All posts filed under: abstract machine

Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Pragmatics

Monday, May 5, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
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A Thousand Plateaus / abstract machine / abstraction / assemblages / guattari / machinic unconscious / pragmatics / redundancy / rhizome / Schizoanalysis

Until Marxism, capitalist political economy has also pretended for a long time to pass as the general grammar of all economy, but linguistics still has not found its Marx and Engels who would reset it on its feet. –Guattari, L’Inconscient Machinique, p.30 fn. 14. The sign is a position of desire; but the first sings are the territorial signs that plant their flags in bodies. And if one wants to call this inscription in naked […]

Minority

Wednesday, April 9, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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A Thousand Plateaus / abstract machine / becoming / Deleuze / language / machine / ontology / Politics

The scientific enterprise of extracting constants and constant relations is always coupled with the political enterprise of imposing them on speakers and transmitting order-words. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 101 Deleuze and Guattari admit that the notion of “minority” is very complex, with references and correlations in all dimensions of human and non-human existence. The opposition is not simply quantitative: “Majority implies a constant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by […]

Meta-ontology

Sunday, March 9, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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abstract machine / antiproduction / body / code / diagram / diagrammatics / flux / idea / language / model / ontology / parasite / process / symbol / text

It is impossible to conceive the assemblage of a scientific experiment apart from a field that generates plans and topological, mathematical, axiomatic and computational descriptions. But sign-machines can function equally well directly within material and social machines without the mediation of significant processes of subjectivation, something which has become more obvious each passing day. The fact that the common essence of semiotic machines and material or social machines proceeds from the same type of abstract […]

On Learning

Saturday, March 8, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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abstract machine / code / Cognition / diagram / difference / energy / entropy / identity / knowledge / learning / memory / problem / structure / Thought / unconscious / wittgenstein

One way of approaching the difference between knowledge and learning (so profound in our opinion that, despite their entanglement, there can be postulated neither a material nor conceptual ground which could ever serve to unify them) is by considering that even while wholly disparate, they are not in the least opposed for that reason. To learn and to know are two divergent operations, contrapositive dynamisms, which are nevertheless always both active simultaneously, as the “cutting […]

Imperceptible

Monday, March 3, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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abstract machine / assemblage / becoming / code / cosmos / diagram / God / intensity / language / molecular / segmentarity / semiotics / sign / subject / truth

“Regimes of signs are not based on language, and language alone does not constitute an abstract machine, whether structural or generative. The opposite is the case. It is language that is based on regimes of signs, and regimes of signs on abstract machines, diagrammatic functions and machinic assemblages that go beyond any system of semiology, linguistics or not. There is no universal propositional logic, nor is there grammaticality in itself, any more than there is […]

Notes to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: November 20, 1923 — Postulates of Linguistics

Sunday, February 10, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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abstract machine / assemblage / chomsky / content / diagram / expression / hegemony / indiscernible / information science / intensity / Labov / linguistics / pragmatics / production / rhizome / semiotics / signifier / variation

In truth, the nature of the abstract machine is the most general problem: there is no reason to tie the abstract machine to the universal or the constant, or to efface the singularity of abstract machines insofar as they are built around variables and variations. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (92-93) Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of the Chomsky-Labov debate exemplifies a well-developed but perhaps under-emphasized aspect of their thinking — namely, their theory of […]

Deconstructing Cybernetics

Saturday, January 19, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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abstract machine / catastrophe / chaos / communication / conservatism / cybernetics / decentralization / derrida / distinction / exteriority / godel / humanity / machine / metaphysics / ontology / spencer-brown / spirit / writing

Notes on Derrida and Cybernetics Let us conjecture that the invention of the transistor — an auto-controllable circuit — indicates the attainment of a critical level of development in cybernetics, a “tipping point.” Then for writing the corresponding moment is the invention of the video camera, perhaps more precisely the photograph: now seeing is writing, literally marking. Visio-literature is the only kind that can ever exists for us today — even ancient literature is post-modern […]

Translation: Véronique Bergen’s Diagram of the Evolution of Deleuzian Concepts

Monday, November 5, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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A Thousand Plateaus / abstract machine / concept / Deleuze / diagram / Difference and Repetition / French Translation / Logic of Sense / ontology / Véronique Bergen

The following is a translation of a section containing a table of the evolutions of the names of the transcendental field and the operators of differenciating liaisons from L’Ontologie de Gilles Deleuze, Véronique Bergen. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001. 545-549. Original translation by Taylor Adkins 11/05/07.

Notes to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Chapters 1 and 2

Tuesday, October 23, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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abstract machine / Anti-Oedipus / Deleuze / desire / desiring machines / family / guattari / lacan / libido / machinic unconscious / molecularity / Schizoanalysis / subject-group / transversality

Anti-Oedipus 1: Desiring-Machines For every organ-machine, an energy machine (1). Schizophrenia and the time before the man-nature dichotomy/split (1). Nature lived as process of production (2). Oedipus presupposes a fantastic repression of desiring-machines (3). The schizophrenic experiences not nature, but nature as a process of production (3). Production is immediately consumption and a recording process, without any sort of mediation (4). The recording process and consumption directly determine production, but within the production process itself […]

Translation: Simondon, Completion of Section I, Chapter 1, The Individual and Its Physico-Biological Genesis

Friday, October 19, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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abstract machine / assemblage / autopoeisis / becoming / being / change / communication / complexity / differentiation / Disparation / formalization / French Translation / individuation / information / materiality / metastability / model / modularity / morphogenesis / morphology / ontogenesis / ontology / philosophy of science / production / self-actualization / Simondon / singularities / structure / system / technology / Untranslated Theory

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 […]

Machines, Morphogenesis and Complexity

Tuesday, October 16, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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abstract machine / atomism / autopoeisis / chaos / code / complexity / Deleuze / differentiation / digital space / evolution / form / individuation / modularity / molecularity / morphogenesis / network / self-organization / Serres / speed

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 […]

Machinic Autopoesis

Thursday, October 11, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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abstract machine / biology / cybernetics / form / information / model / ontology / structure / system / theory

Process In Mechanism and Biological Explanation [Maturana 1970], Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela argue that machines and biological forms are very closely related — so closely, in fact, that biologists can reasonably claim living systems are machines. This is not meant merely as a pedagogical metaphor, but rather as a rigorous analogy, which emphasizes important symmetries, and even better, expresses concisely specific experimental and theoretical aims. In what sense, then, are living systems machines? A […]