It is impossible to conceive the assemblage of a scientific experiment apart from a field that generates plans and topological, mathematical, axiomatic and computational descriptions. But sign-machines can function equally well directly within material and social machines without the mediation of significant processes of subjectivation, something which has become more obvious each passing day. The fact that the common essence of semiotic machines and material or social machines proceeds from the same type of abstract machine is the decisive step we must take in order to found a political pragmatics on something other than good intentions.

Felix Guattari, L’Inconscient machinique: essais de schizo-analyse. Paris: Editions Recherche, 1979. p. 67.

That we underestimate machines is an understatement. Human language itself is a code which produces codes, hence an always already over-coded decoding — and the decoding processes, for their part, go as far as you like. Let us be cautious, then, and attempt to linger for a moment on the side of the symbolic. Every discourse, every instance of language, every explicit “saying” — is also implicitly a kind of abstract program. A program gives us in turn the language in which that program is expressed — and also in which completely new programs can be expressed. Finally, every text also contains an irreducible element of pure ontology, thereby encoding — between the lines — the very principles for organizing discourse itself. Whichever metaphor obscurely prefigures the communicative passage, tracing these interdependent “resemblances,” or “differential” networks of “abstract” models, (or even “ethico-spiritual” traces of traces) necessarily takes us on an adventure outside of the text — but mysteriously or ironically, always into other kinds of texts! This infinite indeterminacy — or antiproductive rupture — is the basis of a “parasitic” logic, the logic of interruption, inequality, a constitutive non-determination.

Hence, in addition to these four distinct but interwoven layers or aspects co-existing in even the shortest text — indeed in a single word — it seems we must also suppose some pre-logical flux of intensity, a matrix of differences, in which these varying aspects would themselves become locally codified and relatively grounded. A diagram needs a space in which to be built and materials from which to be constructed; ideas needs relational fields in which they realize themselves sensibly and and dramatize their “break” into reality to one another — how, why and where they fall to their death onto the depths of bodies — but even this as though organically or by divine judgment. Bodies break the recursive cycle of language through the intervention of a partial object (programmer-parasite.) The parasite, the cold body sucking the warmth, writes new programs, and in doing so inevitably scrambles the meanings of the old instructions. The parasite is ontological rupture or antiproduction, phenomenological transduction — its work, grounding relation, is itself grounded only by an act of invention, translation, dramatization. Grounded in metaphor, in a productive diagram, in an abstract machine. Or, in other words: the parasite, whose provisional ground or counter-network is the minimal subject of the abstract machine, guarantees the consistency of the abstract programs’ specific productive diagram simultaneously as (1) a single variation, which is also (2) a model for variations; yet this is model is at once a (3) variable language of models, as well as the (4) machinic meta-ontology pragmatically governing the organizational principles of languages themselves.

One way of approaching the difference between knowledge and learning (so profound in our opinion that, despite their entanglement, there can be postulated neither a material nor conceptual ground which could ever serve to unify them) is by considering that even while wholly disparate, they are not in the least opposed for that reason. To learn and to know are two divergent operations, contrapositive dynamisms, which are nevertheless always both active simultaneously, as the “cutting edges” or ungrounding machines of cognition. A thought is grounded not in abstract oppositions, but in concrete forces traversing real problematic fields.

Knowledge is classically represented as a heterogeneous assemblage — our minds are far too imperfect to clearly perceive the pure, homogeneous Truth — which is self-totalizing and self-regulated by an internal learning process, charged with traversing its own experiences (as they are represented and reactivated as memories of varying intensities.) In this sense, abstract oppositions emerge only as variables of these mixed compositions of energetic and entropic flows. This is the illusion of hyper-diagrammatism (implying a kind of super-diagram of “all” thought.) We must try and see that thought isn’t about models and copies, not about identity and ideology — but rather about lines along which interminglings are operative, as though “between” concrete and abstract flows of energy — food for words, money for sex, death for love, virtue for pain, and on and on…

What is produced in this process of establishing communication between incommensurable problematic fields — or learning — should certainly not be characterized as a pure memory, but rather a decentralized and a-subjective cognitive process. “Thought” is not the difference between learning and knowledge, but rather an abstract machine which underlies them while nevertheless separating them, almost as though by an absolute divergence. Learning fights dullness and emptiness with lightning and fire, mortally threatening the stasis and death of “serious knowledge,” which would otherwise totally consume the brave and fiery heart of discovery. So let’s stop asking what “knowledge” and “learning” mean in themselves (and trying to ‘deduce’ the ‘difference’ — and thereby, most likely, only serving to overcode it by an all-too-serious line of death); let’s rather ask: how do these operations work?

“That knowledge can be described”; this is, in a way, the implicit assertion of every “knower,” that a definition can be provided of the known’s own structure. Although the knower asserts his knowledge exists rigorously — that is, in such a way that its structure can be defined –nevertheless, the organizing or individuating drives supporting the knowledge (the hidden forces beneath the idea) must be grasped intuitively before we can “know” the knowledge itself (the pure idea, or form of the problematic field.) Otherwise knowledge and learning would be absolutely impossible, i.e., would have only an internal origin based on identity.

On the contrary, this prior recognition of a “problematic” structure — knowledge’s cautious but deliberate self-ungrounding — is paradoxically the driving urge towards discovery, the wild and infinite energy-overcoming-entropy we experience in learning. Though certainly knowledge misleads us, quite deliberately, as to the nature of this process! (It is easy enough for “knowers” to cover up, even to themselves, the unconscious, a-subjective lightning flash of intuition experienced directly “as” the subjective struggle in the world to learn.)

For knowledge is superficially calm and sure of itself, at least when observed in its close-to-equilibrium state: we must admit of a certain strange feeling of “possession” of an organized (i.e., received) truth, a smooth tabulation of events into neatly ordered columns and rows. Learning, on the other hand, is turbulence itself. Pre-organized knowledge is constitutionally incapable of questioning, or even apprehending as such, the underlying structures upon which its coherence depends.

This paradox could perhaps be formulated as follows. We must know the limits of our knowledge in order to be certain of our certainty. But — and this is, in some sense, Wittgenstein’s most important contribution to Western philosophy — “knowing the limit of our knowledge” entails already knowing both sides of it, that is, to know both the already-known, organized side with which we are familiar, as well as the unknown, unorganized side of which we know little — if anything at all.

“Regimes of signs are not based on language, and language alone does not constitute an abstract machine, whether structural or generative. The opposite is the case. It is language that is based on regimes of signs, and regimes of signs on abstract machines, diagrammatic functions and machinic assemblages that go beyond any system of semiology, linguistics or not. There is no universal propositional logic, nor is there grammaticality in itself, any more than there is signifiance for itself. “Behind” statements and semioticizations there are only machines, assemblages and movements of deterritorialization that cut across the stratification of the various systems and elude both the coordinates of language and of existence…

A Thousand Plateaus 148

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

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

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

(Matt Dixon)

Thinking Cybernetics:
Mapping the Intersections between Metaphysics, Technology, Biopolitics

(abstract for panel)

The purpose of this panel is to gather together ideas, perspectives, and questions from a diverse variety of thinkers and disciplines relating to the theory and practice of cybernetics. Our goal is to raise a series of critical questions concerning the intersection between biopolitics, metaphysics, and technology.

While each paper is devoted to a specific author or authors and is generally focused on a particular theme or aspect of cybernetics, all of us in some way are arguing for a larger transformation of philosophical, political, social, and technological categories. There are many urgent questions posed by cybernetics; and moreover, its development has so far tended to furnish many other fields of investigation with new tools for studying new problems. As St-Exupery wrote in 1939: “The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature, but plunges him more deeply into them.” What does philosophy have to tell us today about our relationship to technology? What does cybernetics imply for metaphysics, ethics and epistemology — or even for the future of writing?

Finally, how do we think the relationship between cybernetics and bio-politics? Perhaps the most troubling question raised by cybernetics concerns the relationship between autonomy and authority. It would appear that everything hinges on the inflection placed upon the word “control”! Cybernetics is derived from a Greek word meaning “governance,” from which an apparently simple question arises: Are we controlling — or controlled by — the systems of machines “we” have built?

When Einstein wrote that it has become “appallingly obvious” our technology “has exceeded our humanity,” he was voicing his concern about the disastrous effects of unimpeded technological growth without a corresponding growth in social responsibility. Certainly, at the very least, technology plays more than a purely mediatory role in society.

Thus another important problem brought to the fore by cybernetics is the role of language itself as a socio-political machine. We assert that thinking our relationship to language and technology today demands a wholesale reformulation of old ways of thinking, in order to explore new cybernetic and philosophical problems. The point is that we need more than a new philosophy of cybernetics, we need a “cybernetic philosophy” (though this also requires a transformative reading of the contemporary philosophy of technology.)

Our first hope is that by gathering together concepts which allow a new understanding of our relationship to technology, we can trace original lines of questioning and resistance. Our second hope is that, through these intersections, there may perhaps result new methods of traversing and escaping systems of control. As B.F. Skinner wrote in Contingencies of Reinforcement in 1969, “The real problem is not whether machines think, but whether men do.”

Panel Members: Joseph Weissman, Taylor

Goraczka, Tomasz Setowski

Images are significant surfaces. This means that images signify, as well as make comprehensible as an abstraction, “something ‘out there’.” Images are reduced from “four dimensions of space and time” to “two surface dimensions.” (8)

Imagination is this specific ability to abstract surfaces out of space and time and to project them back into space and time. Imagination is the precondition for producing and decoding images. “The ability to encode phenomena into two-dimensional symbols and to read these symbols.” (8)

The significance of images is on the surface. A single glance remains superficial and doesn’t reconstruct the abstracted dimensions. One has to “allow one’s gaze to wander over the surface feeling the way as one goes” in order to enhance and deepen the significance. The path the gaze follows is “complex” and formed by the “structure of the image” and the “observer’s intentions.” (8) This is called ‘scanning’ and reveals the significance of the image. Therefore, it is a kind of synthesis between the intention manifested in the image and the intention belonging to the observer.

Images are not ‘denotative’ (unambiguous) complexes of symbols (like numbers, for example) but ‘connotative’ (ambiguous) complexes of symbols. Images provide space for interpretation. The space reconstructed by scanning is the space of mutual significance. The gaze produces specific relations between elements of the image. Scanning is thus a kind of eternal return: the gaze “can return to an element of the image it has already seen, and ‘before’ can come ‘after: the time reconstructed by scanning is an eternal recurrence of the same process.” (9)

The space and time peculiar to the image is none other than the world of magic. Within the space and time of the image, nothing is excluded; everything participates in a significant context. Moreover, this is a world where everything is repeated. The cyclical reality of the image is therefore structurally different from the linear world of history “in which nothing is repeated and in which everything has causes and will have consequences.” (9) He gives the example of a cock crowing at dawn to describe the difference: “In the historical world, sunrise is the cause of the cock’s crowing; in the magical one, sunrise signifies crowing and crowing signifies sunrise.” (9)

The significance of images is magical. The magical nature of the image has to be taken into account when we want to decode them. It’s wrong to look for a frozen event in images; “rather they replace events by states of things and translate them into scenes.”(9) The dialectic inherent to an image must be seen in the light of this magic, whose power lies in the superficial nature of the image.

Images are mediations between the world and human beings. We ‘ex-ist’: the world is not immediately accessible to us. Images are needed to make the world comprehensible. “But as soon as this happens, images come between the world and human beings.” (9-10) Although they are intended to be maps, they quickly turn into screens.

Instead of representing the world, images obscure it until human beings’ lives finally become a function of the images they create. We cease to decode images and instead project them still encoded into the world which (meanwhile) itself becomes like an image: “a context of scenes, of states of things.” (10) Our reality is magically restructured into a ‘global image scenario.’

This reversal of the function of the image can be called ‘idolatry.’ Flusser suggests we can see this even in the present day in the technical images which proceed to violent recode reality. “Essentially this is a question of ‘amnesia.’” (10) We forget we created the images to orient ourselves; once we can’t decode them anymore, our lives becomes a function of our own images, in other words…

Imagination has turned into hallucination. Flusser believes this is a recurring process. He cites the invention of linear writing as people “trying to remember the original intention behind the images. They attempted to tear down the screens showing the image in order to clear a path into the world behind it. Their method was to tear the elements of the image (pixels) from the surface and arrange them into lines… They thus transcoded the circular time of magic into the linear time of history.” (10) This transcoding was the simultaneous origin of both historical consciousness and history.

From then on, historical consciousness is ranged against magical consciousness. This is struggle which has not died down; Flusser cites “the stand taken against images by the Jewish prophets and the Greek philosophers (particularly Plato.)” (10-11) This struggle of writing against the image runs throughout history.

With writing, a new ability was born called ‘conceptual thinking’ which consisted of abstracting lines from surfaces, that is, producing and decoding them. Conceptual thinking is more abstract than imaginative thinking. All dimensions are abstracted from phenomena, except straight lines: thus with writing, we take “one step further back from the world.” (11)

Texts do not signify the world; they signify the images they tear up. Decoding texts just means discovering the images they signify. Texts intend to explain images, while concepts intend to make ideas comprehensible. “Texts are a metacode of images.”(11)

Texts explain images in order to explain them away, but images also illustrate texts to make them comprehensible. This explains the paradox that the more science struggles against ideologies, it absorbs ideas and becomes itself ideological; just as the more Christianity struggled against Paganism, the more it absorbed the images and itself became pagan. “Conceptual thinking admittedly analyzes magical thought in order to clear it out of he way, but magical thought creeps into conceptual thought so as to bestow significance on it.” (11-12)

Images become more and more conceptual as texts become more and more imaginative. In the course of the dialectical process, conceptual and imaginative thought mutually reinforce one another. As an example of an extreme of conceptual abstraction he suggests we consider computer images, which makes even more sense with modern advances in data compression. At the other end, it is in scientific texts that we can expect to find the greatest imagination. (12)

Behind ones back, the hierarchy of codes is overturned. Texts, originally a metacode of images, have themselves as metacode. But, just like images, writing itself is a mediation and is subject to the same internal dialectic. Writing is torn apart by internal conflict.

If it is the intention of writing to mediate between human beings and their images, it can also obscure images instead of representing them. Even more disturbing, perhaps, is the insinuation of writing itself between human beings and their images. We can’t decode our texts anymore, or reconstruct the signified images.

If the texts become incomprehensible as images, human beings’ lives become a function of their texts. He coins the term ‘textolatory’ to denote a state of hallucination similar to idolatry, of ‘faithfulness to the text’ (in quotes in the text.) He gives two examples: Christianity again, and Marxism.

Texts are projected into the world out there, and the world is experienced, known and evaluated as a function of these texts. The example here is the scientific discourse: any idea we have of the scientific universe which is signified by these texts becomes unsound, since any ideas we form about scientific discourses have been wrongly decoded. “Anyone who tries to imagine anything, for example, using the equation of the theory of relativity, has not understood it. But as, in the end, all concepts signify ideas, the scientific, incomprehensible universe is an ‘empty’ universe.” (12-13)

Textolatry reached a critical level in the nineteenth century. With it, argues Flusser, history came to an end. “History…is a progressive transcoding of images into concepts, a progresive disenchantment (taking the magic out of things), a progressive process of comprehension.” (13) But, again, if texts become incomprehensible, there’s nothing left to explain: history’s over.

During the crisis of texts, technical images were invented. They were invented to make texts comprehensible once more. They place texts under a magic spell “to overcome the crisis of history.” (13)

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?