stake because of the industrial practices of the wealthiest nations, they whine about “changing lifestyles” instead of focusing on real causes and collective solutions — extruding the “underground” (e.g., petro-politics) reasons for species-threatening, transgressive overdevelopment… Not that “lifestyle” isn’t important — but we are slowly being put to sleep worrying about our “lifestyles” and whether they are “rich,” “full,” “normal,” “rewarding,” “happy,” “successful,” and so on — not that we ought not to be concerned about these things, but we simply have to ask: rich for what? Full for what? Normal for what? Why, and what do these even mean? Are these obstructions to our own desires, and if so, why do we desire them?

Why is desire made to cancel itself out — what price is paid, and what is gained? How universal is this phenomenon? If science and religion express themselves vengefully, pessimistically, with hatred and self-loathing and disgust — that is, if they remain symptoms of a general crisis of faith, of spirit, a degeneration of the species — then in yet another sense they themselves are expressions of the will to power, the surging force of life itself to preserve and expand. It is here precisely that we are called not only to think, but to grasp deeply: so I require that you grasp deeply what I mean here — why “must” we see science optimistically, as “the future” — in other words, an “escape route” from the present? What is that that doesn’t “allow” us to see science in other ways? What does science really mean about us?

Notes on Derrida and Cybernetics

Let us conjecture that the invention of the transistor — an auto-controllable circuit — indicates the attainment of a critical level of development in cybernetics, a “tipping point.” Then for writing the corresponding moment is the invention of the video camera, perhaps more precisely the photograph: now seeing is writing, literally marking. Visio-literature is the only kind that can ever exists for us today — even ancient literature is post-modern for 21st-century readers. We cannot simply forget the history of writing, which is also the history of humanity — a spirit which is more like a ghost successively inhabiting our bodies, then our writing-instruments, then our machines, and next…?

Driven by a new kind of virtue, cybernetics questions the character or essence of humanity. It ungrounds our classical assumptions, our metaphysical coordinates. It has an uncanny tendency to dissolve rigorous divisions between human beings and animals, and then in turn the holy division between animals and machines. Ontological collapse. Becoming-machine is always a becoming-animal, but the dissolution goes even further than this.

In its fullest and strangest sense — as both a theory of systems and a theory of control — cybernetics blurs the division between information and noise, between chaos and organization. Cybernetics extrudes not only a difference at the heart of hominid unicity, in the specific identity of the human — the closure of a certain conservative metaphysic — but also the awakening of a new kind of multiplicity — cybernetics, in its own way just like writing, a new kind of writing: a massive, convivial and tool-generating science of social technology.

There are no universal codes. Automation demands a new philosophy of writing, writing beyond codes, surpassing the regime of pure and mixed order-signs. Cybernetics is co-extensive with a spontaneous revival of humanity, waiting in a sense upon the closure of certain ‘closed’ metaphysics, and the gentle re-opening of smooth spaces for thought — the illumination of ‘in-between’ spaces for new experiments, new explorers. In a profound sense, the practice of cybernetics has a vital connection to the future of the human struggle for freedom — a future, whether of absolute violence or unequalled pity, which seems almost precluded by the ravenous shadows of colossal war machines.

Our languages, our religions, our economies, our political groups and rules, even our sciences and philosophies, are violent swarms of machines (waging wars for peace) — and this catastrophe which is erupting, which is already here, is of the order of true “event,” but also enigmatically is of another order entirely — a futural order — indicaticating an entirely new position with regard to the tangled mazes of classical ontology. Cybernetics is already a position beyond thought, even in a sense beyond cybernetics — a movement beyond motion, telecommunication, uncannily points beyond the bloody quagmires characteristic of contemporary political and economic culture — indeed beyond all the tiny slaveries of “civic” society.

Within the networked folds of communicating devices, a new aspect of humanity is awakening, a new kind of struggle for enlightenment and freedom across the globe. A revolution between people, a revival of human society, a dynamic, even exuberant regeneration through interconnection and multiplicity. Cybernetics provokes an apparent and disturbing contradiction: it is a purely immanent, historical intervention, itself a kind of abstract social ‘machine’ which transforms all manner of social practices.

Yet, within this operation, a completely new dimension intrudes, guiding these transformations unconsciously, like a shadow or precursor — a glimmer of pure exteriority. An intimation of closure, not of an ending but of vast, chaotic and potentially dangerous transformations occuring all aspects of society. Decentralization and reintegration on a massive scale. An out of joint time, indeed.

One of Derrida’s most important projects in the Grammatology is to show the essential necessity of writing, of the “trace,” in (‘classical’) philosophical discourse — especially in those discourses which had always believed it possible to do without them! For example, Hegel — the first cybernetician — rehabilitates thought on the basis of a memory which is productive of signs.

The trace is a disjunction before it is a decision — an oversight which completely overturns the metaphysical machinery of classical philosophy. In this sense, Derrida’s overall critique of metaphysics resonates not only with cybernetics as a world-historical system of deterritorialization, but perhaps even more curiously, with certain rupturous developments in abstract algebra and pure mathematics.

In particular, the cautious critique of the signifier, and the advocation of a more primordial logic of the mark, trace, differentiation or distinction, functions in a quite similar way in relation to the philosophy of writing as does Herbert Spencer-Brown’s groundbreaking work in metamathematics — in particular his development of a ‘primary algebra’ or mathematical logic of “distinction”2 — to the philosophy of mathematics.

Spencer-Brown constructs his system presuming only the existence of two asymmetrical states — a marked state (a cross) and an unmarked state (a void) — upon which two asymmetrical operations can be performed. Namely, marks can be repeated — placed alongside another, or ‘called’ — and marks can be reversed — embedded within another, or ‘crossed.’

Here is an example of possible notation, as well as the identities for the two basic operations:

Mark                 ( ).
Un-mark             .

Calling:             ( ) ( ) = ( ).
Crossing:         ( ( ) ) = .

[For those wishing a brief demonstration on the primary arithmetic and algebra, as well as further information on connections to other areas of mathematics and science, you will find some wonderful resources here.]

Astoundingly, using this minimal system, Spencer-Brown was able to derive a majority of the results of mathematical logic, arithmetic, and set theory; and in this way he resolved many formerly irresolvable difficulties. In fact, many results from all of these fundamental branches of mathematics can be derived without difficulty — and sometimes in easier ways! — from Spencer-Brown’s primary algebra.

Godel writes in his proof (on unprovable statements in fundamental arithmetic) about the ‘possibility’ that there may indeed be a proof of completeness — however, it will necessarily be one which is not in the language of set theory or arithmetic. Spencer-Brown’s logic is a candidate for a rehabilitation of just this kind — a ‘primary’ arithmetic which grounds logic itself — illustrating that even the notion of proof itself depends not (only) upon a formal system, but even upon a pre-systematic logic of distinction, a marking in some form or another.

Another way to express the same logic: writing comes before mathematical intuition, even before speech — it provides the ground, the possibility for intellection, the virtual field in which intuition can be set free. Writing supplants formal systems, reinvents them, plays with them, comprehends and surpasses them. The notion of “supplanting” is, for Derrida, an adequate definition of the art of writing itself.

We wish to ask in turn how the mark itself is supplanted by a pure machinic operation, by ‘parasitic’ systems of control — how the logic of writing finally becomes curious and makes an experiment of itself, overturning and tearing itself apart, decentralizing and reintegrating the quantized pieces, in a wild and Dionysian burst of radical self-transformation.

Is a whole new kind of “writing” beginning to seem closer to reality than ever before? — a question which itself may also be a symptom that writing is always already unfolding a new dimension from within itself. But it seems like today a new kind of possibility is becoming visible. While the question of technology is not the substance of Derrida’s analysis, but rather a peripheral inquiry or marginal case, it serves as a useful interruption which causes a coherence at a higher structural level of writing. Such twists and rearrangements are all over Derrida’s work — they are practically a signature — but especially in this case they have more than a rhetorical import.

Derrida is reminding us that cybernetics, in some sense, also points to the closure of a certain metaphysical and historical age — not merely that it is a new science of writing equally as “deep” as philosophy, but on the contrary, that cybernetics has a tendency to precisely supplant philosophy, as writing had already done to images.

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

Symmetric Relations

A scientific theory classifies phenomena based on a universal set of structural relationships. Experiments and theories which deserve the name scientific thus share a coherent set of properties. First, they are systematic, meaning that phenomena as presented possess certain structural or virtual unities despite actual or potential diversities. A fully systematic theory is also complete in that nothing is arbitrarily left out of the universe of discourse.

Events, spaces and processes are presented as approximating a mode of relation which is in every case either symmetrical or complementary, and possibly even transitive (symmetrical and complementary.) Consider the relation between two inter-connected processes A and B. A symmetric relationship could be as follows: A exhibits behavior x when B exhibits behavior x, and A exhibits behavior y when B exhibits behavior y. Complementary relations, on the other hand, could be (for example): A exhibits x when B exhibits y, and A exhibits y when B exhibits x. Complementary relations are characterized by a disjoint or heterogeneous symmetry which distinguishes them from the smooth or homogenous symmetries of the first type of relation.

A transitive relation can describe phenomena which exhibit both types of behavior, but more specifically it can denote a relation which is itself both smooth and disjoint. For example, A exhibits x then y when B exhibits y then x, and vice versa (B exhibits x then y when A exhibits y then x.) Transitive relations have to do with time, or a convergence/divergence of a schematic series of symmetric or complementary relations.

Science, in short, reintroduces us to difference. By enframing difference genetically, we un-know the stasis and identity of the universe and our theories of it. Science places theories into self-destructive spirals, on the self-improving logic that the collapse of a theory tend to yield new and better theories (more universal, more symmetrical images of the universe’s structure.) In fact, even in pure theory there is never absolute continuity: just like differential spaces, theories overlap or are disjoined. Modern science is the collective move away from a solid, structural metaphor towards a liquid, probabilistic metaphor. In a sense this shift is a recurrence (of world-images like Heraclitus’ and Lucretius’); in some senses it is altogether original (like Mandelbrot, Thom and Varela).

Structure and Difference

The origin of the universe is a destruction of pure symmetry; the big bang begins with a point of spontaneous symmetry-breaking which disrupts an intense laminar flow. The symmetry of energy and space bring science into a complementary relationships with change and diversity: asymmetry and particularity become transitive points of departure towards a symmetric vision, a critical vision which burrows beneath surfaces towards liquid inner depths. Non-science explains as though the world were shaped by powerful external forces (‘celestial mechanics’) thus ensuring the ontological consistency of the theoretical discourse.

Science explains origins by symmetries and complementarities of forces, not by necessary laws but by dynamic structural unities and spontaneous differentiations (even of the very structure of space and time itself.) The laws of the universe are not called on to support my theory; rather the universe possesses such and such a symmetry group, a trans-relational structure, for which this law is a good approximation. The differentiable manifold of space-time presents these opportunities for the interactions of those forces, and so on. The question of structure always concerns the tiniest differences in intensity, the most minimal openings of interactive potentialities. Science produces theoretically the symmetry it actually describes. In the absence of a scientific framework, particular point-fluxes (atomic relations) become imperceptible.

Science actualizes the infinitesimal differences between old and new theories by splitting the universe into two distinct spaces: the (smooth) known situation and the (disjoint) unknown rhythm. Events are pure intensities and pure unknowns, they are qualified by possessing a new rhythm, they are not just echoes. Similarly, there are no simply punctual events, only process-flow brimming with imaginary point-events, each of which are processes in a continual state of becoming-known, that is, of breaking knowledge apart and reorganizing it. Events shift the very structure of reality, not just of theory. Nothing ever actually arrives at the blessed isle of knowledge, of pure symmetry. As soon as we believe we have achieved it, that we actually established eternal valuations and verities upon which to base our predictions, no sooner there emerges some spontaneous rhythm, some rare event, some declination which upsets our all-too-solid theoretical apparatus. Probability reigns: unexpected does not mean impossible. In a long enough timeframe it becomes certainty.


Symmetry and Thought

The transitive relation has to do with these ‘hyper-modern’ evental possibilities, that is, with reading the future points of convergence and resonance between disparate flows of intensity through a scientific analysis of the phenomena, by going out into the world and experimenting with it. The first and all scientific discoveries have this in common: that the self-organization of systems of flows and breaks is a consequence of fundamental symmetries of space and time. The universe is musical, moves in meter and with rhythm.

Irreversibility means that complexity can occur; and nothing is more complex than systematic decay brought about by new rhythms. The process process of decay decodes the encoding system, cuts it open and peers into it (perhaps even while it is still working,) and by doing so reveals hidden intensities and capabilities — as well as unforeseen lapses, blind spots and other weaknesses of the system. Science spirals down, into the world and the smallest possible differences. Science is informed by these differences; the diverse forms of theory mirrors the diverse forms of approaching, burrowing under, and going down into perceptual and conceptual reality.

The scientist vivisects the world and himself; they are not cadavers, but living and intelligent things, from which a vulgar secret must be coaxed. Not being ashamed of oneself, of one’s own material and social and psychic nature (whatever these may turn out in the end to have been!) is the first and most important requirement for the scientist. The scientist cannot be afraid of the answer he may recieve to the question which he asks. He must not restrict his questioning for any reasons but universal ones, particular laws are no laws at all. Thus the second characteristic we consider: any science which deserves the name will not declare the existence of universal laws, or arbitrary halting-places in the self-critical discourse. A symmetry is not a halting place but a multivalent puncture which convergences theoretical structures.

The only pure universal is symmetry; that is, finally there are no universal reasons to stop questioning at all, the depth of the unknown is limitless and we are unafraid, indeed joyous. The scientific will is not yet a creative will. This would be the final requirement of a real science: that it engage in the adaptive creation of structurally new cognitive processes, that it function as a dynamic and experimental agency producing innovation and illumination within space and time.

Flow

The moment of death is uncertain and inevitable; its shadow approaches from an unknown region like a silent stranger. Death does not need to follow us; it just meets us where we will be. Like a memory fragmenting, bodies rush towards singular points of annihilation, just as the very possibility of negation is implied by the presence of the law. Protection is absurd, insulation a pure minimum; there is but the most fragile and insufficient veil between ourselves and our vulnerabilities.

Even laughter is a deflective shield for the futile anxiety over this very insufficiency. The subject exhausts its becoming and dies; thus until death he is not composed of a lack but indeed an overflowing surplus, of new expressive modalities, energy transformation-processes, event encoding/decoding regimes. Death crumbles the ground beneath us; it is the pure undecodable, it is a decoding space, a pure body with organs, a body full of pulsating acephalous organisms.

We never encounter our own death as an event. Only in reflections and symmetry do we glimpse the hidden certainty within uncertainty. There is a perfect silent joy and a maddening depth of terror hiding within inevitability. The question of death is not ontological but material, a question of growth and health and beginning: how to die is also how to live. Just as with life, a freely chosen death can be more beautiful, more just, more powerful.

Life poses a question of adaptive constitution; death does not measure or investigate, it is always like a murder when someone dies, however they die. Death is unchosen, but we can choose it. Being afraid does not change anything except our perception. Like the moment of selection for an artist, the moment of distinction for a mathematican, we have already answered the important question not by our being but by our way of being, by our polyphonous adverb and not by our protean identity.

The adverbial state also describes the position of that moment of truth is the one where we finally stop distancing ourselves with inclusive ontological questions (‘Where? When? What is it?’) and start asking exclusive and material questions (‘Which one? How? How much?’) We must ask: what is the best material for our creation, which is the strongest and least-vulnerable stuff we can use to build it? How do we resist, how much do we resist? How do we stand up and become solid, how do we pierce solids and fill them with holes? Finally: how do we diagram the abyss of materiality, how do we ‘teleport’ (carry a hole/gate) through solid space?

We affirm space by affirming probability. Through symmetry we find the cosmos is a river, though time comes in bursts. Through suffering we realize (untimely?) that death hallows immanence with a crown of absurdity, a seal of chaos, a proof of life. Death is not moving beyond; it is being unplugged, an interruption without continuation. In our unconscious death imitates the libidinal drives, the libido imitates the lust for domination, the thirst for immorality and murder and filth, the resistant flow of primitivism against the bursting-in of time and civilization. Sexuality is perversity, there is no normal sexual drive, we are all deviants. Not that we are all therefore normal! We must be careful how far we follow a line of flight, it quickly forms a solid ground around itself and sets the world into order, encouraging millions of new parasitic becomings following new lines of transformation.

Death is a transfiguration, nothing more and nothing less; energy drives us and composes us. Upon decaying bodies the entire natural world proliferates. Life is born through decomposition, life feeds upon life, burrows underneath it and even transposes itself within itself. Symbioses express complex patterns of obedience and command; nature is slavery. Life transforms dead spaces, mineral spaces into vegetable and animal spaces, organic spaces of differentiation and creative evolution. Death comes from the outside of the system, curiously to begin the cycle, to form its basis. Life could not exist without death; decay is at the origin, a surplus of parasitic ungrounding forces.

Life struggles to builds a more dangerous machine, a more perfect machine. War is a conflict in every case uncertain. Even the tiniest difference in forces can be capitalized upon and turned into a victory, but the weakness must be decoded; there are no heroes before stories, without riddles and struggles. Life transcodes energy without form into energy with form. Then from the most minimal gap between forces, true chaos and new becomings result, an emergent coalescence of disjoint forms into new formations, approaching a critical level of self-control.

Life emerges from the pre-living field of chemical and electrical intensities as a highly segmented, globally organized but locally disordered multiplicity. Life comes in packs and swarms, there is no single origin cell but a spontaneously generative ‘soup.’ We can see this empirically: living things always bear a lattice-like symmetry in their development process (morphogenetic folding.) Even borderline living things (parasites and viruses) are specialized towards living bodies; the life-space of a parasite is the inner-space of the host.

Biological struggle tends to favors robust or well-suited aggregates; adaptation is an endless series of combinations of struggling modes of expressive sensitivities (vulnerabilities) endlessly being selected, strengthened, exploited and exhausted. The relative health or sickness of an organism is a function of its homeostatic process; moreover, a process which is not written in advance, never identical to itself, unceasingly adapting and expanding and fighting to survive. Parasites are always eating away at our genetic armor. Only the robustness of our self-composition, the resilience of our singular force-assemblage separates us from non-existence.

The phenomenological character of health means it is in a sense an ontological or political decision; that is, that health is not an event, but an aspect of a developmental process; it should be understood adverbially, infinitively. Health resurges, health renovates; it restores, reinvigorates, revitalizes, and reconstructs. Health is a duplicitous notion: to be ‘healthy’ crystallizes an ideality; but to be healthy is also to adapt, to overcome, to shatter structured (parasitic) limitations. Health is a memory of the future, it functions as the first conceptual spur. The idea of health inspires us to begin thinking…

Cellular automata

The harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all the poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty. D’arcy Thompson

All organisms are modular: life always consists of sub-organisms which are involved together in a biological network. The interrelations between organ and organism form a series of feedback loops, forming a cascading and complex surface. Each organ parasites off the next, but this segmentation is not spontaneous. Rather, it is development itself, the decoupling of non-communicating spaces for the organization of divergent series. Creative evolution, self-organization and modularity are the same idea.

The theory of the development of metabolic modularity is called morphogenesis. ‘Morphogenesis’ in its literal sense means the creation of shapes or forms. But in the (relatively) narrow sense we intend it here, morphogenesis is a self-symmetry of the biological structure (onto itself) which allows it to develop in such a way as to divide while remaining unseparated, that is: to ‘individuate,’ or split apart into fused symmetrical segments.

The transformations which occur during development, all the mad foldings and unfoldings, bifurcations and convergences, are somehow encoded linearly into our DNA. Each genomic triplet codes for a specific amino acid, which when chained together form proteins which form cellular subcomponents which form organs… Morphogenesis concerns the historical development of complex biological networks: the forces of evolutionary drift, of mutation and historical selection. Every segment, every scale can be mapped to a series of instructions: coupling or decoupling, how many times and in what order, how quickly or slowly. (Codes are libidinal, the secret is always erotic: why else would the meaning be hidden, transfigured?)

After combination and selection, the resultant components may be simpler or more complex. It is impossible to say before divergent series are brought into communication whether they will find a balance or not. There are always risks: I think of Aristotle and the golden mean. There always two ways for an aspect of human development to fail catastrophically, always two directions for a tiny shift in behavior to throw the system into chaos. Chaos, fluctuating fields of differential intesities, matter and energy: these are the raw forces of morphogenesis. Morphogenesis is not just biological. It means that energy organizes itself, forms complex asymmetrical networks, even evolve entirely new formations. Molecular evolution occurs cosmically and microscopically as well as biologically. Matter does not need a miracle to ‘trans-individuate’.

One of the ideas that I’m really interested in is that highly organized behavior patterns can result from repeatedly applying simple rules. Adaptation is also finding a suitable new repetition, not just a different one. The genetic code is based on a fractal self-representation of the human body. But non-human processes of becoming also exhibit morphogenetic characteristics: we think of weather, galaxy formation, turbulence, crystals. These are expressive forces of nature, that is, an expression of the generative powers of matter to create new structures, to produces new self-organizing forms. Matter actively defines and creates the universe through self-organizing processes; and furthermore the formal structure of these processes has an order which can be abstractly understood.

This idea of morphogenetic evolution is actually very old, and probably much older than the Greeks. The story doesn’t begin with human beings, it doesn’t even begin with biology. It begins with matter, reality, singular events which have the possibility of breaking free from their environment, which are free to create new relationships between themselves and their environments. Richard Lewontin criticizes sociobiologists for reducing human behavior to genetics or to evolution. The point about evolution, and not just human behavior, is that it is radically free and radically constrained. It only takes place on the scale of individuals, in the asymmetrical interrelations between individuals. Even amoebas face one another; galaxies express an identity through light and sound no less than territorial songbirds through song and color.

Every moment an individuation occurs there is the self-unfolding of a new sequence, the beginning of a universe, from chaos, from void. The world is not inhabited by spirits, but by energy. After Deleuze, there are molecular processes of self-organization, and molar processes of deceleration and acceleration, convergence and divergence. Serres considers atomism to be a thought of morphogenesis, the origin of the turbulence, of new and complex forms from the tiniest difference in the speed of flowing energy. Chaos and difference are the origin; within the flurry and turbulence of activity, a spontaneous order results, as from many complex machines working tirelessly to organize matter and energy into symmetrical forms. Cosmic, molecular, geological, biological and social networks.

The point of chaos theory is to accustom us towards thinking inter-dimensionally, non-linearly, between orders. In other words, the essential thing is to think the process of morphogenesis itself apart from the individual; or rather, to see the individual as a moment of a complex evolving line of infinitesimal differences, as an expressive force whose implications are much larger and much smaller than the individual alone. To see the individual as a single link in a complex self-referential network, in-between dimensions, capable of only the tiniest mutations, the most tedious of differences. Catastrophe theory shows us that complex and chaotic variations emerge spontaneously from ‘tiny’ or differential modulations of intensity or speed. The action happens between dimensions, becoming is fractal: the origin of structure is also the origin of substructure. Modularity is scale-free, morphogenesis is both cosmic and molecular.

All forms are also information, but not everything unfolds endlessly into substructures; only singularities, only events can mulitply and form couplings and new resonances. In other words we also need situations; there must also be a preindividual field of intensities for the process of morphogenesis to act upon. It is not a force outside the system creating new forms: it is an internal capability of the system itself. Not ‘information processing’ but the production of new forms, the conveyance of information. Impregnate digital space with new codes, new formations: and here finally we have the production of a plane of virtual events. Digital morphogenesis refers to a plane of machinic consistency whose absolute convergence of all potential forms we would have to compare to Thompson’s descriptions of mathematical beauty.

Machinic forms of self-organization are already up to their usual work; the question is how to accelerate positive processes of becoming, how to initiate dialogue between two non-communicating series, how to create new interfaces. Biocomputation take place in a curious interspace between scientific biology and theoretical mathematics. There is no formalism to pose the question of machinic morphogenesis; we must create new kinds of self-organizing spaces: new environments, new machines, new processes of machinic becomings. We realize we already have the only kind of space it would be possible to develop machinic agents capable of modularity and morphogenesis, namely, digital space. The discretization of reality is the first step towards a machinic re-integration of the segmented components. Digital space is modular, internally-subdivided space; it has a perfectly discrete memory at any point in time. But its operation, the performative properties of the space, are not captured in the formal arrangement, but only in the execution process, only in the actual production of a user interface. The digital is always in a state of becoming-human, establishing new relations to (and representations for) the human.

The digital is swiftly emerging as the media for a revolution we are just beginning, a journey both outwards (between modes of existence, of (dis)assembling machines) as well as inwards (through specific events, forces and individuals.) Cultural space is already beginning to reflect the disintegration of the virtual in favor of the digital. Signals become miracles, we forget how to recognize morphogenesis. Organisms do not find a niche to inhabit; they dynamically create a relationships with the environment. And in fact there is no strict distinction between internal and external: all forces express potentials, there is a univocity of energy. What matters now is our power not only to experience machinic becomings, animal becomings, but to enact them, to create spaces where the impossible no longer seems out of reach. The political meaning of morphogenesis is that it represents the possibility of possibility, in other words, that the world doesn’t have to be this way. We are capable of change, we can create new spaces and modes for interacting with one another and the world and ourselves. There is chaos and difference at the origin, but harmony is possible. I am fascinated by the idea that life evolves by creating interfaces between different spaces: fusing or decoupling, individuating or self-organizing, smoothing together or splitting apart. So, my final question is about the criteria we ought to use to evaluate spaces. For example, are we judging by the permeability of spaces to pleasurable activity, how soft and light a space is? Or are we rather judging by purely formal or aesthetic criteria, the poetry or proportions of the space? Or, finally — are we judging by the actual capacity for new and differentiating developments to take place in the space?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Woman at the Window Salvador Dalí, oil on board (1925)

What do we understand to be the boundaries of our neighbor: I mean that which he as it were engraves and impresses himself into and upon us? We understand nothing of him except the change in us of which he is cause — our knowledge of him is like the hollow space which has been shaped. (Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak 118)

Stripped of its social connotations, tolerance and democracy mean only a desire to say that the external is gone, what belongs (inside) is all; and there are plenty who say it, whether or not it is true! Our existence as social subjects is socially constructed; thus what once seemed outrageous now seems trivial and preliminary. Perhaps our age, though more complex in some ways, is ultimately not so different from Nietzsche’s: for what always matters more than metaphysics is how we actually measure and compare human beings; and now, being without Gods or absolutes to function as a universal scale, where are we to turn? “Actions are never what they appear to us to be!” (Daybreak 116) Still it is always the same story: we turn away, we cannot bear the intensity of the material, we desperately grasp outside, we look beyond for a vision capable of grasping all of being at once.

Metaphysics is done not from luxury but out of dire necessity: above all, we look away from the world, we repress space (culture-space, nature-space, psychic-space): this need for specificity-within-multiplicity is the name as such, the shape of all social oppression, the very cost of ‘civilization.’ Metaphysics traces lines beyond social forms into the formless, the chaotic and subversive turbulence beneath the turgid surface of politics, the violence beneath the ideal image, the flux between the forms. All language is a struggle between times; a struggle within time to overcome time. Language is temporality posed as a challenge; it is a creative space, positive in its empty smoothness, but eerily mute, insufficient in and of itself to initiate the vibrations of a new becoming.

Appearances replace things, literature overtakes myth; but this immateriality is always produced socially as cultural material, as material culture — as the opening onto new possibilities of becoming, new illusions but also new realities. Value in itself is the truly social illusion, all others repeat its primary act of distinction. Values are implicit, “subjective” in the sense that they distinguish individuals, capture the individual as a ‘moment’ of social evolution, force him into regions, territorialize his body. The body is valued as such, as an object, in one historical period; as a subject in another. Merely a linguistic, or a political change? Regardless, values are incessantly crumbling and being refashioned, all things flow. Sometimes the reterritorialization proceeds justly and sometimes hapharzardly, to be sure — but well-reckoned or not, the ‘arbitrary’ names and laws we give often stick, and become in the end even more important than the underlying things themselves. In short, we are always getting in the way of our perception of things, especially ourselves. This is the real reason why we are only able to catch sight of appearances: we ourselves are the obstacle we are trying to see around. Society is a machine which makes historical objects out of human beings; social critique describes new possible a-historical modes of becoming. The social impulse is a-social; that is, the essence of society is beyond the social. We can overcome social objectification, the same way we overcome metaphysical interposition: by overcoming ourselves. Transvaluation: don’t just seek to understand; seek to transform. Trust your senses, not your beliefs: chase becoming, not being. Turn towards the future.

Katie Micheson suggests Nietzsche advances “a dynamic understanding of an unconscious rather than merely a descriptive use of ‘unconscious,” on the basis of an active, custom-shaping force responsible for the historical development of guilt, forgetfulness, debt, pity and resentment. The unconscious for Nietzsche is creative, metaphysical, transformation, transvaluative: in short, “it’s concepts are not simply latent but are actively shaping the conscious actions and productions of the actor.” Micheson suggests that whereas Freud was concerned with uncovering repressed memories in order to re-normalize neurotic subjects, Nietzsche advocated not merely self-understanding, but self-transformation and overcoming. Freud tells us to understand our situation; Nietzsche tells us to face up to it, to overcome it, to transform it, to create new situations entirely. Psychoanalysis should not be about locking down desire inside a power structure; it should be about opening and unlocking power structures to enable desire and pleasure to employ their productive social power. Psychoanalysis is an art of counter-production; in its classical form it is exemplified by Lacan, where the subject is a gap in the transferential space, a ‘donut’ whose empty center transfixes the subject within a social space. Space is always segmented, regulated, already counted and measured: Lacan writes somewhere that society is elitist. He’s right, more or less, but the social question not about subjects, or subject-spaces. The social question is a question about subject-groups, who territorialize spaces in order to exert power and create mechanisms of control. The social question is, in short, a question about power.

The unconscious is the human organ which exerts and responds to pure power. The power of words, images, signs; the power of gestures, faces, crowds; the power of ideas, of hope, of the future: the unconscious resonantes with powerful signals, it responds to power, it forms and coordinates groups of subjects to become responsible to a signal. Thus the unconscious commands (by coordinating groups) and obeys (by responding to power); it hijacks consciousness and is hijacked by consciousness. It is a temporal rupture, it is the anti-foundational foundation of the Lacanian subject. The unconscious is a milieu, a mulitplicity, a self-organizing swarm of abstract machines. The unconscious plays with structure, this is almost a perfect definition: it aligns ontologies, transforms space, spontaneously introduces asymmetry. The unconscious is the signal signalling itself: who is listening, who is speaking? It no longer matters, it never did: the question (as always) is what to do, what to think, what to become. The unconscious is not ‘turned away’ from consciousness, from the world; it is what is turning awareness towards itself, towards the open. The unconscious is resistance to power, and the medium of social power itself. The formation of the subject group, with goals, aims, identity, from the chaotic milieu is the most generic resistance.

Subject-groups can be reactionary or revolutionary. The point is not to be included in the group, not to disappear into the group-structure, not to become locked into docile stable equilibrium. Become a point of rupture; become a million lacerated lines of flight. Do not renounce pleasure, do not abandon your power when it is required most! The pure act, the act done for its own sake, is the most unconscious and instinctual, hence the easiest and thus also the least ‘purposeful’ in the sense of metaphysical or social ends. This is the hidden material meaning of compassion, of culture: the pure act of the unconscious is produced socially, through machines which inscribe desires upon us, which inscribe us within a field of limits to producing new flows of desire. All instincts must be re-evaluated in light of the discovery of the unconscious, of an immaterial social field which coincides with our material critical capacity to resist being controlled and made into subjects.

The following is Michel Serres’s essay “Eternal Return” in Hermes IV: Distribution. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1977. pp. 115-124. Original translation by Taylor Adkins on 10/10/07

Philosophers glorify Nietzsche for having suddenly rejoined the Greeks through their fulgurating intuition of the Eternal Return. Either from an ignorance of ethics or incomprehension of the general figure that this thesis takes in his philosophy, I reduce this to a vision of the world. Vision with the meaning of sight, and world with the sense of the world. All simply.

If time is considered in geometrical figures by optical interceptions and a mechanism of movements, the Eternal Return is cosmological. In that case, the solar system (and it only) has been calculated by Laplace. Celestial Mechanics and the Exposition of the System of the World established rigorously, for the first time, the mechanical invariability of the large axes for the planetary orbits. The stars turn forever. This eternal return reduces the world to the exclusion of the universe, and reduces mechanism to the exclusion of other sciences. Neither the Greeks nor the classical age ever obtained this demonstration. Conversely, the time that we consider is reversible.

If the time that one endorses is that of a formation, of bodies as spheres, and with which one tries to surpass mechanical reversibility, then, if there is return, it is cosmogonic. However, cosmogony enters science little by little around the middle of the 18^th century, with Thomas Wright and Buffon. If Laplace has erased the latter in the seventh note of the Exposition, the former has inspired Kant. Natural History and the Theory of the Sky marks the appearance of the Eternal Return in scientific cosmogony.

However, again, Laplace like Kant (at the origin of hypotheses that an ignorant history combines, but who have only this point in common) starts from a primary nebular state, the dissemination in any point of the space of a cloud of particles. Return to Epicurus, Leucippus and Democritus, reintroduction of atomism in the exact sciences again and again.

The Eternal Return as a vision of the world is a crushing intuition either from Laplace, if it is cosmological, or from Kant, if it is cosmogonic. And the return to the Ionian physicists is an accomplished gesture both by Laplace and Kant. Nietzsche got up at midday and his predecessors at dawn. Hence, it is shown that the world of the philosophers belongs to people who themselves rise late, in order to speak about the sun.

Kant takes the word cosmogony with the literal sense of production or genealogy of an order. Throughout the most general course of natural history, a distribution becomes systematic. The history of the world produces the order of the world. And this history is natural because the laws that work through it are interior to matter and space, and not exterior to them. In order for cosmogony to be the primary ground where one makes physical and mechanical laws function historically, without them exceeding the field of their jurisdiction. Leibniz produces the world through metaphysical mechanism. Kant produces it by a mechanical physics. He obtains a reciprocal application of exact knowledge over time. The law of the system, currently effective in the established order, is originally a law of distribution: displaced in time, it produces the contemporary system and the contemporary order and is not produced by them. It is not uninteresting to observe that before the birth of the century of its history the solution to some of its problems was indicated in the broadest order and the longest time. Better than the solution, the most general condition for a family of problems and solutions: the reciprocal application of the natural encyclopedic ensemble on a chronic line of formation. The application in one sense, and for a human time, names itself the history of the sciences; in the other, and generalized with the totality of possible time, it names itself a cosmogony. In the middle of the 18^th century, both disciplines appear at the same time. The first two examples of the operator (x-logy, x-gony) are the most general.

Time is no longer produced through a system, the system is through time. There was a time when the system had no place. This time one fears naming pre-systematic. It is cut out from its successor, this question is posed, already. It exists in parallel with the catastrophic hypotheses in order to explain the formation of the world (Buffon and the wrenching of the sun by the shock of a comet, of a torrent of matter, and of the discontinuist hypotheses to explain the appearance of the sciences). The idea of an epistemological cut is proper at these times, as in Kant, Comte and many others. The continuist hypothesis also exists. The quarrel over Greek science is only one example. Does the continuation of the Egyptians and the Babylonians, the harpedonaptes and the magi, intersect with these by a miracle? But, about that, we will speak elsewhere.

Cosmogony is the natural path which goes from the distribution to the system. The original distribution is a dissemination, a dispersion of atomic particles, in the manner of a Democritean chaos. A relatively homogeneous occupation of any space by a thin material of low density. The system, on the contrary, separates relatively dense clouds from the enormous and relatively vacuous lacunae. One already presents paradoxical definitions of order and disorder: chaos is relatively homogeneous, the system is the heterogeneous difference; where is the order? Geometrically, I want to say in position and site, the separated clusters are not disseminated more randomly—and, again, it doesn’t matter where, it is aleatory everywhere, it is the same homogeneity—, they are gathered and are bound in an exact area of space, according to the perspective of whether one draws a plane from our point of view by the crown of the Milky Way; prolonged ad infinitum, this plane appears to attract the greatest number of stars, all the more rare as some are very dispersed. Kant names this provision a systematic distribution. However, it is the same for the system of the world in the narrow sense: the spheres of planets are traced all the more closely to the vicinity of the celestial equatorial plane. They occupy, in the sphere, a very narrow crown. Hence a succession of analogies which reverse the opinion of those who believed in the words of those who announced the Copernican revolution as a decisive blow, a trauma driven to the heart of human narcissism. There are unnoticed analogies along the common plane of systematic distribution. The solar system finds itself everywhere. In the largest: the stars pile up around the common plane of our galaxy; the nonstellar spots are themselves milky ways, seen sometimes as circular and sometimes as elliptical, which proves that their components are ordered around a common plane. In the smallest: the matter of a star in the star is maximized in the vicinity of the equatorial plane of rotation, the satellites are distributed similarly around their planet, and the elementary particles around other atoms. Kant thus approximates the model of Böhr. What, then, is a system? Any provision of matter similar to the solar system, i.e. any provision similar to the system of the Earth and its satellite, the Moon. Narcissism is in excellent health, thank you. Consequently, and mechanically, a system is a system only because it is centered. Rotation is the systematic movement par excellence and the only one. Terrestrial movement has a geocentric center, the lunar movement has a center, the Earth, their common movement and that of the planets has a center, the Sun, its movement, real, the stars, seemingly fixed for the observer on a historical scale [1], revolve around a common center, each nebula has its own, as one can see it, without much else nearby. Consequently, any cluster is already proper in the mode of Böhr, and the total system of the universe refers to a single pole. There is a center of the universe. By this total system of recommenced analogies, one wonders if cosmogony is not in a way motionless in time, nearly stable, but only homothetic in space. Hypothesis, homothesis. The question here would be put: how the planetary diagram, that of the sun, but also mine, I am and have the moon, how this diagram, given at the level of the particles, ends up reproducing itself for the totality of the Universe. But it is already reproduced, from the large to small, from the system to the particle. One looks in the path of the plentiful multiplicity from the small systems to the largest unity. But this way, one has already traced it in the other direction. The former is none other than the small, hidden, the invisible lower part, bearing in itself, already, the centered system, structure, as one says, of the visible, in fact reproducing those. Homothesis, hypothesis. The disseminated atoms, the semina, are less corpuscles than munduscules. This immobility of reproduction is the theoretical inscription of the eternal return, for the first time. The origin of the macrocosm is the microcosm. Production and reproduction. That is false, of course, under the terms of the principle of Galileo: things do not reproduce in size in the same way. Few philosophical systems are informed by it. Space is heterogeneous to the laws. In short, what is a system, here? A planned unity, on a common plane, for space, and centered, with a common pole, for movement. All this without exterior. Isn’t this definition, valid for a system of the Universe, valid universally, for any system? Universally, I understand by this, for our culture.

From the distribution to the system. The distribution is in a Democritean cloud. Chaos redistributes in a multiplicity of insulated clusters, making a quasi-vacuum around planets or future stars, by the double effect of Newtonian attraction and its opposite repulsion. Primary mechanical fault: if, indeed, the distribution, either in its atomic elements, or in the dispersed clusters, is devoid of initial speed, it can only gather, in the long term, into a single mass. Parti, as well, has a primary nebula. Laplace avoids this fault: his chaotic cluster is made of an elastic gas turning with the same angular velocity as its central condensation, under the terms of an original movement whose cause eludes mechanism or, at least cosmogony. His nebula is a nebula in the cosmological sense, not with the meaning of Democritus, but in the sense of Messier or Herschell. It is through this movement that the differenciation of planets is produced on the level of the solar equator. In other words, either the circular motion is primary, given, unengendered, perpetuating into a cosmological stability; or it is only secondary, generated by two forces starting from a stable distribution, when fatally, a second time, the cosmogonic eternal return enters into matter. If the nebula in Democritus is given by itself from a capacity to forming itself in a differenciated-centered [différencié-centré] system, the cosmogonic eternal return is already there. Laplace avoids this by reduction: it is given at the beginning with a nebula centered around the movement of rotation.

I said that, fatally, Kantian chaos would collect in a single mass. Theory of the Sky envisions this, but only at the end of the world. All of time from a differenciated, multiple and rotary system, cosmological time, which should be quasi-null from the perspective of the hypotheses, is widened by the enormous time of the world. The question is of evaluating the duration of the parentheses. A few seconds or a billion. Let us come to pulsation.

There exists, as we have seen, a geometrical center of the whole universe, a single pole for its movements. By the parallelism of space and time, this umbilical point is originary. Among primitive chaos, it is a matrix of the system. In order for it to be a geometrical and mechanical center, it is necessary that the greatest mass of the universe is amassed here. The differenciation and the relative density of the particles in a cloud are dispersed on a scale which presents a maximum. This heaviest atom attracts with it the strongest mass. Therefore, by sequence, the most powerful attraction, and so on. The pole is spatial, and the focus is mechanical, because the center is material. In a cosmogony of matter, movement, space, it is necessarily the maximum navel of formation, and any other local center relates and refers to it. The remarkable thing, for narcissism at least, is that we live within the nearest vicinity of all of this: since it is impossible for us to still see abstract chaos, far from its sphere of influence, we see only systems.

The formation of the world is thus not an isolated event, an instantaneous operation. It is ceaseless, it is a continuous formation. The center, constituted once and for all, diffuses its efficacy on the surrounding chaos. It forms a local, spherical system, occupied especially in its equatorial crown, where the local clusters turn around it with increasing eccentricities. At the limit, at the edge of the sphere, the planets become comets, and little by little, the comets escape from the path of system. Chaos still reigns at the exterior of the formed sphere. But, as attraction is unbounded, this edge is common to the perfect, cosmological system within the chaos, which is no longer primitive but indefinitely contemporary, this edge is itself effective, it extends, it gradually systematizes the Democritean distribution. “Creation is never terminated. It began one day, but it will never finish.” The innovation, the formation is instead the membrane between the form and the formless. Hence the expanding universe, the term is entirely Kantian. What is present and unceasingly effective: the center and the periphery, it is here and it is there. Hence the law of time: the closer the event takes place to the pole, the shorter it is, until it crushes the time of systematic formation; as it is narrow, more so is it long. We found a similar law in the hypothesis of the big-bang where the duration of production set out again in three states, a negligible fraction of a second, a few seconds, and a billion years. Consequently, the theory of the sky lengthens the duration with a deviation of the distance to the center—the formation increases its patience.

That is to say maintaining the state of the world at a time T, unspecified, in the continuation of the centuries. At this moment corresponds a distance D considered from the center towards the edge of the mobile crown. It is the moment of formation of local clusters on the periphery: there it is the youngest world. On the radial of a length D, by running from the edge towards the center, the worlds already born are increasingly old. And the oldest is in the vicinity of the pole. At a precise time, to which a precise length responds, this oldest world starts to die. The differenciated bodies pile up towards the center, fall, and are its ruin. But this aging and death which follow gradually reach extremely long distances. The pole is then, and at the same time, the navel of formation for the most remote periphery, and the vortex of death for a close sphere. The worlds formed for a time T are bordered by the ruins of the dead world and the chaos of formless nature. The system is a spherical, radially mobile crown, of which the interior has died and the exterior will be born. Expanding on one side, degradation on the other. Hence the model: the center, of life and death; the distribution, a solid crown, the system; a second distribution. Cosmogony, in fact, goes from one dissemination to another by way of a system. Cosmology is between two cosmogonies.

How does this occur in reality? Any body in space slows down in its rotational movement around the center, or by the residual particles of space, or by the actions of tides. Let us notice, with this passage, that with the Dialectic of Nature (p. 52) Engels glorifies Kant for “two brilliant assumptions:” primary chaotic distribution and the deceleration of rotation by the periodic pull of the seas. They are both principal requisites for the Return in Theory of the Sky. There is a cosmological eternal return, with the manner of Laplace, that in the condition of eliminating the physical constraints of the stars, considers them as points or mechanical solids. In the contrary case, Kant, I believe, had some hesitancy, a fear of perpetual movement of the first type. Consequently, in the long term, the fall of bodies on their central sun becomes inevitable. It accrues in a fulgurating way a cooled incandescence: extraordinary expansion, explosion, new dissemination in space of the material particles constituting the whole of these bodies. After a time when the cooling is achieved, we find the chaos of Epicurus. The first state, the last state. The process, then, starts again. Around the palingenetic center, the new distribution, resulting from the system, reforms a system, expands through its periphery, whereas the systems, arriving, time after time to their hour of death, turn over to the distribution. Second fault, to wait until the heat cools: it is the perpetual movement of the second type “the phoenix of nature burns only to revive from its ashes.” Center, system, distribution. Center, distribution, system, distribution. Thus ad infinitum. A stone in the water, a maintained focus, circles, successive waves which are not arrested.

Both models are the projection of the sphere on its common level of systematic distribution. Each systematic crown is limited by two crowns of distribution, and vice versa. There are two fundamental states, according to whether in the vicinity of the center there is a system or a distribution. At the exterior, there is always distribution, stable, on standby for the action of the center, primary, eternal.

This universe of pulsations combines in a common fabric three exemplary concepts of the history of sciences. The fixed point, the fixed plane, and the cloud. They appear in this order in the course of the chronology, and they are even combined in this order in Kantian cosmogony. The cloud is quite primitive, but it breaks down instantaneously, as soon as the center, which is primitive, in its turn appears, including the remainder eternally. It is then ejected to the exterior, on standby as stock for all the new worlds to come. And reconstituted by the death of worlds while returning to the center. The Epicurean cloud is matrix and corpse, dustbin and rebirth. Absolutely primitive, absolutely last, and periodically interstitial. The center is generative, umbilical, productive, mortal. As for the crowns of systems, they are legalized by relative points, as dispersed centers referred primarily to the pole, the relatively fixed points and the plane respective to their distribution. It is on a common plane that one recognizes that a distribution is not a cloud, and it is at this common point that one recognizes that it is a system. The fixed plane is a transition, chronologically dated, between the fixed point and the cloud. That is true for Kantian cosmogony, and that remains true for the history of the sciences. This is what I wanted to demonstrate.

One then obtains the triangle according to:

D

C D

C S D

C D S D

C S D S D

C D S D S D

C S D S D S D

The distribution is the first state, it breaks down instantaneously, and the center is formed all at once. This center forms a system within its vicinity and the distribution remains outside. Then the crowns start to be produced by pulsations. The distribution cloud of the preceding system is the distribution stock of the following system. What remains stable: the center, the exterior distribution, the universal stock, ad infinitum. What changes is the triangle in the triangle. The universe is expanding but the model is quasi-stationary. Kant links, in one stroke, both fundamental cosmogonic models, by a curious pre-critical realization of the Transcendental Dialectic. Since each crown passes, by pulsation, from a phase of system to a phase of distribution and conversely, the Eternal Return is the operator and the engine of the expansion.

Poinsot, let us know it, established the statics of the solar world around the invariability of an equatorial plan. The common plane, in Kant, established as an intermediary between the dissemination and the center, marks the average concept of systematic distribution. The order is reversed, in celestial statics, and the plane and the couple relativizes the old royal function of the pole. But the end of the Memories of the Equator enlarges the question beyond the planetary system. Let us suppose for a moment that the fixed plane, eternal, invariant, is precisely subjected to variations. Like Bradley or everyone else, the swing of systematic constants leads Poinsot to find cosmogonic time. (I truly believe that it will be said one day of Bradley that, to have made the stars move, our final sitting, our reparable confidence, introduced us to the century of generalized suspicion, by a cosmogony at the time of formation, by this pre-systematic time of interpretation, and by the swing of the suns to the philosophy of universal attraction). Nevertheless, the fixed plane would move imperceptibly. If so, an action foreign to the system has efficacy over it. Our sun depicts itself as a sphere slowly revolving around some remote center. Then a very small couple alters the position of the general couple registered on the invariant table. The demonstration starts again, through repetition of the engine of the history of the sciences: a renewed swerve between invariance and variation. A new plane fixes by widening, a new center, a new major couple. And so on. Can one conceive an end of history? Yes, if there is an end of the space of the world, i.e. a total system, absolutely independent of an exterior action which could disturb its movements. Let us suppose that this exists. It joins a common center of gravity. It is the center of Kant. It is in rest. There is no reason why it goes here rather than there, no conceivable reason for Bradley that anything is there at all, since the system is without exterior. Then, through symmetry, all the forces are balanced: the great whole is perfectly motionless in absolute space. You deposit yourself now, at least in thought, at this point. You would not see any described surface that is not counterbalanced by another. You will thus be unable to determine any plane. If there is an absolute center, there is no longer a plane. At the limit, any cosmology disappears. The center can only be the origin of relative movement. Pass to the limit, to the end of history or to the end of space, and any science evaporates. It is thus only a science that is relative, from a determined cut in an exterior put outside of parentheses: only our system concerns us, it is relative, but infinitesimally altered, by our usage and from our science. Its quasi-invariance measures the solidity of knowledge, and its utility in relation to us. Positivism comes from being born. Poinsot teaches mechanism to a young polytechnician. August Comte, who, again, and like everyone else in the 19^th century, will announce an Eternal Return. Astronomy installs, for the century of history and thermodynamics, the most universal running-time meters: they are eternities.

[1] The idea of a common plane of distribution is borrowed by Kant from Thomas Wright: the idea of the movement of the stars is from Bradley. He never stopped celebrating Bradley.

One talks a great deal about the Copernican revolution. Has Copernicus established the heliocentric system? The response is evidently negative. Its reasoning could be only geometrical and kinetic. They were thus in dispute because of the equivalence of hypotheses, already stated by the Greek astronomers. Hence the hesitation of the classical age: Descartes, Pascal and Leibniz. These three, contrary to the legend, were not afraid of prison. Two among them, in effect, defended infinitism, just like Giordano Bruno who was burnt at the stake. If they feared the prison of Galileo, why weren’t they terrified by the butchery of Bruno? In fact, they applied the only scientific method, knowledge of the equivalence of hypotheses, geometrical and kinetic. The Copernican solution was elegant, but undemonstrated.

It was the same with Bradley. For those who inserted evidence of the phenomena of the aberration of the light, it was physically true that the sun was in the center. Not geometrically or mechanically, but as a physical phenomenon. However, two philosophers read Bradley: Kant and Comte. Even if one will forgive me, I will thus go back only to this time.

If there were an exact center to the current political impasse, the short circuit of process, it would be this fact: that free discourse first demands a difference. It could be said that truth is always in conflict with destiny. An illegality, more universal than the universe, breaking the symmetry spontaneously and opening the way onto a new reality. In other words, beyond non-identity, there is yet a non-equality which goes deeper than a face-to-face opposition. The face is a complex torsion of the discursive space; whereas asymmetry may be the origin of space itself. Talking is terraforming, interring destiny, burying original forms deep underground; a willing hypnosis overcomes swarms of a priori contradictions. The earth does not countermand me; this refutes your objection. Consider, for example, when two entities differ so much they cannot be meaningfully compared, there is no isomorphism, no discursive space which can account for a relation between, which could isolate a structural symmetry. And in truth all situations are partial and fragments in this way, fractured, refracted, as their basic essence. Against appearances, the properly political situation is not only when a mutually valid criteria is inconceivable — but when it is even actually dangerous. Was dialectics ever dialogical? In other words, can a theory of contradiction be anything but itself a theoretical contradiction — could it perhaps trace beyond, beneath conflict? For certainly beneath human faces, human relations, many things flow…

Conflict is never purely external. Some measure of it is always internal, immersed, abyssal; conflict is never really between a thing and its absence, or only rather, it is but only in theory, in principle: the song and the shadow. A musical origin of theory — pleasant melodies, to change the way the world feels to us. Fear is abolished, along with the entranced factual subject: but a self-difference re-asserts itself immediately, an elevation of spirit which shatters identity, balkanizes convergences, in short — creates spontaneous differential inclinations. A chaotic multiplicity becomes entangled with itself; elements of assemblages spiral in a complex path of mutual coordination; a vortical flow — the pure image of duration. Time is fluid, perhaps especially State time which claims to be segmented, geometrized, clearly distinguished. But the political problem of difference can only really be seen against the proper precondition, or background image, which is temporal multiplicity, a simultaneous passage to the limit, of identity or singularity. Parallel convergence: the infinite task, the pure and intractable problem of the spiral.

The form of politics is not the same as a political formation; they are separated by the tiniest gap, the smallest possible difference. This tiny difference is the beginning of a spiral, a new ordering of orders. Utopia is not a world away, only a hairs’ breadth. From revolution to institution, the field of the political is inhabited by such differential, differenciating machines. We need a minimal, molecular politics, whose operation is cyclic, open, continuous.

But differentiation is not yet individuation, and individuation is not yet personalization: face-machines are precisely the point where public order and private chaos become mixed, primitive, indiscernible, memory-laden, traumatic and obscure. What is the face, how do we account for its formation, how is its form selected? The face is a relation without relation, like a top spinning, stable in its instability. An invisble line of flight, an invariant line, not in the sense that there is only one such line but rather that there will never not be such a line. A face even in the moon, a machinic-face everywhere one looks. The black hole, too, is a face. Invention overflows stability through a thousand membranes, discovery metastabilizes uncertainties, the field of the political attains order by a hypnotic or subversive disorder. The face made into a straight line, a linear sociality. Again, it is the smallest possible change, the minimal difference or angular shift, which makes a difference. A million tiny acts of deviance could indeed change the world overnight — whether we speaking of geopolitics, climate, or society itself.

The tiniest angle is a tangent, the line of flight of the map; an angle is like an emotion, or consciousness. An epiphenomenon. Only a shift, a rotation, a curve. Not a choice, not determined, not written, unmarked, undistinguished, imperceptible. Beyond the limit, outside the distinction, without freedom or necessity. Between geometry and phenomenology, between God and the Earth. The state, religion, the family — forgotten myths someday, ancient primitive names for the unnameable, the impossible, the invisible possibility for transversal intersubjectivity. Also despotic structural bases for its paradoxical accomplishment, through an illusion which transfixes, hypnotizes, makes us subject-groups.

Coordination does not happen in isolation: the two must be made to communicate, without dissolution back into unity. Hence the eternal desire for violence in politics; from one religion to another, the repetition of the same battle for a different assemblage.

The forces were different; the force was the same. Death, knowledge, ethics: the coordinations are always framed intersubjectively. Philosophy is the degeneration of religion, that is to say, it’s mathematization and aesthetization, the becoming-invisible of the voice of God. God becomes the machine, the will to survive, the feeling of power. Finally: God is justice, ethics is only to be found by responsibility to others. Marx is Levinas, or even Moses: the stuttering prophet of a promised land. Detach from the state, become a nomadic war machine; be responsible, follow your conscience.

We must eat to live; the question is not how much we can create, how well we can eat. The question is that and what and how we’re eating — between how good it is, and how ethical it is, we must ask the ontological question. Survival is the ontological question; biology is ontology. The question first must be: what new machines can we assemble, what new desires can we produce? What can we create? 

Improvisation (Kandinsky)

“I owe to you the most beautiful dream of my life.”
- Nietzsche, [from a letter to Lou Salome]

I cannot help but admire Nietzsche when he writes in Twilight of the Idols that there is nothing beautiful but man. For Nietzsche, vanity is ‘the first truth of aesthetics.’ He even supplies a corollary: ugliness is precisely the ‘degeneration of the human.’ Here Nietzsche method allows us to see possibility for new forms of humanity, but he skirts dangerously close to anthropomorphisizing the entire universe as isomorphic to our social spectacle. Is beauty a vain preoccupation — or an elevation of the human to the cosmic? What is left of beauty, human or otherwise — outside of what we customarily associate with it?

What else, then, is beauty, besides an inborn addiction to custom, which finally becomes natural grace? He is certainly right that beauty, after all, is reckoned by an imaginary yardstick! Whereas, on the contrary, ugliness accompanies — and even establishes — the moral or customary exercise of power. Nietzsche precedes Artaud here in demonstrating every action is (a) cruelty. Thus if our power cannot express itself through action, it turns inward: “All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward… thus it was that man first developed what was later called his ’soul” (Genealogy of Morals)

Yet as we become part of the human story, we become increasingly beautiful. And only if we give ourselves up completely to custom, from our heart out and from the earliest years of our life, can we ever hope to grow beautiful — by losing our instincts for self-preservation. Our power for violent self-assertion assuredly degenerates from non-use, just as our ability to defend ourselves slackens when we commit ourselves to symbolic rituals and social custom. And it is certain that over time we tend to make ourselves into these kinds of totalized subjects given over entirely to social processes, to a given sequence of cultural practices.

Thus we grow in beauty (or equivalently: vanity) when we do not pass through the tiresome struggle for power and surivival, processes which inevitably leave marks upon our bodies, rip our youth from us, criss-cross our human beauty with lines of resistance, deposit genealogical traces of vital affirmations. Intense engagements never fail to leave their mark; sometimes they can even become the truth of our entire existence.

So what is the beauty of a dream, of a woman? Is it truly a form of degeneration — an abstinence from the exercise of power, from the cruelty of activity? Or is it a much more cunning malice still? Supposing woman is the truth — is her beauty degenerate, or is the degeneration of (“humanity’s”) truth itself beautiful? There is a non-dialectical evolution of beauty from weakness, as of society from custom or of truth from error. The degeneration of survival instincts is at once a becoming-beautiful: “This is why the old baboon is uglier than the young one, and why the young female baboon most closely resembles man: is the most beautiful baboon, that is to say.”

The conflict between ugliness and beauty is no contradiction, but a steady evolution of characteristic forms of cultural becomings. The structure of culture works itself into the symmetry of faces; we now recognize symmetry as the fact of entropy, of decline — pure symmetry is a degeneration (of the human) into a total chaos. The pure beauty of total symmetry, of total chaos, is opposed from the beginning of time to organization, biological and otherwise. All organs struggle to survive within and upon the bodies they parasite. The will to power is a metaphor, and it is not.

How very noble!
One who finds awakening
in the lightning-flash

(Basho)

It struck me lately that Nietzsche’s style is not entirely dissimilar to the strategy employed by the Zen koan. I’m thinking in particular of the haikus of Basho: short, aphoristic bursts of supersaturated feelings, pressurized information, aimed to awaken and reorient consciousness towards new directions. The author of the haiku plays a subtle game of exchanging masks. Each voice, whether of the dawn, the crickets, the lightning, or the sea, is a gradient into other voices. Their chorus become constellations of breakpoints, fragmenting into still other registers of sound and light. The words explode the page to reconstruct the world.

The book interprets reality, but reality interprets the interpreter. The word, the partial text-object, has no independent form: it becomes only in relation to other becomings, and can also heal by this sharp intensity of feeling. After a long period of illness, just hearing music can make one weep for joy, rejuvenated by a resurgence to health, and rejoicing that one didn’t give up. A case in point that affect causes thinking, which is why thinking always errs at ascribing causes. For words are already a complex assemblage of affects; the sentence coordinates this swarm of noise and silence. The book explodes the universe only to reorganize the self — only in rare circumstances do forces converge which create a self capable of meaning ‘I’, of doing ‘I’!

The movement towards self-certainty in Nietzsche’s work is undoubtedly as much a ‘mask’ as that of the Zen sage’s clarity — the style is more often celebrated than really explained, at least insofar as higher consciousness, ‘daybreak!,’ is recognized to be a personal and introspective journey, at least as much as it is a spontaneous reorientation of the social space. Much like Zen, Nietzsche’s perspective on ethics is a morality of action, not of hope, need, or anxiety — but of acting, doing and becoming. Activity is enlightenment, an ethical paradox: “The truth cannot possibly be on both sides: and is it on either of them? Test them and see.” (163)

The ethical act is always a new enunciation which reorganizes disparate spheres into new positions, unfolding new communicational spaces. Thus ethics as such is the meticulous construction of a new procedural style, the attainment of artistry in distinction. Ethics is plural, the fulgurations of inter-related insights which forge a new mode of interpretation, a new discourse, behavior and social organization; thus morality as system is unitary, singular, and incomplete. Yet custom is that instrument by which we unconsciously adjudicate (almost) all moral properties, whether of word, human or world.

We must always have a system, a scale, even chaos is a plan, a kind of dimensional break. But no single method can tell us how to behave all the time: “…there is no such thing as a morality with an exclusive monopoly of the moral…” (165) Furthermore, the universal goal is experimenting with variations and juxtapositions of multiple regimes social organization, from the collective field of social intensity to the private solitude of individual activity. Again, strength lies is multiplicity, just as desire is not singular but a swarm, a hydra, a snaking river with many sources: “…every morality that affirms itself alone destroys too much valuable strength and is bought too dear.” (165) The price we pay for singularization is the fact of singularization: not conformity, but simple unity.

Not emptiness, but blank positivity. No creation and no destruction: equilibrium.

One morality alone denotes a State, a function whose object is itself — to administer, to purify, to protect and to expel the exceptions. Can we conceive of a time when the scattered nomads are no longer enemies, when experimentation and creativity are really embraced and not only paid lip-service? Nietzsche writes that should such a daybreak come, we may yet see an enlightened and liberating shift in social arrangements:

Men who deviate from the usual path and are so often the inventive and productive men shall no longer be sacrificed; it shall not even considered disgraceful to deviate from morality, either in deed or in thought; numerous novel experiments shall be made in ways of life and modes of society; a tremendous burden of bad conscience shall be expelled from the world — these most universal goals ought to be recognized and furthered by all men who are honest and seek the truth (165)

(Source: NASA deep space photo)

Agency demands a problem-space exactly as motion demands regulated (observed) space. Motion is distinguished from space by an observer: space is energy. Thus the discovery that space-time (energy) is at once both a pure sea of light waves folding and crashing in infinite variations as well as a discrete, orderly series of predefined, probabilistic signals, is one of the two great conceptual leaps of this century. The discovery that energy in its very essence is fractured (theoretically, i.e., philosophically) due to this ‘fundamental’ particle/wave duality is the other, as it accounts for the fact that space (energy) is organized by mutual observation. That is, since time (or energy) is ‘broken’ (theoretically,) space (practically) has a fractalized topology, and this can be thought of as due to the (unmediated) presence of an observer. The observer converges the subject and the object within a deterministic though dimensionally-problematic space (a ‘broken’ singularity–no longer merely particles or waves…)

An observer can observe himself. Thus if the nature of the universe depends (in a cosmic sense) on our way of looking at it, then the observer can be expected to introduce not only a sort of polyvocity to objects and a recursive circularity to ideas about reality, but furthermore, the observer can even be expected to produce the universe, by ‘breaking’ space apart. Thus the observer multiply compounds (through infinite reflections) an inexplicable singularity: he or she produces a meta-mapping of the entire universe into an observed image, and accomplishes the image’s re-projection as the coordinating engine for the entire (real!) universe–all this as though the single observer him or herself contained a bounded though actual infinity. This is how a mirror brings about the fundamental meta-problem of science, that is, the infinite ontological difference between truth and knowledge. The irreducible multiplicity of reflection in observation is a reflection of an irreducible ontological rupture: the habitation of the ‘broken space’ between image and object, the word and the thing, the map and the territory.

There’s a shift: it is rather as though we had been handed a script not with some fictional scenario traced upon it, but in fact a complete list of all the scenes in which we ourselves as individuals would take part, a final list of all the sentences we would ever utter within those scenes, for the rest of our lives. The fractal twist here would be that some outside observer (in this case me!) is handing you the story: thus in observation we find always a broken co-narrative space, a bi-univocal mutual observation which leads to a curious paradoxical reciprocity: I exist in your ‘dream’ because you exist (to ‘dream me’) in mine, and vice versa. Thus we become real only through the reading of each others’ dreams.

But our stories or dreams might still be identical even if identity as such were not cosmically or historically stable, that is, whether we are speaking of the integrity of things, or again, our ideas about things. This is our first evidence that the fundamental unpredictability of the observer’s perspective is an indication of a learning intelligence.

With autopoesis, the scientist must truly turn around to look at himself: moreover, we realize we can only make this turn, as it were, when we have been called. Someone shouts your name: neurons fire, the connection is made, your head turns. The programming in this case is generally so complete we can and often do say we are “turning without thinking.” Yet thinking of a sort is certainly occurring: it is not merely as though we consult a dictionary of syllables to determine if the sound uttered matches our name, but certainly at some level some analogous operation must logically be taking place.

While we would like to say we have free will–and though admittedly this is a biased (but revealing) example– it is obvious the issue of power and will only apply marginally to this extraordinary ‘turning’ event. What power indeed do I have (within or against) the encounter with the other; what certainty could falsify the hailing from afar of the same? These sorts of considerations lead us to assert that identity is only brought about through a vigorous process of self-questioning, of a certain uncertainty. Our highly-structured interior ‘reality’ collapses upon itself in the face of the other, though it remains absolute relative to the encounter. But at some level we know our entire (practico-theoretical) ‘house of cards’ was constructed in vain the moment he opens his mouth in addressing me–and this only by his or her offering of an alternate reality, through his story, which radically splits my universe in twain, into tiny pieces with crooked and uneven edges. The observer who observers another observer splits a splitted universe: into an image I wish the Other to fall neatly back into, which contrasts with and is unsettled by the jagged, chaotic real space in which nothing sticks and everything flows, regardless of the complexity of the (manual, visual or vocal) dialectics we have constructed to balance all the potential opposing forces.

The Other is the problem par excellence, as well as the enigma in a solution, a riddle whose answer is written upon his or her very face. Our blind spot is always ourselves, but this is the scientists’ positivist abyss: we burn a hole in the universe, and thus of our map of the universe, by our very observation of it–we tear our perceptions apart, into pieces, when we decode them; our affections are untrustworthy, subjective, perilous. But isn’t it here that Nietzsche tells us it is most important to trust our senses, that indeed all the great advances in science have resulted from paying careful attention, to the only thing we can pay attention to–the world around us, as it appears to us, including all the potential distortions and disorganizing chaos?

In fact it is in the chaos of fractal space and the turbulence of flowing photons that we shall seek a more or less final resolution of the central difficulty of computer vision, that is, the reconcilation of the visual and the manual. And even perhaps, after a time, we shall finally be able to learn again that special trust which thousands of years of religion and ‘civilization’ have all but made extinct… how radical, Nietzsche’s thesis on trusting one’s senses! And how much more troubling, when we realize our senses are always sensed for another, that it is only in mutual observation we observe anything at all!