The essence of a channel is to transmit, to disseminate, to yield a flux. The problem of knowledge is correlative to constructing an adequate channel for the reception of an idea, the “proper medium” for a thoughts’ proliferation. Expressed in this way the “idea” is only an ideal problem, which in reality takes on an unsettling and radical complexity. The pure and implacable universality of the idea gives way to the realization of the innumerable fissures and leaks comprising the real — and quite organic — larval origin of thought. 

A kind of thought which, to be sure, still does not issue from myself, and which is neither memory nor imagination, but is rather a thought which breaks through, which traverses me. Hence the universal is always shot through with contingency, a pure implacability which rests precisely upon history, upon the conquering, the decimation of nomad flows indecently refusing to conform. The drive to systematically master desire, for a generalized and radical constructivism, the subtle and uncanny “inner” dynamism of our age, is bent upon a wholesale transformation of the fundamental essence of humanity. 

The breakdown of this machine, this doom upon the universal, is perhaps capable of reproducing itself virally — even as a snapshot of an image of thought in the very process of decomposing (and in relation to which all philosophical gestures seem but supplications, and — so much more rarely — vindications.)

A new medium always is, it must be, painstaking crafted: for once forged, a channel exists only the precondition of a flow, and even upon the continuity of the flux. 

I want to think the concrete peculiarity, the absolute singularity of any channel as such. The continuous flow of water through the machinery of a dam, of a pipe; the unending drift of signals across our always-on global information networks. 

The channel faces every military risk imaginable: takeover, subversion, blockade. But it also faces every theoretical risk imaginable: hyper-specialization, perversion, madness.

Yet the truth is that a channel is only and always a meta-channel, an assemblage, a channeling machine blending very different channels together, and which itself forms a channel in relation to even greater such channels. Whether of water, cement, metal pipe, twisted cable or realized in the very trembling of air molecules, the channel compels us to turn towards what remains, what is not swept away by the flows. 

Notes on the Preface of Laruelle’s Critique of Deleuze

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

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

Laruelle, ibid.

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

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

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

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

2.

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

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

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

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

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

3.

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

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

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

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

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

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

One does not argue with Spinoza.

This book is absolute, Laruelle writes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plato, Phaedrus 275a-b

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So: show us, don’t tell us!

Write because you’re sick to death of stories.

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

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

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

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

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

Always ask: are these circles still concentric?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Science, Information and Time

There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.

Alfred North Whitehead

It is necessary to go beyond all the pieces of spoken information; to extract from them a pure speech-act, creative story-telling which is as it were the obverse side of the dominant myths, of current words and their supporters.
It is also necessary to go beyond all the visual layers; to set up a pure informed person capable of emerging from the debris, of surviving the end of the world, hence capable of receiving into the body the pure act of speech.

Gilles Deleuze (The Time-Image)

Becoming unfolds along spatial and temporal symmetries. Biogenesis is the slow process of isolating extensive differences (from a million intensive differences) and making its form hard, becoming like a diamond or like a stone in the river — so that the difference become invisible to the stream, to the flow, but resists and therefore modifies the flow imperceptibly.

Slowly these tiny threads wrap together to form diffuse organizations of control and counter-control dipoles, which gather together in symmetry groups distributed across and reflecting the organization of the whole system. Biogenesis, the hyper-differentiation of life which occurs at evolutionary breaking points (like the Cambrian explosion,) is an example of a widespread tendency for a given style of becoming to grow hardened, able to resist transformations.

Ultimately this ability rests on the isomorphic circular orbits of the all various dimensions of life; the problem of resisting difference is precisely about differential speeds. Just the right degree of firmness or porosity: too much or too little and the membrane protecting you will be completely destroyed. Resisting difference is about strategically engaging and breaking symmetries in order to form counter-positions, evolving organizations.

Information is encoded by redundancy and frequency; it is an ordering word, a virtual or artificial precept which replaces and reorganizes a natural or organic one. As our new paradigm for images, movement and otherwise, the overflux of informatics presents the difficult challenge of integration, the real problem of transforming information into useful knowledge.

Hence the concept of interfaces allows us to offer a recursive definition of science, as an interface which can create new interfaces (from the (decon-)structure of previous interfaces.)

In this sense, updating interfaces applies isomorphically to the creative transformation of social and political space as much as to the spatial organization of academic and scientific discourses.

In response to this challenge of ‘updating’ our cultural interface, there arises the possibility of a general critique of the organization of power. Advocates of such a pragmatics of becoming or aesthetics of ‘force’ (molecular transformation,) energetically engage in deterritorializing discourses of ‘knowledge’/power. The logic behind the disruption is the principle that a narrative is composed, even traversed and permeated, by (virtual) multiplicities, by pure flows and alien singularities. All this is immanent, images no longer have an outside.

Thus the ‘crisis’ of science is that the structure of scientific thought is not autonomous. Sciences’ image of its own thought has been given to it by other discourses, by other kinds of organizations. The ‘common sphere’ is in deep trouble because we are so splintered, so segregated in modern society (we tend to unconsciously surround ourselves by a delusional spectacle that constantly reinforces how right we are.) And like any dialogue, the scientific discourse can be abused, taken uncritically and for granted. Science is a tool, the materialist-pragmatists say, we need it only so far as it is useful. Managers of education and research apply what Lyotard criticises the ‘performativity’ criterion: funding those research projects which are going to generate profit, are directly useful to those with money.

Information is political before it is scientific, it is born from the self-organizing interactions of clusters of human beings. Science is structured by the shape of these fractal clusters, by their power for storing and processing large amounts of information. (What can be shared for free? Information, it’s as free and open as air. The world freely expresses abundant information; reality comes pre-thematized. Information is free; that is, as long as the channel is open, as long as both stations are ready. Politics is the opening of this smooth discursive space, the actualization of virtual multiplicity, towards a just and collectively-organized inter-social space.

Organization and Knowledge

A linear increase in energy can produce a nonlinear change in the system that conducts that energy, a change that would be difficult to predict in advance…

(Steven Johnson, Emergence)

So it would seem that where information exists, it can only occur as a process of documenting a process. It is a second one-way signal intervening in a one-way transformation (all single-variable measurements have this parasitic structure.) For without an activity of communication, what would information be? Information is a blank image, a token of exchange, a null place for storage and organization of data. It is structure without form, a real process expressed as a pure act of emptiness and receptivity to qualitative change, of con-forming to other processes. But is knowledge then wider than information, ontologically “broader”? Is information really as narrow as we tend to consign it? Information is a relationship between relations; this structure exhibits a fractal symmetry which underlies scientific thought no less than creativity.

After all, human beings appear to possess a great deal of non-verbal knowledge, such as the knowledge acquired through a creative relationship to the world — as evidenced, for example, in the technical creativity of a musician or sculptor — that have no explicit linguistic content. The content of a craftsman’s skill is non-informational, not part of a narrative, not intrinsically given to symbolic expression. Formal, perhaps, but we might better say it is information embodied, that such knowledge is substantial, because acquired by an observer through a transformative relationship. Learning seems to immerse thought within the quality of the relationship, up to a real psychobiological transformation.

However, described this way, the very existence of such actual knowledge could seem somewhat controversial. To this end let us instead consider the alternate possibility that the ontological division is here only linguistic, and that there are in fact real vectors of translation between the two modalities of observation. “Information” and “knowledge” are then just products of observation procedures; what we would really want to know is how observation works, how it arises in the first place. Instead of asking: how do we reconcile agency and structure (which is ultimately a performative kind of question, begging for analogical solutions) we ask about the genealogy of structure. For example, what is in question in the case of the internal conflict we find in the definition of knowledge is the legitimacy of the observation procedure: is it in accordance with dominant scientific methods? In analyzing agency we enter into a recurring problem of narration, the endless reconversion of knowledge into information, the ontological constricture of scientific knowledge which has been characterized as a crisis of modern science. The crisis is internal to science, it deals with science’s refusal of transcendence. Science requires non-science to confirm itself; it turns freely towards what is otherwise than itself — that is, chaos.

Chaos transcending order; a strange inversion, but nonetheless this decay and transformation is the ontological relation as we here understand it. Transcendence pierces ontological relations just as its does physical ones; it is more primary than ontology. Transcendence is needed in order to perform ontology, to ask the performative, ontological question of any particular aspect of being (particularly science.) Before transcendence is ontological, a question of voids, it is a metaphysical posture, a turning towards the Other, an orientation towards what is otherwise than myself.

Lyotard suggests that postmodern science be understood as the search for instabilities. Then it is a quest for noise, for boundaries of chaos, for turbulence and indeterminacy. A new paralogic for an age of incredulity. The world is constantly expressing its symmetry to us, which is to say, the world is full of self-similar noise. And it’s impossible to completely shut it out (though we can become quite good at ignoring it.) Even if we were deprived of external sound artificially, we could not escape the noises of our own bodies, of our own minds. We communicate through noise: noise is the medium through which information is transmitted. What is noise? Above all it is a heterogenous collective, a relation interrupted, the intervention of non-sense. We can already see noise implies the intervention of another (ontological) order of operations, cross-over from another system in a non-temporal cycle. Noise breaks (through), it is entropy, the de-formation of a relation: the transformation from operation into non-operation. Noise subtracts information from a channel; but the channel itself is noise.

Information may be mediated by noise, but intuitively information seems to come in two ontologically distinct but symmetrical ways: doing and seeing, thinking and feeling, touching and immersion, learning and teaching, ‘content’ and ‘expression.’ Yet, even intuitively, a strict dualism here is untenable. Isn’t it but a moment before some vector of passage between the formal spaces is exposed, an entire inter-space of spaces? Folded within forms, constituting them, are swarming families of anti-forms, vectors of symmetry-breaking, sub-altern modalities of distinction. Indeed, these non-formal substances construct the axiom of epistemological individuation as an independent process prior to and necessary for the separation of distinct fields (information and knowledge.)

Science depends upon the discourse of history, but tends to take it for granted. The way to demonstrate this would be to produce a clarified history of discourse. The point would be to show that already archaeology (and ontology) take us back to genealogy, that is: to the discursive genesis, towards a historical method of transduction. Critical posture: the observer ungrounds his own witness. The admission we must make: we owe everything to history, indeed, the whole organization of human space, scientific or otherwise. An enormous amount of information is stored in our cultural practices alone — indeed, enough to govern the complex interactions of six billion human beings!

A human city has many purposes: a city provies shelter to citizens as well as a convenient places for traders to buy and sell goods. Steven Johnson argues that in addition to all the manifest purposes to a city, like protection and trade, cities also possess a latent, subterranean purpose: managing information. He suggests that cities be understood as information storage and retrieval devices; they are even (spatio-visual) interfaces, because they store and transmit useful new ideas to a wider population. What must happen in order for these hidden capacities to arise in the first place, and then finally to surface? After all, cities are not explicitly planned in order to be able to do this. The inter-facial capacity arises as a macro-effect not predictable from the individual behavior of any of the micro-elements!

When our cultural practices, our unconscious self-organization betrays itself — when the integrity of our social space collapses. In a moment, a hardened culture can grow out of touch with fluid realities (conversely, fluid cultures can fail to respond forcefully enough to danger.) The point is that innovation is our historical birthright no less than tradition. There is no hope in collective movements without a corresponding transformation of unhealthy and parasitic relations. In terms of ideology, we have a paradox of communication. There must be a clear channel to communicate information. But the sender and reciever, they too are “channels” exchanging information. So where does the repair begin: with the relation, or with the relation between relations?

The escape from this paradox is an exception, a code, a difference repeated, modulated, articulated twice. Culture is this secret production of metalepsis, the integration of another ontological order into an actual series. Science deals with strategems, plans of attack — moves in a game, but also solutions to a problem, a solution that changes the nature of the game. Postmodern science searches for these moments of instability, boundary conditions, where a linear change in energy produces a nonlinear change in the system’s behavior: sender becomes receiver, “down” becomes “through”, and so forth (an ontological differend, a non-linear shift in the dimensional structure of the system.) Incompatibility is the cause of the arising in the world of individuation.

Individuation repairs an incompatibility, or rather it incessantly resumes repair of a primordial break. Thus an identity is transgenerationally maintained despite the constant breaks and resumptions of the immanent process of diagnosis restoration. Information is passed down through generations as well as horizontally across generations; thanks to historical critique, we can read the transversal lessons of history, by burrowing underneath biography we discover the curious science of genealogy, or the real history of becoming.

Theorem: the history of science obeys the law of diminishing returns. The first attack on the narcissism of science…

Second: if we examine the set made of the problem and of the actions that transform it, there is no doubt that it is, at the beginning, more complex than the thing itself or the process. Clearer perhaps, yet more complicated. The question can then be reexamined in order to try to illuminate this new complexity and maybe, to transform it. Thus we form a set: the chain seems unending. The strategies of intervention, the interruption of the process or of the thing, observation that seeks to clarify, photon bombardment, the inseparable association of the knowers and the known–all make complexity increase, the price of which increases astronomically. A new obscurity accumulates in unexpected locations, spots that had tended towards clarity; we want to dislodge it but can only do so at ever-increasing prices and at the price of a new obscurity, blacker yet, with a deeper, darker shadow. Chase the parasite–he comes galloping back, accompanied, just like the demons of an exorcism, with a thousand like him, but more ferocious, hungrier, all bellowing, roaring, clamoring.

Have I described the elementary link of a system of knowledge or its pathology? I do not know. Anyway, it makes work, gives sustenance. One parasite drives out another. The second attack on the narcissism of scientists. The shadow brought by knowledge increases by one order of magnitude at every reflection.

Can we henceforth do without an epistemology of the parasite?

Michel Serres, The Parasite 17

Michel Serres’ The Parasite should be read as an extended critique of media, an impassioned appeal against the all-too-hastily narrowing spaces of historical and scientific explanation and discovery. Instead of confining knowledge within the human or physical sciences we should rather remember that knowledge of any kind irreversibly captures the world. Knowledge parasites real systems. Sometimes, it even begins to govern their evolution.

Serres claims that the parasite invents this very exchange of matter for logic, this mysterious bridge between the segmented sciences, this parasite which creates science and theory on the same day: “What would all knowledge be without this asymmetrical, crossed exchange? This irreversible capture.” (P 210) The very same parasitic diagram is to be found in both observation and experiments, both human and physical sciences: they all presuppose an interception, they construct unidirectional flows, they support an asymmetrical balance of operations. There is a unity between the human and the physical sciences, not a convergence but precisely an isomorphic structure:

Very little literature strays far from science, and much brings us back to science. Very little science strays far from literature, and much brings us back to literature. Logic and anthropology are found in the same strait(s); subdetermination [hypocrisy, ‘fuzzy’ logic] has to to with all knowledge. (The Parasite 215)

The parasite is transduction across separated disciplines, bodies, forces, systems. The structure of the interspace is segmented, modular densities broken apart by bits of noise. These interruptions, these knotted and transposed interfaces, turn out to be the noisy origin of information, the terrifying black abyss of knowledge. Parasite: atom of relationality. Therefore it is  the interspace as such, but also the traveller between these distant lands (brought close not by journey but by folding/filling space.)

The traveller who interrupts the meal is invited to the meal immediately, he is asked to join in, to exchange a good tale for his gastronomic satisfaction. From matter to logic, food to words: from speaking to eating, to speaking of eating. Fables of interrupted meals abound in the pages of The Parasite: the point, I think, is to emphasize the parasites’ role in this transformation, that they create exchanges of the material for the logical, and vice versa.The parasite is the invention of this passage of transformation between “ontologically” distinct layers and the exchange between (and the noise in the signal, etc.) Serres calls it a semiconductor.

The parasites invent exchange, but a ‘broken’ logic of exchange, which Serres says we are always forgetting. Serres puts it simply: parasites don’t barter, they exchange money. They interrupt a unary operation, they transveralize an energy flow (introduce a slanted dimension, spontaneously breaking symmetry.) How does a vital, living, material energy engage in becoming verbal, disordered and linguistic information? “The parasite is the location and the subject of the transformation. The collective, at the table, makes noise. The collective, finally, can be unanimous starting with this noise.” (P 211)

This raises an interesting and complex political question about the role of ‘parasites’ in the exchanges between molar solidarity and molecular turbulence. Perhaps this is even a possible critique of Serres: Does the epistemological model presented here really have a clear symmetric functionality as a model for a political struggle/organization? I think he can legitimately make this claim. Parasites, one-way relationships, show up all over nature and society, they are a fair candidate for the foundation for a project of conceptual re-unification. The parasite represents not a broken symmetry but a higher symmetry, a fuzzy and noisy organization, a fractal or proto-biological symmetry.

The parasite is therefore an extremely well-chosen conceptual vehicle for his new philosophy of time and history. The question is the exhumation of various topological spaces of knowledge (currently divided between ‘human’ and ‘natural’) and power (divided too, but in a very different way,) an analysis of their populations of intensities and exchanges and disjunctions, and finally the transformation of these spaces of society and the spaces of the earth(s) by the interruption of ‘power-’ and ‘knowledge-vectors,’ atoms of information or knowledge, units of qualitative relationality. In short, parasites are really at work all the time in terms of knowledge and power, they are the ‘truth’ of knowledge (falsification) and power (dissent).

It is interesting that Serres remains ambivalent to the concept of the parasite through the course of its rigorous and powerful exposition, and though fascinated, he is more than a little shaken, repulsed, ‘chased away’ from himself. He does not know if he has stumbled upon a new atom, the essence of relation. Could Serres finally not stomach the parasite? Could he not abide this tormented and ‘diagonal’ logic of parasitic relations which obscures and confuses what belongs to the system, what makes the system up and what is against the system? For in closing The Parasite, he writes:

“Inundation of hell, swelling up of history. Here is the Devil then; no, no, I wasn’t expecting him. He’s come; the book is done, as if it were burnt. I didn’t know that it was irreparably a book of Evil. The Evil of noise, of the song of hell, thundering; of hunger, illness, pain; dressed as animals and now undressed as a naked man; of Evil, quite simply. Meal, banquet, feast of the devil. “It finally is separate from me. Thus the horrible insect slowly left my room, through the creaking door, one May morning, in Venice.

As Serres puts it, he doesn’t know “whether the diagram of the rats is generative or corrupting.” (16) It is a worthy question, one of the most interesting questions raised in The Parasite.

The Parasite is filled with detailed analyses of stories about interrupted meals, from the Symposium to La Fontaine’s fables. The meal is the original relation. But it contains already a parasitic relation. The diagram is fractal. Serres diagrams its primitive cell this way:

3

|

|

|

|

V

1 <—————————— 2

The importance of the meal is the interchange between guest and host, which is transposed in Serres’ text with the justaposition between the words ‘guest’ and ‘host’ in the French language, implying a disjunction across ontological layers. This original relation is interrupted by a third (and then a fourth, etc.) This invisible ‘third’ is the structural unity between theory and science:

It is raining; a passer-by comes in. Here is the interrupted meal once more. Stopped for only a moment, since the traveller is asked to join the diners. His host does not have to ask him twice. He accepts the invitation and sits down in front of his bowl. The host is the satyr, dining at home; he is the donor. He calls to the passer-by, saying to him, be our guest. The guest is the stranger, the interrupter, the one who receives the soup, agrees to the meal. The host, the guest: the same word; he gives and receives, offers and accepts, invites and is invited, master and paser-by…

An invariable term through the transfer of the gift. It might be dangerous not to decide who is the host and who is the guest, who gives and who receives, who is the parasite and who is the table d’hote, who has the gift and who has the loss, and where hospitality begins with hospitality…

[Michel Serres, the Parasite 15-16]

The decision to be made is about the space of history, that is, the role of the third, the outsider, the other. How much (r)evolutionary capability are we going to assign to minor elements — to parasites, tiny fluctuations, minimal differences? The lineaments of an alternate history of science are palpable (see Notes on Birth of Physics.) But in short, Michel Serres introduces us to a new kind of time and history.

Time is a dynamic and turbulent space, not a linear or repetitive chain. Serres proposes a multiplicity of different figures for time; we are to understand time topologically, diagrammatically, through methods both exact and inexact, in order to allow creative manipulation of the flow of time.

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

Chapter 1

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

1. Ontology and ontogenesis: from Bergson to Simondon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1] IGPB, p. 34.

[2] IPC, p.163.

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

[4] Cf. Creative Evolution.

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

[6] Creative Evolution.

[7] IPC, p. 137.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Limits of the hylemorphic model

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network.” (Maturana, Varela, 1980, p. 78)
“[…] the space defined by an autopoietic system is self-contained and cannot be described by using dimensions that define another space. When we refer to our interactions with a concrete autopoietic system, however, we project this system on the space of our manipulations and make a description of this projection.” (Maturana, Varela, 1980, p. 89)

Niklas Luhman works with this autopoesis to produce a quite fascinating model of systematicity. I’ll briefly highlight what’s important from our point of view.

A ‘machine’ is defined by the boundary between itself and its environment; a machine is divided from an infinitely complex exterior. Communication within a machine-system operates by selecting only a limited amount of all information available outside (reduction of complexity.) The criterion according to which info is selected and processed is meaning. Machines process meaning, producing desire; each machine’s identity is constantly reproduced in communication (depending, again, on what’s meaningful and what’s not.) If a system fails to main identity, it ceases to exist as a system and dissolves back into the environment. Autopoeisis is this process of reproduction from elements previously filtered from an over-copmlex environment. The operation of autopoesis can be binarily encoded (in a Spencer-Brown logic of distinction) as a program which filters and processes information from the environment.

OK, taking this from a D&G perspective, the question becomes about this connection or boundary-limit… and I think this is where fractality and cognition exhibit a common transitive structure…

Program-agents connect: machines to flows, flows to machines, flows to flows, machines to machines, events to flow-machines, machines to event-flows; they (1) produce mappings (flowcharts) of these connections, (2) dis-join, decode and fracture these mappings, (3) construct new machines->more or less ‘dense’ networks of ‘tubes’, flows->currents of intensity, subagents->communicate the pure imagistic flow of unconscious symbol-automation, a particular agent constructs a tool (or a machine with a hole in the shape of a ‘problem’) by halting this flow, “flattening” it into (n-1) dimensions, where it can be differentially represented by a self-organizing nano-ontology; these subagents compress reality into their ‘micro-worldviews’ but then uncompress them into signification, a stream of images and words whose true ‘symbolic’ value is not in the individual’s ontology, but in the group; so natural evolution works to point individual ontologies towards the assemblage of the group, but also pushes the groups’ ontology towards more effective ways of responding to events; so all agents are partial agents, but these agent/machine networks are not all at the same “level”; machines can be made up of machines and subagents; all agents are subagents, this fundamental fractality is ultimately what allows these flows to be taken as flows, allows agents to be and to perform; “full” agents that skim the surface of language are precisely the question. up til now we have only considered the deeps. and perhaps this is ultimately all we need consider: merely the most fundamental heuristics of cognition. but what about conceptual metaphors? does the machinic framework provide for the possibility of metonymy? does the fractality of cognition really completely account for linguistic competency…?

What is a subagent?

The task of a subagent is to translate an image (scene) into a problem space, an objectivized or idealized space. Geometric regularity is in fact what is here being auto-regulated: the problem of establishing arbitrary limits is taken up as a recursive feedback loop between the systematic and meta-systematic modes of computation. Intensity, attention, or heat is represented by the amount of ‘noise’ (perturbation) allowed by the meta-system in the description of the problem space. This problem space is then populated by sub-subagents who imagine it, and then create sub-sub-subagents who reify it into a problem space; this gradual decomposition amounts to conceptual simplification, that is, until we find an undifferentiable function which decodes the image, i.e., supplies the solution. The image (collapse of solution space) is transcoded into a new problem-space, or returned as feedback to higher levels of the system, which may be in contact with other subagents inhabiting the given problem space.