Fractal Ontology

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 which to evaluate [it].” (ATP 105) Thus the majority need not be in numerical majority; for majority supposes only the assumption of a “state of power and domination, not the other way around” — the standard measure, when it is assumed to be the standard, thereby becomes major. Minorities, on the other hand, are not determined by constants — they are not systems but subsystems, outsystems — seeds of potential, creative and created, crystals of becoming.

These considerations are deployed together in one of the most significant points in Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of linguistics, which is this: that grammar is a system of power primarily, not a prototype but a protocol, directly connected to an economy and a politics more primarily than to a network of syntagms and semantemes. Thus even though grammar cannot be presented as an invariant linguistic substructure, it nevertheless possesses singular structural features — political ones — namely, functioning as the medium of transmitting commands, “order-words.” Thus language is shaped directly by political and economic forces; it is a prerequisite for the individuals’ submission to social laws. “No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions.” (101)

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The essential is never perceived in sheer multiplicity or in first impressions.

Henri de Lubac

In Nature there is nothing contingent; all things have been caused by the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way.

Spinoza, Ethics

The wise person is free in two ways which conform to the two poles of ethics: free in the first instance because one’s soul can attain to the interiority of perfect physical causes; and again because one’s mind may enjoy very special relations established between effects in a situation of pure exteriority… The question becomes: what are these expressive relations of events?

Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense 169-170

It is no more desirable (if it is even possible — and there is no more absurd “if possible”!) to “liberate” the soul from fear than to “rescue” the body from suffering. As ever, appearances are certainly against us here: for terror is a kind of inertia which breaks analysis apart; it appears entirely negative, a sickness, a peculiarly “human” horror of the void. Lygophobia. (Freud called it a manifestation of separation anxiety.) The demand for certainty is part of the basic text of human nature. The will to truth is thus paradoxically a kind of poesis, a creative fire driving out the darkness. At the limit of metaphysical interpretation, light signifies pure love, it rips apart the bonds of meaning, it is pure signification itself, the voice or song of the universe — and the noisy soul responding. And it is with a second and far blacker paradox that counter-signification reaches a point of critical mass, where the absolute “material” of destructive terror — brought to an unbearable intensity by a fixated or excessive gaze, by a dangerous exposure (to noise, light…) — is transformed all at once into the positive, immanent criteria for science, that is: for a dangerous and powerful thinking of the real.

Thus at the deconstructed origin of analysis we find a deferral. It is not enough to say deconstruction must be deconstructed. We must be clear: analysis breaks and we desire this specifically. It is part of the text. It’s how literature begins. In psychological terms, we are always about to discover “it” was already broken. Exactly: where it was… But if there is a productive diagram of science itself, its constitutive disjunction may be witnessed in this joyous cruelty of overturning analysis: anti-philosophy, drawing finite boundaries, inventing counter-positions. Experiment! A quantum riot, metaphysical terrorism, a billion home-made atom bombs. It’s how science begins. We know it can be done, but is it enough? There is no answer to this question. You cannot know in advance whether or not an experiment will succeed. But here there is still much for philosophy to do — not say, for even in saying, philosophy still must do.

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Metaphysics beyond Psychoanalysis

0: Entryways

“What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?”
Lacan

“Lacan never pursues purely philosophical objectives.”
Badiou

Questions, not meanings, are forgotten. May we therefore at last refrain from inquiring what psychoanalysis means, or asking what it is supposed to signify? And, since this alone is clearly insufficient, could it also be possible to take a cautious step “backwards,” simply in order to ask: which psychoanalysis, and how does it work? Where, when, and how much is it thinking? Where and why does it forget (merging imperceptibly here with a mythical alien outside, or fading transparently there into an empirical illusion)? From what eerily formal abyss “must” the “truth” must be continuously salvaged? Why these specific fixations, abstract algorithms and “critical” meta-languages — and in what ways are these translated (and transformed) into applications as clinical practice?

The history of psychoanalysis is a torus, and offers few instances of non-paradoxical theoretical encounters. It is in this sense that Lacan’s project of critically deconstructing the “origins” of (post-Freudian) psychoanalysis could be said to follow analogically — or even metaphorically — from Heidegger’s project of ungrounding (Platonic) metaphysics via a “detour” through the Pre-Socratics. In a different but curiously parallel way, Deleuze’s distaste for — and now subtle, now overt subversion of — Lacan, especially his analysis of desire (bordering at times on a strange kind of “power struggle” within psychoanalysis not unlike Lacan’s own break with the analysts of his early career) can indeed be said to mirror Levinas’ tense and passionate struggle with Heidegger over the question of desire — which, not coincidentally, Heidegger also characterizes as structured around a central lack.

In terms of contemporary theory, Laruelle and Badiou’s anti- or non-philosophy could be said to present a similarly-effective overturning of literary-deconstructive methods — we find a deceptive model of this technique in the work of Derrida, and in a different sense, the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Badiou’s position could be baldly summarized as a critique of what is really a humanistic or “centralizing,” isolationist move within theory, which claims to be the opposite, or “de-centralizing” — while ancient philosophy suffered badly from a similar “axiomatic” illusion as well, it is especially modern thinkers whose theory is built starting from a promise (instead of a premise,) and so filled with convincing but misleading interpretations of facts (rather than taking a de-subjectivized scientific position capable of producing a rigorous analysis of the “facts” of the matter.) Laruelle expresses this “inhumanism,” or post-metaphysical materialism, particularly rigorously: only science is really capable of moving thought beyond the philosophical as such.

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In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze proposes what we may be permitted to term a differential phenomenology capable at last of setting mathematics and logic themselves upon a proper “ground” — that of difference, and multiplicity… Not only is it possible to overturn representation, but we can begin right away — if we immediately cease to encode relationships between singularities as identities, oppositions, analogies, and so on — but instead in terms of constitutive inequalities.

Deleuze’s project, as always, is pure affirmation without negativity or contradiction. Here he challenges all of us to affirm a Difference capable of constructing the very system which then cancels it — precisely by explicating it! — so that, strictly speaking, difference ought to be (and always will have been) inexplicable. What does this mean? How does this affirmation work?

Difference resists inclusion within the symbolic network which it produces as its destination and even “discovers” as its origin. Qualities, especially when taken as signs, present us with these same two faces. For on the one hand, they indicate “an implicated order of constitutive differences”; but on the other hand, the quality “tends to cancel out those differences in the extended order in which they are explicated.” (Difference and Repetition 22 It is also in this sense that signification is at once an origin and a destination (or directing agency, an “ordering” machine.) But the two functions are uneasily fused together: the destination denies the origin. Difference cancels itself by extending itself, covering itself with a quality. What happened? What is this uncanny “empirical” effect of qualitative distortion?

For Deleuze, “[t]he peculiarity of ‘effects,’ in the causal sense, is to have a perceptual ‘effect’ and to be able to be called by a proper name (Seebeck effect, Kelvin effect…), because they emerge in a properly differential field of individuation which the name symbolises. The vanishing of difference is precisely inseparable from an ‘effect’ of which we are victims.” (D&R 22 The unblinking (or “indifferent”) victims of a vanished Difference which nonetheless lives on, in itself, even as it is being evacuated, cancelled, and mutilated by its own explication. Deleuze returns again and again to the the two distinct “faces” of pragmatics, characterized by the fixation upon a particular “extensity” guaranteed by an illusory functionalization of difference (for example, the empirical or sensible as opposed to the transcendental.)

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[My translation follows. A particular difficulty of Deleuze's unique expressions here is that a verbal form of ‘delirium’ is often used in the original French and in its Italian rendition. I have used the word ‘hallucinate’ to translate ‘delire’ and related words, but have tried to keep the word ‘delirium’ and ‘delirious’ whenever possible.’]

Perhaps schizophrenia reveals something that comes to us in pieces, always transforming, constantly enough and everywhere. Don’t stop to be taken, kidnapped, dragged away. But from what?

It is always and only the father, like Schreber’s father. Schreber’s father, the sun and his father, the god and father, etc., etc.

This is what has always impressed me about schizophrenia; that, even in their misery and their pain, there is no shortage of humor.

It feels very dry to have to say this, to hear this spoken. They agree. They have, first of all, a strong desire to be popular, to make you happy [to be ‘cured’ to you.] Or they get angry, and they only want to be left in peace.

There was once a television program on schizophrenia in which a perfect schizophrenic asks for a cigarette. The psychiatrist, I don’t know why, she denied it to him. Understand, when you say things like “you hallucinate a sun, I find the sun and your father,” how you expect a schizophrenic to answer?

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Joe and I arrived in California on Wednesday for the conference on Badiou, Deleuze, and Whitehead concerning ontology and politics. On Thursday, Justin Clemens and Oliver Feltham (both translators of Badiou) gave a wonderful paper on a rapprochement between Deleuze and Badiou (focusing on the Logic of Sense and Being and Event–seemingly a strange synthesis at first). One of the juicier comparisons was made when Justin reminded us that Deleuze’s nonsense–that which says its own sense–is isomorphic to Badiou’s understanding of the event, which is a set that belongs to itself, thus violating (or acceding to) Russel’s paradox. You can check out the site for more details here.

In any case, Joe will be presenting his paper entitled “Ontology beyond Politics” tomorrow morning. An older draft of the paper has been filed in the archives in pdf and can also be viewed in its original post on the site. Just to make it immediately available, I will include it in this post as well. Here’s the link to a pdf version:
Politics Beyond Ontology.

I am only here to support Joe: so let’s hope that he kicks some ass tomorrow morning, takes name, and of course, never forgets to simultaneously chew bubble gum (unless he’s all out of it).

The following is an excerpt on the syntheses of the unconscious in Difference and Repetition from Véronique Bergen’s L’Ontologie de Gilles Deleuze, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001. 325-327. Original translation by Taylor Adkins on 11/05/07.

The three syntheses of the unconscious in the times developed in Difference and Repetition, the three “beyonds of the pleasure principle”[1] organizing bio-psychic life

“correspond to figures of repetition, which appear in the work of a great novelist: the binding, the ever renewed fine cord; the every displaced stain on the wall; the ever erased eraser. The repetition-binding, the repetition-stain, the repetition-eraser: the three beyonds of the pleasure principle. The first synthesis expresses the foundation of time upon the basis of a living present, a foundation which endows pleasure with its value as a general empirical principle to which is subject the content of the psychic life in the Id. The second synthesis expresses the manner in which time is grounded in a pure past, a ground which conditions the application of the pleasure principle to the contents of the Ego. The third synthesis, however, refers to the absence of ground into which we are precipitated by the ground itself: Thanatos appears in third place as this groundlessness, beyond the ground of Eros and the foundation of Habit” (Difference and Repetition, tr. Paul Patton, p. 114).

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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.

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The following are two entries from Francois Zourabichvili’s book La vocabulaire de Deleuze. Paris: Ellipses, 2003. Original Translation by Taylor Adkins 11/03/07.

Pre-individual Singularities

* We cannot accept the alternative which thoroughly compromises psychology, cosmology, and theology: either singularities already comprised in individuals and persons, or the undifferentiated abyss. Only when the world, teaming with anonymous and nomadic, impersonal and pre-individual singularities, opens up, do we tread at last on the field of the transcendental (LS 103).

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I’ve been visiting the massthink blog (populated by Ryan and Aless) for a couple of months now, but, as a bad reader, I failed to leave comments. I was thrilled not only with the content, but more so with the way in which these two have organized their site. I was inspired to see their text page (which encouraged me to put up the bibliography, still under construction) and by the way in which they described their project.

They way that they describe themselves and their differing styles and personalities reminds me of the different forces at play between Joe’s writing and my own. He studies math, computer science, and philosophy, while I come from a training in comparative literature, literary theory and philosophy. Though that is one of the more obvious contrasts.

I first found their site looking at material on Nietzsche. Their post on Nietzsche focused on Danto’s reading, though at the same time it was evident that the authors were widely read beyond this one reading. I think it was here that I could tell that massthink had a great deal in common with the work Joe and I have been doing here at fractal.

I didn’t know at the time that our friendly exchange would be more than a coincidence. In a show of friendship and brotherhood, these two have extended a gesture of respect to the work that has been done here. The posts that they have discussed are important not only for their content, but also as a difference in tone: the posts they discuss are Joe’s from before he and I began collaborating together, and I think that it’s important to see the changes that his writing has undergone over the two years he’s had this blog.

In any case, one usually keeps reading because of an inspiration to think, an ‘affect’ to start. Reading through their site earlier this week, I found two extremely enlightening posts: one on Deleuze, DeLanda, and Darwninism; the other on the hylomorph and the monster (identity). I could not tell the author of the texts, but I can note a different style and orientation of writing. The first text is expository, and follows a line of thought that traces through different understandings of theories of evolution (I love the emphasis on a change in relation among parts and not of the parts themselves as primary for evolution). This text is clearer, more concise and and at least as important as anything I’ve read on the topic (but don’t trust me, see for yourself). On the other hand, their text on the hylomorph and the monster had a different approach to the reader, a different call, almost an assurance to the reader to allow difference to play itself out, to dissolve the images of thought that plague us through psychic/social repression.

Of course, this is only a small selection of their posts. These two know their stuff–none of the rhetorical foreplay, none of the abstract regurgitation of concepts. This is real philosophy, not diluted but distilled so as to capture its essence. It’s stronger that way, and definitely has a better kick!

The following is an entry from Francois Laruelle’s Dictionnaire de la non-philosophie. Paris: Editions Kimé, 1998. Original translation by Sid Littlefield, 10/31/07.

Vision-in-One (One, One-in-One, Real)

Primary concept of non-philosophy, equal to “One-in-One” or the “Real”. What determines the theory of in-the-last-instance and the pragmatics of the Thought-World (“philosophy”). The vision-in-one is radically immanent and universal; it is the given-without-givenness of the givenness of the Thought-World.

Philosophy is the desire and oppression of the One, divisible or associated with division. The problemization of Being (Heidegger included) supposes this barred One without really thematizing it. Philosophies of the One (Plato, neo-Platonism, Lacan) suppose a final convertibility with Being based on the fact that Being is given a final objectivity, that is ordered by the criteria of Being or abstracted from them. All ‘thoughts of the One’ are still structured like that of metaphysics: They hold an ultimate bound between the metaphysics of the science of Being and the science of the One. The necessary disqualification of the One of the Greek from its empirical component, the one of the count or counting (Badiou), in an extreme point of conflict between Being and the One and the ‘death’ of this one. The philosophy that wishes to be post-metaphysical oscillates, in the best cases, between the end of Being and the end of the One, while not ceasing to honor metaphysics.

Non-philosophy enunciates a series of axioms on the One understood as vision-in-One and no longer as the desire of the One:

(1) The One is radical immanence, identity-without-transcendence, not associated with transcendence or division.

(2) The One is in-One or vision-in-One and not in-Being or in-Difference.

(3) The One is the Real in so far as it forecloses all symbolization (thought, knowledge, etc.)

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The individual is a chaos necessary to every political and social order, a chaos enveloped in a structural social machine. This chaos should be distinguished from a random distribution of intensities or an undifferentiated aggregate but instead should be thought of as overdetermined. From our point of view (against a flow of power that remains obscure in origin) this is precisely the problem that must be addressed according to the collective nature of the individual, including the individual’s own place in the social order at large.

From the other point of view, it is the individual that poses the problem to society—hence the horrifying solution of micromanagement wherein the individual-as-problem is solved according to algorithms that divide these ‘solutions’ to their respective function in the social body. And when we say body in this sense, we take the ‘solution-individual’ to mean precisely the transformation of the individual into a tool—the instrumental individual—that nevertheless, if we risk the metaphor, functions as a cell assigned to certain duties in relation to different organs (conceived as institutions directing molar quantities of power) linked to the Organism-State (the constituted Whole that literally exceeds its parts through its miraculation as surplus value, projecting a dominant image of repres(sive)entation). The problem with this view is at least twofold: first, the problematic of the individual cannot be solved from a hierarchical political position (without violence, even considered in terms of psychic/collective repression); and secondly, there are criteria upon which to decide where the Whole lies, because the Whole is precisely the illusion of the State as an entity or organism, when in fact the individual calls into question (if its problem is diagonally posed) the (de)stratification that a certain social body undergoes (through entropy and (planned) states of equilibrium).

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Logic of Sense: Preface

Here Deleuze begins by highlighting Carroll and the Stoics for their theory of events; he says that there is a marriage of language and the unconscious at work.

Paradoxes imply that sense is a nonexisting entity (xiii). Deleuze claims that the Stoics formed a new image of thought [how can this be linked to Difference and Repetition wherein Deleuze claims that it’s imperative to move beyond a certain dogmatic image of thought? Ultimately, in the preface Deleuze claims that Logic of Sense will attempt to develop a logical and psychological novel (xiv).

Series 1: Paradoxes of Pure Becoming

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D+G have reached the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I [This, of course, is preceded by similar assertions about the schizophrenic in Anti-Oedipus]. (3).
A book is an assemblage and a multiplicity:
One side of a machinic assemblage faces the state, which doubtless makes it a kind of organism, or signifying totality, or determination attributable to a subject; it also has a side facing a body without organs, which is continually dismantling the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities to pass or circulate, and attributing to itself subjects that it leaves with nothing more than a name as the trace of an intensity. What is the body without organs of a book? …We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge…Literature is an assemblage. It has nothing to do with ideology. There is no ideology and never has been (4).
This assertion resonates with what D+G write of earlier in Anti-Oedipus pg. 104—they will write there: “It is not an ideological problem…unconscious investments are made according to positions of desire and uses of synthesis, very different from the interests of the subject, individual or collective, who desires’ (104).
D+G insists upon ‘Stratometers, deleometers, BwO units of convergence. Not only do these constitute a quantification of writing, but they define writing as always the measure of something else. Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come (4-5).

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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 (4).
Production as process:
Production of production—actions and passions
Production of recording processes—of the distribution and of co-ordinates that serve as points of reference
Production of consumption—sensual pleasures, anxieties, and pain (4).
Man as the eternal custodian of the machines of the universe (4).
Schizophrenia (or the unconscious) does not distinguish between producer-product (5).
Desiring-machines are always binary machines (5). [Probably due to the co-existence of paranoic (repulsive) machines and miraculating (attractive) machines—in order to create the identifications of the celibate machine—more on this later.]
Productive or connective syntheses: and…and…and (5).
Flow-producing machines couple with organ-machines that interrupts the flow (5).
Desire couples flows, causes the currents to flow, flows itself, and breaks the flows (5).
The object presupposes the continuity of a flow; every flow causes the fragmentation of the object (6).
Schizophrenia (or the unconscious) also does not distinguish between product/producing (6).
Production is always something ‘grafted onto’ the product—desiring-production is the production of production (6).
Schizophrenic as universal producer (7).
Levi-Strauss’s bricolage and schizophrenia—the schizo shows an indifference to the tools at hand and the goal of the project; there is only the drive as anti-teleological principle of desire (7).
Bricolage works with whatever is at hand—a limited set of rules, and a finite and heterogeneous set of tools (7).
Product/producing unity allows for D+G to talk about “an enormous undifferentiated object” (7).
Nirvana and the view that it would be better if there had never been machines or connections (7).
The body suffers from being organized in a triangulated fashion (8).
The full BwO is the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable (8).
Desiring-machines only work when they break down and work continually by breaking down (8).
BwO is nonproductive but is produced as the identity of producing-product in connective synth (8).
BwO is the body without an image (8).
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Four Birds Mixed media on paper (Catheryn Austen)

Openness only comes in the imperceptible recesses of infection: A faceless love. (Reza Negarestani)

Michel Serres never fails to remind us of something simple and indispensable. It is that all relationships are founded upon noise. In the beginning, there is noise, not silence. Even the simplest words arrive much later; and, at any rate, our words are still noise. The din and clamor of the many is sometimes frightful; and Serres’ work can be singularly terrifying. But Serres’ reminder is highly rational, even a joyful reconsecration of science.

Serres delights in showing us old meanings of new words, and vice versa; but it particularly to this word, noise, and its French cognate, parasite, that he gives unique expressivity and sonorousness. One of the primary meanings of noise in his work is chaos: the pure multiplicity behind things, without any pre-existing order or organization. All our knowledge is an organization of unorganized noise; noise is being-in-itself. In this context noise can also mean static, a cross-signal or lawless irruption, witnessed in the chaotic permutations introduced by chance into a flow of information, perhaps even from another physical system entirely. Static can also mean stationary, the white noise which persists even in the stillness of non-existence: in this sense noise also stands for the ever-present background noise, the racket and din of human and inhuman machines, over which it is often necessary to speak loudly in order to make oneself heard. Noise means that no system is without turbulence for very long, that there is always chaos, multiplicity and deviation; in short, there is always a parasite, always background noise, always depth and darkness beyond order and disorder. No system is an island, without relations, above the sea; but there are islands of ordered relations upon an ocean of noise. The universe is turbulence, but — and this is the strange and subtle turn — the converse is not true: turbulence is not universal, but local. It is absolute and relative at once: the violent sea becomes calm, a top falls, an earthquake ends. Still there are always larger forces, larger closed systems tumbling into chaos. Every system is an image of a system free from turbulence, an abstract or virtual composition. But reality is always chaotic, always in minimal deviation from every possible model: everything is in motion; everything falls.
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Paper Proposal : Philosophy of Science

Information, Disparation and Affectivity: the Pre-Individual Field of Singularities in Simondon, Ruyer and Deleuze

On the importance of disparate series and their internal resonance in the constitution of systems, see Gilbert Simondon, L’individu et sa genese physico-biologique, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964, p. 20. (However, Simondon maintains as a condition the requirement of resemblance between series, or the smallness of the differences in play: pp. 254-7). [Gilles Deleuze. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia, 1994. fn. 25, p. 318.]

On depth, stereoscopic images and the ’solution of the antinomies,’ see Raymond Ruyer, ‘Le relief axiologique et le sentiment de la profondeur,’ Revue de metaphysique et de morale, July 1956. On the primacy of ‘disparateness’ in relation to opposition, see Gilbert Simondon’s critique of Lewin’s ‘hodological space’ in L’individu et sa genese physico-biologique, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964, pp. 232-4. [Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia, 1994. fn. 12, p. 330.]

Raymond Ruyer, La genese des formes vivantes, Paris: Flammarion, 1958. pp. 91 ff.: “The mystery of differenciation cannot be elucidated by making it the effect of differences in situation produced by equal divisions…”. Ruyer, no less than Bergson, profoundly analysed the notions of the virtual and actualisation. His entire biological philosophy rests upon them along with the idea of the ‘thematic.’ See Elements de psycho-biologie, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1946, ch. 4. [Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia, 1994. fn. 28, p. 328.]

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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.
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We should speak of a dialectics of the calculus rather than a metaphysics. By “dialectic” we do not mean any kind of circulation of opposing representations which would make them coincide in the identity of a concept, but the problem element in so far as this may be distinguished from the properly mathematical element of solutions. Following Lautman’s general thesis, a problem has three aspects: its difference in kind from solutions; its transcendence in relation to the solutions that it engenders on the basis of its own determinant conditions; and its immanence in the solutions which cover it, the problem being the better resolved the more it is determined. Thus the ideal connections constitutive of the problematic (dialectical) Idea are incarnated in the real relations which are constituted by mathematical theories and carried over into problems in the form of solutions (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia, 1994. p. 178.).

Following Lautman and Vuillemin’s work on mathematics, ’structuralism’ seems to us the only means by which a genetic method can achieve its ambitions. It is sufficient to understand that the genesis takes place in time not between one actual term, however small, and another actual term, but between the virtual and its actualisation–in other words, it goes from the structure to the incarnation, from the conditions of a problem to the cases of solution, from the differential elements and their ideal connections to actual terms and diverse real relations which constitute at each moment the actuality of time. This is a genesis without dynamism, evolving necessarily in the element of a supra-historicity, a static genesis which may be understood as the correlate of the notion of passive synthesis, and which in turn illuminates that notion. Was not the mistake of the modern interpretation of calculus to condemn its genetic ambitions under the pretext of having discovered a ’structure’ which dissociated calculus from any phoronomic or dynamic considerations? There are Ideas which correspond to mathematical relations and realities, others which correspond to physical laws and facts. There are others which, according to their order, correspond to organisms, psychic structures, languages, and societies; their correspondences without resemblance are of a structural-genetic nature. Just as structure is independent of any principle of identity, so genesis is independent of a rule of resemblance. However, an Idea with all its adventures emerges in so far as it already satisfies certain structural and genetic conditions, and not others. The application of these criteria must therefore be sought in very different domains, by means of examples chosen almost at random (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia, 1994. p. 183-84.).

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

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

The state cannot spontaneously create scientific assemblages any more than it can create poetry; the state struggles only with its habitat, its Other, its medium, never (or only in extreme cases) with itself. And in the end, nomadic science draws the state bloodhounds to its hide-out by its exotic odors. The nomads are not only killed formally and indifferently; they are annihilated precisely for their indifference to the state formalism. Nomadic signals hijack the royal message, forge the signature of the state; such floating signals are seeds, impressions of novel forms, sparks which sometimes inspire revolutions. Conventional science is quite effective at reincorporating these signals, as it is skillful at organizing prepared matter; but minor science contraverts every state by inventing new forms of matter, and just as easily a poet dreams up novel expressions.
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My last six posts have all been translations; they range from philosophy of science to paradigms for approaching and studying Nietzsche. I plan to continue working on translating Boudot’s work (including sections from three of his books on Nietzsche, featuring comparisons of Nietzsche with Bataille, Camus, and Bachelard); Ruyer’s work (Genesis of Living Forms, Cybernetics and the Origin of Information, and The Paradoxes of Consciousness and the Limits of Automatism); Guattari’s work (Schizoanalytic Cartographies; The Machinic Unconscious; and Psychoanalysis and Transversality); Laruelle’s work (Nietzsche contra
Heidegger; Beyond the Power Principle); Badiou’s (early) work (Theory of the Subject; Of Ideology); Simondon’s work (The Individual and Its Physico-Biological Genesis; Psychic and Collective Individuation; and
On the Mode of the Existence of Technical Objects); and Serres’s work (Hermes II, III, and IV; The Origins of Geometry).

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Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone, 1991.

Bergson on several occassions compares the approach of philosophy to the procedure of infinitesimal calculus: When we have benefited in experience from a little light which shows us a line of articulation, all that remains is to extend it beyond experience—just as mathematicians reconstitute, with the infinitely small elements that they perceive of the real curve, ‘the curve itself stretching out into the darkness behind them.’ In any case, Bergson is not one of those philosophers who ascribes a properly human wisdom and equilibrium to philosophy. To open us up to the inhuman and the superhuman (durations which are inferior or superior to our own), to go beyond the human condition: This is the meaning of philosophy, in so far as our condition condemns us to live among badly analyzed composites, and to be badly analyzed composites ourselves (Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism pg 27-28).

Deleuze’s project in Bergsonism is to render a systematic understanding of Bergson’s concepts in their interrelations. Of course, this book is an experiment in philosophical buggery, and so there is a clear Deleuzian ring to it. There is much in here that is strictly related to Deleuze’s project, but in itself it still retains a lot of theoretical value and stands as a concise and intriguing reading of Bergson. The first chapter on intuition as method lays out clearly Bergson’s project in three moves: (1) state and create problems; (2) discover the genuine differences in kind; (3) apprehend time in its reality as duration. To construct this method in its rigor, we must set out some rules as we go along.

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A word will suddenly reverberate in us and find too lingering an echo in cherished, old ideas; an image will light up and persuade us outright, abruptly, and all at once. In reality, a serious, weighty word, a key word, only carries everyday conviction, conviction that stems more from the linguistic past or from the naivety of primary images than from objective truth…All description nucleates in this way and collects about centres that are too bright. Unconscious thought gathers around these centres–these nuclei–and thus the mind is introverted and immobilised. –Gaston Bachelard, Formation of the Scientific Mind

In this work Bachelard theorizes a pedagogical psychoanalysis that will attempt to reinstate the sense of the problem in science and remove any unconscious valorizations that occur through the development of scientific knowledge. The sense of the problem is at the forefront of Bachelard’s project because he believes that all knowledge must be an answer to a question (24-25). Moreover, the conservative instinct takes a stunting grip on science insofar as it becomes self-satisfied with the solutions it has already established. These solutions are the same platitudes that teachers and textbooks command us to memorize. A psychoanalysis of the scientific mind is called upon when epistemological obstacles encrust knowledge that is not questioned.

In fact, this is Bachleard’s main thesis: knowledge becomes overcoded with affective images that reduce the efficacy of thought by burdening it with so many coefficients of values. This instructs us on a difference between the historian of science and the epistemologist: the former considers the errors of a previous mode of thought to still constitute facts insofar as they entail real investments and beliefs. The latter, however, proceeds to link facts to a system of ideas that can show how these errors harbor a specific power of the problematic insofar as they represent counter-thoughts. Thus Bachelard believes that truly scientific knowledge always mobilizes its forces against previous knowledge.

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Fractal Cow is made by Gabor Csordas and Gabor Papp and can be found at http://www.mndl.hu/works/fractalcow.

Hypothesis in Process Philosophy

Abstract

It seems that we experience the world: but beyond this, what more can be said? Can we hypothesize the abyssal and incorporeal depths of the origin of social desire, and could description perhaps reach even farther? In this paper, my goal is to provide a reading of the work of Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze in light of present sociopolitical conditions. I stress that we should see conventional ontology as a social machine which functions by division, and in this it operates in a precisely opposite way from a political logic of (just) distribution. If universalism would actually imply a transcendent origin of social order, we must learn to do without the hypothesis. I argue that the future must be sought immanently, as a process of utopian restoration. Tomorrow’s truth is to be constructed by our hands or not at all.

Ontology has a new goal and new project in the twenty-first century. How do we think the relation of subjects to events without transcendence? How do we organize the field of social intensities without division and repressing desire? How can we accelerate distribution, and intensify healthy and potent forces of social change? This paper aims to provide a new kind of mapping of the social field, pointing towards a space for thought where ontology can be seen as secondary to metaphysics. Deleuze writes that “politics precedes being,” so metaphysics must clarify what to ontology is indiscernible — the lack produced by social and conceptual division — and recognize this divisive operation not as productive of an immanent equality, but in fact a transcendent subjugation.

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“Our quarrel can be formulated in a number of ways. We could approach it by way of some novel questions such as, for example: how is it that, for Deleuze, politics is not an autonomous form of thought, a singular section of chaos, one that differs from art, science and philosophy? This point alone bears witness to our divergence, and there is a sense in which everything can be said to follow from it.” –Alain Badiou^[1]

“Freedom, and by the way, what Freedom? ‘Subject-group,’ Freedom as Subject. Deleuze and Guattari don’t hide this much: return to Kant, here’s what they came up with to exorcise the Hegelian ghost.” –Alain Badiou^[2]

“It definitely makes sense to look at the various ways individuals and groups constitute themselves as subjects through processes of subject-ification: what counts in such processes is the extent to which, as they take shape, they elude both established forms of knowledge and the dominant forms of power. Even if they in turn engender new forms of power or become assimilated into new forms of knowledge. For a while, though, they have a real rebellious spontaneity. This is nothing to do with going back to ‘the subject,’ that is, to something invested with duties, power, and knowledge. One might equally well speak of new kinds of event, rather than processes of subjectification: events that can’t be explained by the situations that give rise to them, or into which they lead.” –Gilles Deleuze^[3]

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Where are the abysses? But they are already swarming: through the lines of others’ faces and in the depths of spaces, in reflections and in distortions, flowing over one another within the black holes through which subjectivity escapes. An abyss swarms because it is always consuming: it is the earth itself, an autopoeitic unity of timeless forces and endless devourings. The terrifying abyss of nonsense is fulfilled in the floating signifier — not in the pure ‘being’ which speaks, but in the machinic mixture of surfaces and the self-destruction of the depths. Significations are yielded by dynamic enunciative assemblages, or precosmic abstract machines. Sense is so fragile: because it is founded upon nonsense. God, the world, and the self are all surface effects: they transcendently anchor sense, give a predetermined sense to themselves. They are their own guarantee–which is precisely why we have to trace beyond the surface.

Language does not possibilize itself: the world of incorporeal effects, or surface effects, makes language possible. This world is a distinction which allows speech: grounded only by pure events which wait upon us as we wait upon them, living only inside the language which expresses them. Secondarily only does language attract itself onto bodies as qualities. “Sense brings that which expresses it into existence, and from that point on is pure inherence, it brings itself to exist, within that which expresses it.” (166, 23rd series Logic of Sense) Sense is light, of the surface, a tracing between surfaces, an interface between subspaces, a biunivocalization: “Language is rendered possible by the frontier which separates it from things and from bodies, including those which speak.” (ibid.) Sense maps the fractal boundaries between the surface of the real and the virtual, and in this way functions as a primary transversal operator: affect, not the modes of existence of a body, but its nonsense: the black holes of sensation, the molecular flux of bodies and mixtures. A primary transcoding erupts: a hyper-organization becoming co-linearized, either in order words or DNA, which express the conditions of presentation– the possibility of a saying or the annihilation of a representation.

But how is the surface organized, and how does the chaotic machinery of the depths work? The abyssal world of incorporeal effects can be seen to belong to another order of time: one of bodies, blockages, durations and causes — the pure present, God; but there is another order, always already passed but always to come, the other time which is incorporeal, “the pure empty form of time,” stretching out infinitely in a straight line in either direction, the truth of time, which has unwound its circle and straightened itself up. This is the process of what Deleuze calls counter-actualizations: “Counter-actualization is nothing, it belongs to a buffoon when it operates alone and pretends to have the value of what could have happened. But, to be the mime of what effectively occurs, to double the actualization with a counter-actualization, the identification with a distance, like the true actor and dancer, is to give the truth of the event the only change of not being confused with its inevitable actualiztion.” (161 ibid) The time of the event, of the incorporeal affect, is the time of counter-actualization: taking the event and considering it at a distance, ‘making sense of it.’ So when the order of the surface is itself cracked, an ‘inevitable’ war machine arises to maintain order: but ought the surface be kept from breaking apart — or should its fragmentation be accelerated?

Ethics is not only a science of brokenness, a toplogy of lack or fractions or strata… but a science of molecular integration, in short, of community. A first-order ethics presents an algebra of multipilicity and faciality simultaneously. Observer and observed find themselves, surprisingly, to be in the exact same position– that is, of having to encounter the other. This is the profound reason an ethical algebra is attainable. The question is not: when ought we to extend the abyssal crack which is at once the subject, the marks and punishments upon the subject, and the whole depth of the social field? The question is much closer to asking: when does militant action possibilize itself? It is as when Deleuze asks: “How do we stay on the surface without staying on the shore?” (157 ibid.) While we forever try to prevent the crack from forming, we cannot subject any evolving process to axioms: we must accept the radical breaks of evolution while maintaining vigorously the position of life. We must recognize that mending a break is much more complex than cleaning a stain. In fact, healing is not where our attention is usually focused; it is at the margins where cracks erupt, “in people ready to destroy themselves,” who would prefer death to the false health of a broken society. Even more: without these cracks thought could not occur. “The eternal truth of the event is grasped only if the event is inscribed in the flesh.” (160 ibid)

So what is this double-abyss whereby we become but only through struggle, this “painful actualization”? But already more important is how to reverse it, how to counter-actualize it — which means remaining at a distance. “It is to give to the crack the chance of flying over it’s own incorporeal surface area, without stopping, at the bursting within each body; it is, finally, to give us the chance to go farther than we would’ve believed possible to the extent that the pure event is each time imprisoned forever in its actualization, counter-actualization liberates it, always for other times.” When Dionysus speaks, he speaks from the undifferentiated ground of future generations. Alienation can be turned into revolutionary exploration. There is no nothing, no abyss, no undifferentiated ground: it is not a choice between full organization or chaos. Rather, there is a chaosmos: the abyss is swarming with difference. The ‘night where all cows are black’ is doubly a lie: if the bovine are not phosphorecscent, this is no fault of Being. We must trace the ‘other’ structure in order to go beyond phenomenology; but first, we must trace the ‘sense-structure,’ or power itself. We must trace a path beyond a grammar, beyond a pure logic of sense, to an ontology of nonsense. Language is an agrammatical, nonsyntactical, impersonal, pre-individual abstract machine. But language acts on bodies: it is only the affects and mixtures of bodies, the conjuration and coordination of surfaces, a splicing and fragmenting of structure and form. Language is thus always both at once, and sense is re-absorbed continually into the gaping depths… Self-destruction cannot always be counter-actualized: the only way nature operates is against itself. Anything is possible: not only that the contradictions are real, but that the real contradicitons are not merely for a laugh!