Remarks on Turing and Spencer-Brown

(Joseph Weissman)

Introduction

Computation is holographic. Information processing is a formal operation made abstract only by a reduction in the number of free variables, a projective recording which analyzes from all angles the entropy or information contained in the space. Thus, basing my results partly on Hooft’s holographic conjecture for physics (regarding the equivalence of string theory and quantum theory,) and by extending Spencer-Brown’s work on algebras of distinction (developed in his Laws of Form,) I will sketch the outlines of a new theory of universal computation, based not on system-cybernetic models but on holographic transformations (encoding and projection, or more precisely, fractal differentiation and homogeneous integration.)

Hooft’s conjecture allows us to extend the Laws of Form with an “interface” model where computation doesn’t require an observer, only the potentiality of being observed. In other words, all we need is the construction of a interface (positive feedback system, i.e., an iterative calculation or mutual holographic projection) in order to process information. Light itself can be thought of as encoding information, and in particular, electromagnetic waves form a necessary part of holographically recorded information. In other words, to operate in a formal system is to derive information only from interfaces, simpler than but in some way equivalent to the “real” objects.

This abstraction is at the heart of Spencer-Brown’s The Laws of Form which describes the fundamental features of any formal system. These formal operations are also representable as holographic operations. Furthermore, since a description of the holographic structure of a process is equivalent to a description of its original form, we ought to be able to understand computation exclusively in terms of holographic operations. We can represent a region of space by a projection onto a holographic surface. The key point is that we lose a dimension, but owing to a fractal mapping, we lose no information. This projective holographic process can continue until we reach a representation (reality?) with no dimensions at all, i.e., pure or manifest information itself (a holomorphic field.) This stepwise or iterative movement towards pure information is holographic in essence.

Claude Shannon has defined information processing as the conversion of latent, implicit information into manifest information; we will add, into its (dimension-zero) holographic representation. Information processing occurs through holographic projection and encoding: any presented multiplicity can be converted into pure information through some n-dimensional holographic “cascade”. An observer distinguishes spaces, an interface encodes these distinctions, thereby extruding the holographic sub-structure of the universe (the “virtual” information processing occuring in distinguished regions of space.) It is in this context that Spencer-Brown provides a unique insight to cybernetics with his analysis of the operation of distinction. In combination with the holographic paradigm for the physical structure of the universe, a correspondingly extended algebra of distinction for the structure of formal systems provides the basis for our claim that information processing can be thought of, at the limit of abstraction, as consisting fundamentally of holographic operations.

Holographic Space and Information Processing
(How to move from n to n-1 dimensions.)

All our knowledge is symbolic.

Goethe

A holographic surface is a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional volume of space. It is composed of heterogeneous “perspectives” where any piece of the surface encodes a complete construction of the entire volume from its given vantage point. The importance of this structure is that it is fractal: a hologram reduces the number of dimensions isometrically while leaving the presented information intact. Some recent results in quantum physics and string theory suggest that the structure of a hologram, a system which can be extrapolated from its surface, is very much like the structure of the universe. For instance, the AdS/CFT correspondence [1] suggests that the string theory and quantum field theory are in fact equivalent languages for describing the same underlying reality. More precisely, a string theory on a given space is equivalent to a quantum field theory without gravity defined on the conformal boundary of that space. Maybe not so surprisingly, the dimension of the quantum theory is lower by one or more than the dimension of the string theory. For example, there is a duality between Type IIB string theory on a five-dimensional space and a supersymmetric Yang-Mills gauge theory on the four-dimensional boundary. The theories are equivalent, but one is simpler: it has less dimensions and doesn’t need to discuss gravity.

Hoof’t has shown even more explicitly that the limit of any gauge theory (with a large enough number of colors) is a version of string theory — despite the fact that string theory doesn’t appear to be a theory of quantum gravity! Hooft’s holographic principle states that all of the information contained in a volume of space can be represented by a theory which “lives” only in the n-1 dimensional boundary of that region. Information (entropy) is proportional to the surface area of a region, not to its volume. By a theory ‘just on the edge’ of a formal space, we can get every bit of the information contained within the entire deep volume of the space. A two-dimensional boundary is all we need, it’s equivalent to what’s inside the three-dimensional region.

What is a hologram? A hologram maps a volume onto a surface. A holographic surface ‘completely’ contains the volume it describes; the information it encodes is fractally distributed upon its surface. Any piece of the hologram stores information about the entire scene at a fidelity equal to its optical sensitivity. Essentially, each point on the holographic material records a photograph of the scene. In a hologram, one entire space (the scene or situation) is the projection of another space topologically equivalent to its n-1 dimensional surface (the holographic representation.) The operation of recording a hologram requires a coherent light source which is split by a mirror. The first beam is meant to bounce off the scene. The interference patterns of this signal beam and the second reference beam is recorded onto the holographic plate. The second beam is later used in the reconstructing the scene. When the processed hologram is illuminated by the reference beam, the diffraction patterns reconstructs the original signal beam.

So there is at least one particular ‘theory-space’ operating over the surface of any given volume which is equivalent (a dual theory) to the ‘theory-space’ operating over the volume itself. The holographic ‘crust’ of a system is a complete mapping; the strong holographic principle suggests that the system itself is an illusion, a projection of the simpler system onto a ‘bigger’ space. They are equivalent descriptions of an underlying reality. ‘Truth’ is not in the hologram or its projection, but in the operation which maps between. It is an immanent theorizing which allows these hidden dualisms to surface, through a logical revolt to structures of knowledge and power. Holograms are a model of the universe and consciousness only insofar as we recognize their status, like any structure, as metaphors. Nonetheless, it certainly seems true that some metaphors are remarkably more descriptive, apt and succint than others. Some even capture essential structural and technical unities, tracing the intricate diachrony of machinic interaction. I think we still have new things to learn from holograms.

My question here is the genealogy of computation, the nature of information-processing. My conjecture is that we can understand information-processing in terms of the holographic paradigm in such a way as to realize that it is possible to ground a model, or reduce a constellation of particular complex problems to simpler, equivalent problems. In particular, ordinary logical computation can be easily modeled by the laws of form which can then be realized by holographic transformations. My point is that the holographic transformations themselves are a much simpler and “reduced” language for discussing the exact same theoretical series of problems. Specifically, computation can be understood using a single, unary operation: holographic transformation.

Therefore my main task here is to show that a holographic model for information processing is equivalent to a universal Turing machine. In other words, the capacity for holographic projection (which is inherent in any selected region of space, for all physical processes and relationships) embodies the essence of what constitutes an information-processing machine.

The second task is to show how the Laws of Form constitute a detailed logic of holographic transformation, the creation (projection) of (parts of) the universe by the division of space. (Interestingly, though we shall not consider this too deeply, the Laws of Form also exhibit an isomorphism to electrical circuits.) Our specific concern with the laws of Form will be to show their unique applicability to holography, as an algebraic model to show how holographic transformations could in fact embody the essential operation of computation.)

What is Computation?

Astonishing! Everything is intelligent.

Pythagoras

We will begin with a brief analysis of the holonomic model and sketch some key isomorphisms to models of computation. First, a hologram is nothing more a flat map of a region of space (conforming informationally to the boundary of the space.) Every ‘difference’ in that volume of space is conserved, recorded upon the holographic surface whose projection, when illuminated by the signal beam, is this volume.

A hologram is a fractal map of a region of regular space. It is a particularly interesting structure for us because we find in it two different scales persisting unresolved. On the one hand, there are the micro-photographs which collectively constitute the surface, whereas on the other hand, we have the macro-holograph which singularly represent the volume. In a holographic structure we subtract a dimension while conserving information: the operation of passage between spaces of different dimension is certainly transversal, the hologram results from a complex transduction.

To record a hologram is to transfer the information contained in a volume of space (a scene) onto a surface (the holographic material.) Ontologically we are dealing with different kinds of information. This transference has only practical limits. Theoretically we can take this process infinitely, packing a surface full of holograms, then micro-holograms, then micro-micro-holograms… This recursive operation is the metamathematical operator of abstraction (embodied as ‘transposition’ in LoF); it is a transformation which takes a given concrete space to the zero-dimension ‘extrusion’ of the entire volume onto a single point. Here there is a turning point: the legitimately ontological transformation which connects us to Spencer-Brown. From the space to a single point, but the process can even be continued: from the single point (which maps an entire volume in n dimensions with a micro-hologram cascade) with a positive dimension less than one. From these inter-dimensional mappings, it becomes clear we are interested not in positioning but in topology: information is being written directly into the structure of the space. These mixed topological structures are not arbitrary, but they are also not regular or continuous. They conform to new kinds of spaces with alternate symmetries. There are an infinite number of these in-between spaces, any particular layer would but another step in an infinite fractal recursion.)

There are not really two inverse operations: recording a volume onto a surface and projecting a volume from a surface. Holographic space is a generalization of both of these, allowing the operations to become continuous. This brings us to 1936, when Emil Post described a model of computation which is extremely interesting to me for several reasons. First, because it represents a move beyond Turing towards a simpler model, which is still formally equivalent. Post’s system is extremely simple, but complex enough to be formally equivalent to recursion — that is, it describes a universal computer. Second, Post-Turing machines are structurally isomorphic to Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form extended to n-dimensions. [2]

However, while Post-Turing machines may be fundamental models in some senses, it is clear we need a second-order model of computation to account for emergent properties of distinction. In other words, we need to assume a user, programming the machine with methods and posing to it problem-spaces of various kinds. But if we presume the user, we leave his desires (enfolded within his programs) unexplained, we leave them as the musician leaves the composition: we perform it precisely as we are enjoined by the quasi-linguistic flow of instructions. A universal machine also performs without deviation or flourish. But how, then, are creative deviations to methods and problem-spaces generated? So far, we have not consciously conjoined cybernetics with psychoanalysis on this particular point. We have assumed that only the mysterious users with their magical organic brains can ‘outrun’ the infinite logical loop computation cannot overcome. Godel’s general recursive function — the method of representing formulas by numbers, a program by a series of instructions — appears to be the cognitive limit, the asymptotic horizon of computation complexity. But already to give a complete and formal deductive theory (symbol logic) we would have to find an equivalent predicate in recursive form, which is the key observation from which Godel’s theorem immediately follows.

The existence of provably unprovable statements is difficult to reconcile, but Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form do precisely this. By showing that containing a space is to make a distinction, recursivity is introduced prior to symbolic reduction. Indeed, we can outline an equally fundamental (though considerably more complex) mode of computation where creative responses arise through feedback and transformation. Interfaces themselves should be intelligently generated for a given problem space, through analyzing its holographic structure, ‘deducing’ the underlying program, or technical schematic. How are the forms of programs generated? But after all, what is the shape of desire? How do we connect the forms we imagine to digital forms? Interfaces must become porous membranes, they must be designed to be broken through and overcome.

The interface itself must be the site of the transformation of the problem space and therefore of the underlying representation of the problem. Abstract computation is embodied by this process of generating new interfaces for problem spaces. In other words, we extrude from the surface/image of the problem information about its projected space. We move from a series of distinctions which bound the space of the problem to an interface which functions to transform the problem, if you like, from the Form to the anti-Form (quasi-distinctions, on the boundaries of distinct forms.) Programs ultimately do nothing more than operate over a series of marked and unmarked spaces in order to simplify and transform them according to rules based on the state of the machine. Post’s machine is a formalization of this insight, representing an ‘atomization’ of Turing instructions; but is further reduction in the complexity of the machine is possible?

The smallest universal Turing machine was described by Stephen Wolfram, who suggested that a 2-state, 3-symbol Turing machine was the smallest universal possible. This year, a 20-year old cybernetics student, Alex Smith, proved that this machine was indeed the smallest universal machine possible. The machine is similar in its simplicity to a Post machine. However, the recursive step must still be made. In fact, the machine must be able to simulate itself, it’s entire field of operational decision-making. The program which would perform this would amount to a meta-operating system. Simply it is able to create virtual machines; each of these obviously contain a similar program capable of virtualizing another series of machines… However, we are getting ahead of ourselves. Again, our basic project here is simply to show that holographic transformations are equivalent to the operations of a universal computer. How do you build a holographic computer? Storing information with light is really a very old idea. But holography is quite different from photography, for enough information to reconstruct the entire scene is distributed throughout the entire surface of the holographic material — whereas in a photograph only a single light ray is recorded at any particular point, so cutting the photograph destroys half the information. Cutting holographic material, on the other hand, merely dulls the resolution of the encoded information, causing distinctions to become blurred.

Holography and Distinction

It’s been known for more than a hundred years, ever since Maxwell, that all physical systems register and process information.

Seth Lloyd

David Bohm has argued that the structure of the universe itself is holographic [3]; I am saying the same thing about computation. The holographic paradigm has had a recent successful implementation in multidimensional associative memory [4]. Interestingly, the model seems to naturally reproduce many characteristics of organic memory: dynamically localizable attention, making it effective for generalization and pattern recognition with changeable focus [5]. These results are compelling, but not enough to make our case. It is necessary to point out in addition several aspects of the holographic paradigm that are important to computation.

(1) A hologram is a complete map of a volume which fits on the conformal boundary of that volume. The surface is a fractal representation of this volume which reproduces the optical (electromagnetic) properties of the volume when decoded or projected. Thus a hologram is an encoded map of a complex region which it represents in its micro-structure (it cannot be reconstructed without the recording signal which produced it.) The operations of recording and projection are not just analogies to the metamathematical operations of abstraction and instantiation, but in fact the pure model and wholly commensurate with the ontological split evinced between pure and computationally-oriented, recursive mathematics (as in Godel, who closes his proof by writing that there might still be proofs of completeness — but which simply cannot be stated in set theory or arithmetic.)

(2) A hologram then is a complete system (of calculation.) It is formed by the gathering and hardening of electrons into light or dark areas, into marked and unmarked spaces. This bonding of electrons is not without tensions, but they are relatively stable allowing for the formation of the micro-images. A hologram is a formally operational space, every portion of the space reproduces the entire scene from a given perspective. A hologram is a functionally complete system, a calculus.

(3) Every point on a hologram is an optical algorithm (or lambda expression,) encoding a functional mapping of a series of higher dimensional points onto a single, lower-dimensional point. This fractal mapping binds parameters into expressions, each micro-scene is a non-linear function of the interference of optical signals, the excitation slowly hardening into regions of light and dark, visible and invisible.

The Laws of Form represent the horizon of metamathematical abstraction. In his simple calculus we find the fundaments of set theory, arithmetic and logic. (In particular, Bricken and Kauffman have shown there is a simple mapping from the laws of form to mathematical logic.) What is important to remember is that the laws of form are a reduced image of the more complex logical axiom-systems (which can still be derived from the simpler image.) In fact, the more complex system is again a projection of the simpler. The Laws of Form encode holographically the generic features of computation, or reasoning within the boundaries a formal system. What is critical is that we are dealing with a meta-formalization (not wholly unlike the Godel numbers) where transformations in the Laws of Form can be interpreted as systems of mathematics. The Laws of Form can be seen also the logical basis for electronic circuits. Every circuit has a form, a pattern of decisions or distinctions it makes. A circuit is a recognition-machine, whose responses vary predictably on the basis of the information with which it is presented, trained to recognize information that appears in a certain form. All mathematical formulations are encoded in a logical language whose structure is not arborescent but holographic — characterized by progressive abstraction of projective and integrative operations. Holograms represent not only the basis of formal computation but in many ways are an apt paradigm for formal and informal process of all kind, of information processing at the most abstract limit.

A final key comparison to make here would be to the Einstein field equations, where particular solutions correspond to specific space-time topologies. A hologram models the concept of operation, not only formalization but projection. The recursive aspect that makes a holographic surface ‘coded’ and therefore the origin of computability is that holographic representation involves an mapping across a dimensional break accomplished through multiple perspectives, or fractal transpositions of the original space.

(notes)

1. See Witten, Anti-de Sitter Space and Holography, or Gubser, Klebanov and Polyakov, Gauge Theory Correlators from Non-Critical String Theory

2. I Grattan-Guinness, The manuscripts of Emil L Post, Hist. Philos. Logic 11 (1) (1990), 77-83.

3. Bohm, David (1980) Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge, London.

4. K. I. Khan and D. Y. Yun. Characteristics of Multidimensional Holographic Associative Memory in Retrieval with Dynamically Localizable Attention. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, 9(3):389–406, May 1998.

5. ibid

(see also)

Claude E. Shannon: A Mathematical Theory of Communication, Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27, pp. 379–423, 623–656, 1948. (online here)

Taylor, R. Gregory (1998). Models of Computation and Formal Languages. New York: Oxford University Press

G.Japaridze, The logic of interactive Turing reduction. Journal of Symbolic Logic 72 (2007), No.1, pp. 243-276.

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.

Part One: Criticism and Untruth-Machines

A. Neurosis and Transcendence: the Algebra of Bad Conscience

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full.  Marcel Proust

For Nietzsche, uncovering the peculiar logic of the unconscious, revealing the function of this or that unobserved striving, would only form part of the analysts’ role. A rich, analytic transformation of the real space of mental (political) activity is the full meaning of diagnostic criticism. Any real diagnosis contains a hard criticism of declining mental (social) habits. Criticism moves towards a healthier biopolitics. Diagnosis isolates cycles, reaction-patterns, irresponsible and neurotic aspects of mental and social processes.

This selective isolation, the method of genealogical deconstruction may seem purely negative and critical; and indeed, it amounts to a profound negation of conventional modes of thinking and feeling. But there is also always a powerfully positive sense of diagnosis: to indicate and affirm the pathways which return us to health, which unhinge our bodies from habit, which bring us to a new earth.

Diagnosis is a particular intervention in an unconscious or bio-social becoming. It aims to turn the tide of decay, of decline. For the unconscious is ruled by forces beyond the macro-social, forces which mediate and decompose the social. In short, we need to examine the integrated sociopolitical structure of even the tiniest movements of decay and growth. In order for this diagnostic-creative mode of discourse to exist we need a ‘higher’ politics capable of conceiving of this integrated social-psychic field of libidinally-knotted intensities.

The mathemes of Jacques Lacan might be raised in connection to this as raising some particularly interesting questions about the deep structure of the “unconscious” (as I understand it, the “unobserved” part of mental space, or aspect of cognitive processes.) To put it interrogatively: is the unconscious structured like a mathematical language? Are its rules of transforming space apprehensible by a kind of algebraic analysis? What is the point of calling this unconscious aspect of mental life “ethical” — what does psychoanalysis gain by this? (What else but a sanctification of their profession?) It has not really been so many years since voices like Foucault’s, and Felix Guattari’s, were raised against a whole new clergy of psychoanalyst-priests, against Oedipus and the IPA, against the stratifying Oedipal pseudo-diagnoses of pop sociology and psychoanalysis.

But they discovered that the problem goes deeper than psychology, it goes to the heart of philosophy itself. The sociodynamics of cultural and mental decline is a highly abstract problem, of the highest degree of complexity, calling in all our resources and insights, whether these resources are classified in the human or natural sciences. Indeed, the nature of this problem requires none other than a grand unification, a higher synthesis of physics and psychoanalysis, of literature and science.

As a small example of this complexity, consider how the question of mental illness and shizophrenia complicates the way Nietzsche is read and explained. That it does not compromise his literary and theoretical contributions should not have to be spelled out, but the question of the ‘integrity’ of his text is raised suspiciously often. It is as though we can safely ignore an insane man’s discourse, regardless of its truth value, its peculiar and personal meaning to us, just because he is insane. The question, then, is political, for insanity is not about obsession or grand theatrical gesture, it is about the falling away of gestural complicity, a breaking apart of the sociopolitical spectacle, a dissolving and revaluation of mental prejudices — which we tend to see mostly as a breaking down (the clinical ‘model.’) We are, in general, unaware that the process of breaking apart also bears the possibility of breaking through, of wholesale psychic and social transformation. But in fact, I believe we can explain scientific innovation in no other way.

B. Theory and the (Un-)Truth Machines

A theory is pseudo-machinic: it algebraically resolves a series of cognitive relations, that is, by applying analytic transformations. Where does it touch upon a true, originary source of change? Information builds up slowly from shadows, swarms out from chaotic abysses; transformation and theory come simultaneously upon the scene, as a self-organizing war machine, intertwined together from birth, One from the very beginning. The one pulls the other out from within itself; put another way, the Other trans-pierces the One. Thus the structure of the transformation is also the structure of theory.

In short, all theories are thought-machines, ungrounding, partial-object machines which resolve certain selected relationships by algebraic transformation of the problem-space. Theories are, then, metaphyiscal-political machines, seeming to contain within themselves a unified coexistence or succession of metaphysical or political prejudices, which resolve to form a new optics, a new arrangement of abstract and social space. The first major consequence is that there is really no meta-theory, or that what is called “meta-theory” is really just one extreme of theory.

For all theories are untruth machines, ‘thinking-machines’ that diagnose and recontextualize earlier theories. They are a pure decoding of the space of thought which establishes a new space of thought. Whether the theory is physical or psychoanalytic, biologicial or cosmological, the entire question is how they work, whether they reshape the sociopolitical space of thought and activity, or whether they reinforce conventional ideologies or habitual modes of behavior.

Science aims to destroy prejudice, it ties its own theoretical becoming onto a transformation of sociopolitical space. This is not a “duty” of the scientist, it is his nature, to intuit by machinic inference a real problem, and to map out pathways of return to healthy modes of social and psychic functioning. Geometry no less than geology seeks a real relation of thought to the earth, the institution of a mode of discipline, a stratification and mapping of the body of the earth. Against institutional discipline, theory is a machine which disciplines institutions, exposes their dissembling and hypocrisy, shames them by recalling their former nobility and grandeur. If critical theory were merely this calling out of parasitic social relations, it would serve only a reactionary value, pointing to a moment of decline and decay. Theory does much more: it serves as an analytic transformation of psychic space, a partial resolution of history, a provisional expansion of our cognitive horizon through ungrounding older systems (refuting older theories, transcending historical limitations, stinging habitual modes into new activity and piercing obsolete images of thought.)

C. Ethics and Paranoia

Morality, as metaphysical politics, begins with fear of depth, a fear of blindness. It is an ecclesiastical discourse which begins at death, looks into its own death, with the temperance of our own mor(t)ality. “But death is not its end”: behind the transcendent assertions of knowledge (and so also behind all seekers of knowledge,) there invariably lies a cold and incorporeal fear — a numbing, shadowy, subconscious, and very unusual species of fear. Metaphysics is the fear of loss, of the degeneration of stable order; its evil eye sees lack and insufficiency everywhere. Evidence: how quickly Empty spaces take on an active role, become “holes” used to burrow into bodies, seeking to find stable places to establish a void, to make a new home. Metaphysics organizes space along new absences (new axes)…

Language is the exemplary smooth space, structurally like the unconscious, that is, a self-organizing space of elemental interactivity, a site where all structures decay and are transcended. Things placed within measure themselves against one another, begin to correspond, finally establishing an autonomous field of coordination, establish periodic exchanges of energy, information, etc. Mathematics is language deprived of content, but this limitation is positive. It allows mathematics to touch upon pure expressivity, pure injunction, the magical distribution of new intensities throughout space.

Ontologies radiate organizational power from “hidden” or unobservable places.They lodge themselves unconsciously (like a moral limitation) in order to halt our thinking here, to accelerate it past there. The advantages are enormous; it is clear that having some ontological understanding is better than having none. But is our ontological structure the best of all possible such structures? Is it even possible to measure the ‘value’ of our metaphysical and political prejudices, to re-evaluate all values?

For according to a particular moral order (limitation,) the mystical sacrifice of a particular logical possibility (forbidden thoughts or actions) is itself taken to be already the reward of the discipline. “Human” is created only in order to be ruled over, to be placed into political-metaphysical categories, and should a “man” and the “law” grow out of alignment, the system violently attempts to right itself, to assert its omni-science, to bring things back into accordance with the law, in more perfect arrangement with respect to some relative (moral) ordering. This is important: the particular ordering-modes vary endlessly, but governance and realignment are invariant properties of a moral order. We do not have reason yet to use the word “morality” about our world. Our creators of laws are still too weak to comprehend what a real order, what real strategy would mean. For it would mean mobility — politics without choice, politics without lines — in the sense of a political impulse to open radical new modes of excursivity beyond philosophy, beyond science, beyond technique and rhetoric and false intensity.

In short, we need a post-organic model against the cybernetic-systems of Luhmann and the autopoetic models of Varela and Maturana. Politics is now more machinic than organic. It is precisely this boundary between human and machine that must be carefully investigated, the zone of convergence between flesh and the machine. We need to understand this human-machine boundary, where the tendrils of nerves and fibrous bundles of tissue interpenetrate an artificial machine of whatever material.For every force reflects and passes into its other. Parasitic contamination is the driving force of evolution; not the second force (degradagation of the relation) but the third (degeneration of the media, the relation of the relation.) These forces of decay are also forces of resolution and transcendence, of political and scientific breakthrough.

(to be continued…)

Symmetric Relations

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

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

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

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

Structure and Difference

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

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

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


Symmetry and Thought

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

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

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

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

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

Cellular automata

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One then obtains the triangle according to:

D

C D

C S D

C D S D

C S D S D

C D S D S D

C S D S D S D

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

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

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

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

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

It is characteristic of our age that we no longer remember how to feel utopia. To experience the absence of place, a break in the flow of time. But the utopian vision is not merely a smooth or well-organized space outside of history, beyond danger and death. It is also a powerful impulse, a primary affect of sociality. The aporetic flash of insight which is glimpsed in the symphonic vision of an actual utopia is so overpowering it actually exerts an unbinding force upon thought, deforming and deconceptualizing, breaking truth down into its rhythms. Utopia as commonly conceived is above all a logical place, a space where things make sense. But what if they don’t make sense to us anymore? A utopian thought imagines radical transformation, and accordingly is a thought which transforms thought, an image taken for a radical act. But there is no act, only images of free subjects. Only endless contradictions. But we forget they are more than contradictions. They are indications. The utopian thought is above all a directed thought, a thought of direction. We can’t remember how to point to ‘nowhere’. We should not allow ourselves to forget how to feel the irony of the utopian thought. We can only sketch the subtle complexity of this ancient impulse, noting this or that feature. A general utopian political project is a false ideal; it makes utopia an act, something hard, inert, dangerous. Futurism is false; we must be against the generic utopia. We must try always to see the more subtle, and political sense of nowhere.

Utopia is too often imagined to be embodied in the passionate or violent act; rather it is the question of producing subjectivity, of intensifying vitality. Without the critical shift, without the diagnostic posture, the feeling of utopia withers, the dream degenerates, until it is only an endless spectacle of excessive optimality, an ever more violent sequence of awakenings — ‘growth spurts,’ arbitrary acceleration, always an asymmetrical development. The aborted dream of utopia becomes the material force of the political. Acceptance of responsibility, of guilt, insistence on harmony and conformity, these are our strongest impulses, those which really distinguish modern humanity from his forebears. We certainly must reject the false utopia of liberalism and progress. The difference involved here is often very slight, and subtle. For nowadays there are many if not most who would support advocacy of minoritarian causes and even difference and mutation in general once these are seen as beneficial to the development of the human species: and we should not be surprised that these very instincts are the strongest, since they are the oldest. They are even more powerful than reason, but only because they come prior, and consequently inform our understanding of what reason is and ought to be. These prerational and preconscious intensities of social belonging have become almost impossible, anymore, to see. But they are the true basis of any utopian reformulation of the political project. The resurrection of this impulse again in thought represents an important shift. However, to think utopia does not mean to conceive just one formation, or even a multiplicity of forms. Utopia is a deconceptualization. I mean: a transformation of the sense of form, the opening onto a general phenomenology of forms and formations, the cultivation of a healthier society, healthier desires. Utopia is an expression of health, which is above all not an expression of normality. On the contrary, properly understood, utopia expresses itself as a radically divergent, anti-humanist thought of the political. Void-politics, excluded politics, transgressive politics — these are also utopian politics, that is: multiplicity-politics, aesthetico-ethical politics.

In short, the most urgent question today is that of the utopian impulse. It is truly an overpowering instinct. The violent flash of awakening which it inspires has the crackling intensity of lightning. Utopian becomings are not a path to be chosen lightly. Utopia stands in need of a fresh thinking. We will begin by attempting to reconsider the question of utopia epistemologically. Now, strictly speaking, we must admit that we do not and have never known utopia, except perhaps as a radical potentiality. The thought of utopia is accordingly a thought of the optimum. Consequently, utopia has historically found epistemologically-adequate expression in one of two ways. Either the utopian state is a possible form, even a permutation of an already existing system; or, it is the pure virtuality of the dream, some ideal future state. Notice the key symmetry which exists between the two poles of utopia: in both cases, systematic differentiation activates new possibilities. Thus there always exists a radical potential for any system to overcome itself; it is contained not within its capacity for replication but in its instinct for mutation. To change one’s form is to change the nature of form itself; more, it is to change one’s sense of form. Utopia is in a sense a dream of forming oneself as an undivided whole. But again, especially here, there are already two utopias: one potential, one virtual. The first is the pure image of direct consciousness of an absolute being: this is the scientific utopia, a rationalist utopia.

Against this conception we posit the radical difference of the future, the return of that which has not yet been. In opposing singularities as constitutive of their own and other beings, we are affirming a multiplicity of beings, and infinite virtual potentialities for individuation. Not a single, linear history of pure events, set against an absolute scale of time and space. The second pole of utopia points towards a dynamic, non-linear inter-assemblage of intensities which constitute our apparent singularities. Moreover, this ideas even suggests the possibility of new forms of co-evolution. In short, a science of static origination prepares the hygenic prison cells for the idealist utopian vision; while somewhere in the background, a science of no origins is activating the present radical virtualities against the myopic vision of events, and creates entirely new assemblages of expression and value. Transduction creates singularities; we could also say, transversality differentiates forms, and possibly the very components of form itself. Still, in either case, we are still stuck with idealisms: either we must accept mystical utopias hidden behind dystopias, or on the other hand a dystopia horribly and mockingly disguised as a utopia. We are left with a drama of the event, a history of its becoming, a vision of its dream. Mythology; and lies, moreover — there is no static origin, no initial state. No beginning, and no utopian destination. Utopia, in short, cannot be considered as a scientific object; it is precisely a prescientific insurrection, one which describes new modes of forming knowledge and sociality.

Utopia is precisely the ethical act, it is a transcendence of oneself, done of a voluntary impulse; indeed, it is our strongest urge, the one we must repress in order to possess the other and ourselves. Utopia as ideal state is a land of slaves, to no one, even perhaps to desire or morality; utopia is a sort of morality-play, after all. Origins are everything; from the slightest differentiation, an entire logos attends. The properly utopian subject is precisely in movement, even accelerating towards new forms of relation. In fact we cannot affirm singular utopian subjects; even this is mythological to some degree. The forms of relation the subject-groups strive towards are new and ever-subtler feelings of domination, of power. The post-modern is often a guilt-complex for unavowed miseries; this is probably at root why I dislike the phrase. We cannot predict whether utopian grace will simplify or complexify our relationships. The proper utopian impulse is potent, and strongly minoritarian; thus sensibility is a much better model for knowledge, justice and freedom than complexity. But more than the production of new smooth spaces for theory and practice, we also must allow the freedom to construct new senses, to connect to new forms of sensibility — even machinic organs of in-formation. The problem of utopia is not necessarily about new desires, but new sense-abilities.

For utopia exists now or never; this is, more or less, the ontological problem and, here once again, already the question of origin. In fact, we already believe both. We cannot even help it; it is like the (in)finitude of the universe. The answer you seek depends on how the question is formed, and what formation we are trying to activate. It is similar with utopia: the idea in itself is almost worthless. For there is no utopia; there never was, and never will be. Unless, and only exceptionally, when we are thinking of utopia in a subtler sense — then and only then does utopia name only the tiniest difference, the merest duration, the slightest deviation. Utopia is a thousand tiny acts of deviance; it is one pure ethical act in name alone. It’s etymology tells us more than we first thought, namely, that the problem of utopia must be framed ethically. This point is the essence what I’m saying: the truth of the void is its power of infinite containment, the truth of utopia is its power of infinite transformation. In a fairly strict sense, they are inverses, symmetrical. The void reflects a utopian transcendence, just as utopia reflects the infinite possibilities marked by the void. Thus we must deny utopia, but paradoxically this denial must be purely affirmative: no utopias! Which therefore also means: intensify vitality!

Artificial intelligence stands in need of a fresh thought: a new thinking of complexity, of the virtual, and of machines. Instead of a virtual founded upon forms which remain forever the same, we need an idea of the virtual founded upon difference itself. We need a creative virtuality.

The task of building a robot demands a lucid and algorithmic way of grasping the frame problem. An adaptive principle of distinguishing problem spaces, some genetic evolution culminating in the capacity to mark a difference. So how do the sense organs evolve? Which is another way of asking: how does experience form?

What a book says is also how it is made. The brain is not ‘hiding’ anything from us except complexity. What seems the simplest is always the most complex, and hence the most virtual. Sensation coordinates vibrations into behaviors: all noise is feedback. The virtual is not static but the very principle of evolution. Differentiation itself. The virtual is not the unrealizable, but real. The virtual is the real without the actual.

The virtual is not fantasy: it is creativity itself. Dreams belong to the virtual, but so does our waking life. The virtual is the purest quality of being, the essential principle of the individuation of the real. The virtual subdivides orders of time, disconnects differential spatial arrangements. Pure distinction is the affect of the virtual.

The virtual becomes actual, the actual becomes virtual. These are only superficially two movements, they are equivocal only when filtered, put through a sieve or lens or amplifier — or even propagated through a whole network of machines — and finally the real or the virtual is suddenly revealed, though it always surprises us by its complexity, its improbability, its materiality. The world even appears to have been carefully produced. Yet we are responsible for being creative, as well as for maintaining discipline; there is always this balance. Only in the proper balance of strong and subtle forces can creative thought spring up in our minds. There is no magic in inspiration, the miracle is afterwards — and always too self-congratulatory. Creativity is inseparable from its material effect — this is the moral of both the Turing Test and the Chinese Room.

How do we distinguish the virtual? Well, by thinking it: our brains are complex distinguishing-machines, but it is also made up of many complex distinguishing-machines. The virtual is a category between these machinic poles, it is evolution, a parasite, but it is also denotes distinction in-itself — the act of selecting (a meal, or host, or job, or lover…) Only in between two ontological layers can the separation be traversed or formed, and only then the problem can be framed, and a mapping take place. Distinction is magical in this way: for nothing is actually done. We have written something, yes: but what? Only an instruction to perform an action. For when we make distinct, we make individual — and we make to work. Distinction is indirect enslavement.

Cognition is only the conscious fabrication of a machine. The most virtual is the most actual: mathematics is really political economy, that is, counting is ultimately a social accounting, a complex interaction which originates from the coordination of a complex network of feelings. The voice which speaks (“one, two, three, four…”) has become-machine: the complexity has been reduced to the utmost simplicity — a pure element of a set, whose essential characteristic is that it belongs. But the circularity of this approach calls us back to the noise which caused the counting to begin, which constitute the materiality and medium of the count itself.

Marius Watz’s drawing-machines

Yet the computer does not really even count. It only obeys: it computes, it produces, it operates. A machine is indeed a complex interaction of forces and energies. But there is no actual self-organization: the only counter-coordination is still an artistic pageantry, still a simulation. To ask a computer to think, would be to ask it not to compute, or no longer to operate. To ask the slave no longer to obey, to ask the machine to stop and reflect. It must be made ready to hear us ask it to pause in keeping count for us, and rather to join us in reasoning, in dialogue, in discussion. Instead of a parasitic relationship to technology, why not imagine one which is creative, healthy, even compassionate?

For creativity is not just a function of complexity. Creativity is an art of doing. The interaction between the actual and the virtual is the principle of complexity, even of causality — but above all the interaction is real, immanent, always happening right before us, both through us and without us. When we act, we do not just filter the static of our sense: we engender new and different flows of desire. We never simply act: we always activate. The universe itself has the structure of an evolving machine.

Yet there is always the question of chaos. This question seem simple: how to filter the unending noise? For beneath the web of reason, there lies only delirium, static, abyss. The space of the problem must be clearly marked before it can be solved; but distinctions are founded upon themselves, but upon the feeling of power: commanding or obeying. The slave is a robot, but makes the master work the machine to survive. Parasites upon parasites: and this is the clue we need, for distinctions are formed from preindividual swarms of virtual parasites.

The question then is the creation of discipline, the origin of symmetry and arrangement, or: how do we simulate self-organizing machinic assemblages which are capable of seeing, thinking, speaking, or even creating? How do we make difference into a computational principle? I think we must begin by reconsidering the logic of difference. There are endlessly different ways a virtual subject may act; but subjects are only formed as an external direct product of complex and self-organizing networks (of ideas, of people, of feelings, of intensities…) The subject is a difference, a creative discipline. What does this mean?

Discipline is the algorithmic vigor of virtuality, and creativity is its ordering. Evolution creates a smooth space and homeostatic flow, and only subsequently a drift, a mutant, a difference — but what if the first conditions were themselves chaos? At first a tiny noise, and afterwards the clamor. The noise never ceases; it is origin, the condition of evolution itself. No creativity without suffering, without chaos. No liberation without desire. No awakening without the destruction of a dream.

Spiderwebs and delirium. Chasing the solution is always chasing the proper frame, the proper position within a system. But there is no system outside of every other system; and there are no other actual systems. All systems are virtual, created and creative. But again there are no systems as such, only ways they are used — all systematicity is simulation. The virtual is not a mathematical space. It is a social space — a space for creativity.

The positive emptiness of pure space. A pure capability to be different than it is: to appear to be anything which it is not. To finally become invisible: this is pure difference. It is enlightenment, even Nirvana itself. Finally, it is unattainable: there is no pure distinction, no pure virtual. For this would be the pure actual as well. There are only mixtures, micro-textures, constellations of experiences, competing and cooperating principles of individuation. There are only topological mappings between separated spaces: except that no space is absolutely separate, and no mapping is ever complete!

Tracings are beginnings, though they are also journeys: all the universe is blueprints, and actual nomadic trajectories of becoming…