Fractal Ontology

Why is every event a kind of plague, war, wound or death? Is this simply to say that there are more unfortunate than fortunate events? No, this is not the case since the question here is about the double structure of every event. With every event, there is indeed the present moment of its actualization, the moment in which the event is embodied in a state of affairs, an individual, or a person, the moment we designate by saying “here, the moment has come.” The future and the past of the event are evaluated only with respect to this definitive present, and from the point of view which embodies it. But on the other hand, there is the future and the past of the event considered in itself, sidestepping each present, being free of the limitations of a state of affairs, impersonal and pre-individual, neutral, neither general nor particular, eventum tantum… It has no other present than that of the mobile instant which represents it, always divided into past-future, and forming what must be called the counter-actualization.

…It is at this mobile and precise point, where all events gather together in one that transmutation happens: this is the point at which death turns against death; where dying is no longer the negation of death, and the impersonality of dying no longer indicates only the moment when I disappear outside of myself, but rather the moment when death loses itself in itself, and also the figure which the most singular life takes on in order to substitute itself for me.

Deleuze, Logic of Sense 151-3

Does objectivity, whose harshness and universal power is revealed in war, provide the unique and primordial form in which Being, when it is distinguished from image, dream and subjective abstraction, imposes itself on consciousness? Is the apprehension of an object equivalent to the very moment in which the bonds with truth are woven?

Levinas

I will not say that the disaster is absolute; on the contrary, it disorients the absolute. It comes and goes, errant disarray, and yet with the imperceptible but intense suddenness of the outside, as an irresistible or unforeseen resolve which would come to us from beyond the confines of decision.

Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

Levinas begins the preface to Totality and Infinity by asking whether war is not the most serious objection to the lucidity — the sanity — of ethics. For war robs our institutions and obligations of their eternity; it is the concrete suspension of the ethical. In war morality vanishes. The violence of war does not only affect us as the most real, the most palpable fact, but as the very truth of the real. Thus it is not just one of the ordeals morality lives. War renders morality derisory, rescinding its imperatives for the interim. Politics, winning at any cost, is enjoined as the very exercise of reason itself — opposing itself to morality as philosophy to naivete.

Fragments of Heraclitus are unnecessary to show that being reveals itself as war to philosophical thought. Reality rends the words that dissimulate it. War is produced as the pure experience of being, cracking the veils which covered its nudity. The ontological event of war is mobilization, a casting-into-motion of beings once anchored in identity. The trial by force is the test of the real. Yet the violence of war does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating people, but in interrupting their continuity — forcing them to play roles in which they can no longer recognize themselves.

People are made to betray not only commitments but their own substance, and made to carry out actions that destroy every possibility for action. “Not only modern war but every war employs arms that turn against those who wield them.” War produces and establishes an order from which nothing and no one can keep their distance. Nothing remains outside. War does not manifest exteriority, the other as other; it destroys the identity of the same. The vision of being glimpsed in war is “totality,” a vision-in-one which dominates Western philosophy.

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Responsibility is what first enables one to catch sight of and conceive of value.
Levinas, Otherwise Than Being 123

Beyond the question of being and non-being, language is not the event — but rather a process of assembling unformed and unspecified elements, an abstract machinics which imagines new forms for itself by correlating the various distinct orders of reality with a plane of consistency in which a unified vision becomes possible — in short uncovering the infinite possibilities of the event. But this apparition of the event in its infinity would be only terror, the dark depth in which all mixtures are possible — and nothing is outlawed — were it not for the ambiguity of silence, the “not-yet” which the event, the “given” or gift, makes possible, and which makes possible the infinite time of cohumanity.

In speaking, reality opens itself up to an order without signification or concept, lost neither in the depths or heights but in the very shape of the world, the surface itself, a topological mode or order of being issuing neither in sound or light but in an idea given me by the other, the gift of language. In expression being can become free. Language is the discovery not only of novelty but justice itself; the enjoyment of discovery is essentially social. The event is not revelation but a secret apology, a map of the vortex. Turbulence is lucidity.

Black holes are everywhere, and this prohibited prohibition permits everything: the torsion of language disarticulates the tension of the soul. Beyond the face there is a paradoxical and two-sided barrier, an apparition which interrupts the symbolic order of discourse, as though by a lateral or diagonal movement between the signified and the non-signified. By an astounding finesse, speech uncovers the world as a lesson or donation.

Debt and faith are born simultaneously. Language is justice — a gift — only when it sheds its anonymity to become universal, not by inventing a world-beyond-the-world, but by reconciling us to one another. It calls us to hear a there-is rustling behind the void.

Hence the notion of event correlates at least three distinct orders of relationship between possibilities: a relative-absolute conjuncture uniting singular events and possible worlds; an absolute disjuncture prohibiting certain events from certain worlds; a trans-evental function sweeping up worlds and events.

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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. Could there be a courage without cruelty, and a pure joy devoid of violence? Terror, like joy, paralyzes, breaks reason apart — it distracts with a simulation. Not the void, but the unformed, is the origin of sorcery. We admit the dimension of the terror of the inhuman appears entirely negative, a sickness — a peculiarly “human” horror of the unknown. 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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Events are volcanic. The event opens upon an outside, a beyond, a resonant and enigmatic depth. Events move the world, releasing free and untamed vibrations within and without us. They place being into relation with exteriority. But how does evental resonance work?

When the new breaks free it is almost like it suddenly becomes “permitted” to us to learn to see all over again. Perhaps it would be better to say: we are allowed to learn to feel all over again. Events never fail to connect up with an outside; they are erupting continually from underneath those powerful, serious and “grounding” forces which served to maintain the distance, to suppress the joyous escape of the event.
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Caspar David Friedrich, Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon (1824)

On The Origin of Duration

(Notes towards a “Genealogy” of Time)

Time is invention, or it is nothing.

Henri Bergson

Time is a stutter, a clue, a signal from beyond which comes from within. The concept “temporality” breaks itself, already expresses divergence, it forever escapes our control.

The flow of time outruns itself, it is always diachronous, bringing thought straight back to its origin, to the quality without quantity, to an intensity issuing neither in number nor form, but rather in pure expressivity itself, in the depth and fullness of experience. Memory is the form of this recurrence, through the continuous variation of matter along certain axes of symmetry, the flowing solution of a complex problem of folding events, unfolding new durations.

Becoming is a transmission received in convoluted mazes, actualization is labyrinthine: not only a million decisions, but a million ideas — and so a million qualities, varieties and dimensions of time, tucked away and tiny, alive in the cracks between the problems and the idea, between memory and the future, waiting to be explored.

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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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Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundations of Universalism. Trans. Ray Brassier. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.

Badiou starts off his book with an interesting definition of the fable:

A ‘fable’ is that part of a narrative that, so far as we are concerned, fails to touch on any Real, unless it be by virtue of that invisible and indirectly accessible residue sticking to every obvious imaginary (4).

Thus Badiou asserts that Paul reduces the Christian narrative to the singular element of fabulation, “with the strength of one who knows that in holding fast to this point as real, one is unburdened of all the imaginary that surrounds it” (4-5).

This seems like a good way for Badiou to preclude any question of the supposed myths surrounding Christianity. Badiou is atheist, but in his reading of Paul he strictly excludes this from affecting his interpretation. In fact, one could say he suspends or brackets off this part of his perspective in order to forestall any skepticism that might encounter Paul along the way of his enunciation of the Christ event.

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Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Form of Time and Chronotope in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: UTP, 1981. 84-258.

I apologize ahead of time for the informality of this post, but “Form of Time and Chronotope in the Novel” is an incredible piece of theory, and it’s a shame that it’s size will prevent many readers from engaging with it fully. Thus the need for some hardcore notes.

Bakhtin’s chronotope is all about the relations and implications of space-time. For Bakhtin, the chronotope “defines genre and generic distinctions,” which may explain his approach throughout the essay as well as Todorov’s own interest in Bakhtin (84-85). If we can think Bakhtin with Bergson, the chronotope can be considered a material assemblage of images with a duration that contracts them into a volume. Analyzing the various forms of chronotope leads to producing a problematics of narrative types.

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Identity Project (Skull Lab), oil on old silkscreen frames (February / March 2006)

What is the relation between experience and identity? Clearly, a purely logical account of identity cannot lay claim to our ‘experience’ of identity, only its most formal aspects. Even an ontological account of identity, identity as collection of experiences or even identity as a pure cognitive event, would again demonstrate only the tautological function of identity (for example, agent A is that entity which experiences ‘being-agent-A’.) Like the tangled hierarchies implicit in the cogito, the ontological perspective aims to resolve at a higher position than it began: it seeks to make decisions based on a total comprehension, which is to be accomplished by a rigorous division. We say that logic studies this same schism, but algebraically rather than differentially. Yet a profound question remains silent: why is the subject missing from our experiential space? Where has identity gone?

It is to Alain Badiou’s credit that we now think the relation of a subject to an event as essentially multiple. But this same principle undermines the mathematical principle of continuity upon which we must base any ontological analysis of a ‘system’ of events. Even if we approach identity naively, as meaning a “belonging in a certain way to a certain state of affairs,” we cannot thereby functionally account for its continuity (a subject still maintaining its identity despite, even perhaps because of her transpositions, or non-continuously varying degrees-of-belonging.) We already see that we have need for a more complicated algebraic structure, one which at least allows for division into partial membership classes. The very nature of equivalence depends fundamentally on this division into ‘similar’ sets.

Furthermore, the fact that inclusion itself is already an ontological division demands further explanation. For example, an identity cannot be ‘induced’ from the situation by the simple observation (or negotiation) which decides that such-and-such belongs to the state of affairs, or does not. In reality, we cannot rigorously establish the existence of the void or the multiple from a pure induction. Rather, even induction depends on a rigorous subdivision of the One until this operation approaches its ‘vulgar’ limit (of non-accuracy, of meaning ‘nothing’.) So when we say this ‘limit’ (zero) belongs to every set, even to itself, we mean that induction (the operation-as-limit) has meaning only when the situation its observes is already understood as meaning ‘nothing.’ Hence the infallibility of the inductive process; it is already a “transductive” tautology! So ‘identity’ (as singularity) refers only to the void’s self-belonging (by subdivision into n classes of varying degrees of ‘belonging’…)

We can of course use induction to demonstrate that the endless process of the self-division of the void will “eventually” produce a pure distinction, a tautological “A is A (and not B)” which, by being so utterly commonplace, completely escapes attention. Distinction masquerades as some sort of absolute truth-event, a pure objective identity. We claim to the contrary that the void is never self-identical, that it never belongs to itself or anyone else. In fact, the power of the void is not ‘activated’ by its emptiness but rather the mathematical intuition of the operator, the one who utilizes the void in order to reconstruct a shrinking remainder of the ‘original’ existential-schematic, again only of this ‘layer’ of being. Thus, we claim that this operation of division cannot in fact account for the reciprocal yet asymmterical relation between experience and identity.

Propositions

(1) Ontology is the geometry of assemblages, and logic the topology of evolving surfaces.

(2) The face is the ultimate object of political violence, or counting.

(3) Politics precedes being.

Axiom I: The face is an abstract political machine.

Proof: Faciality is the enigmatic source of radical freedom, the paradigmatic social assemblage. But in the face we also find the primary form of education, even of confidence — a critical power, and a critical powerlessness. Since the deployment of an ontological framework is always an operation, facialization is to functionalize, to become-abstract and even become-machine. Thus the question of sense becomes: how does our belief-desire constellation gain its apparent autonomy– or conversely, whence emerges the face’s power of making sense, of teaching, of bestowing confidence and trust? More simply, we quickly see this question is also: are freedom and power only to refer to social assemblages, in short, to particular historical spaces (and faces)?
But we can still conceive of a yet more primordial break and flow to sociality. Where the state-machine encounters the war-machine, we find the first true encounter. To be certain it is not the face, but rather the interface which is to be read as the immediate experience, a direct encounter with the overflowing infinity of being’s being. Thus the ontologically transversal encounter must be understood as unleashing the pure flow of social desire and belief, as unravelling or bifurcating the very medium of sociality. The inter-face is the mode of becoming two at once — thus also the primary machination.

Corollary: Infinity now appears as the impossible smoothing of an already ‘pre-stratified’ encounter, a transcendent light encountered as one approaches the exterior limit of being’s being. The dimension opened up by the face is one of a radical but immanent alterity, the overdetermined prerequisite, or becoming-in-motion of a state-signifiying machine.

Lemma I The infinity of the face is the only possible ethical criterion.

Proof: There is no ethics beyond the face, beyond the content or source of a self-coordinating vitality. Indeed the face is the very origin of radical social molecularity. Thus there is politics only behind the face, that is, between segments of responsibility-distribution. Political intensity is invested where it will produce affects and counter-actualizations in the social body– the very primordial molecular forms which structure, for example, facial expressions.
So the political comes before the face, but is always and immediately re-facialized. Can we derail or delay this moment of reification? But the political question would still always be: what is not shown? What lies behind the surface? The surface remains the whole of the ethical, the depths and heights already an ontological breach of the immanent revelation in the face of the other.

Corollary: Hence the vigor of dialectic involved within the political process as well as by its commentators. Yet dialogue is not the essential form of the political, but of the ethical. The form of the political is secrecy– the anonymous universal. A political system is built not by institutions but secret phrases, passwords, which magically transform the everyday into the eternal. The ‘dirty secret’ of politics is that it’s structure is inherently religious, indeed overtly sexual: the separation of church and state is no more than a slogan, a sort of geometric imbalance in a unified social energy field. We can take as a classic example the de-facializing authoritarian power source. The fulcrum of power is always an analogous point of radical divergence: we consider the full extent of social and biological ‘accomplishments’ to be the starting point of revolution, as witnessed in, for example, the constructed separation of genders, sexual orientations, political parties, social classes, etc.

Axiom II Therefore any ontology of sense would have to be able to distinguish between ideologies, and even to indicate where ideology is irrelevant: thus, such an ontology would be more like an ontology of nonsense. The aim of such a project must be to critically analyze process of the evolution of the political, before it questions the event of the political as such (or the molar and undifferentiated being of the political conditions.)

Proof: Political events create the spaces they act upon; the ‘pure’ political event would only alter the very topology of the political universe, for example, to open a new space for public enjoyment, or to close off a space for privacy. The question of an ontology of sense reduces the question to self-observation, the genesis of hiding away: for example, this division between the hidden and the visible could be read as a tension between the geometry (or grammar) of sense and the algebra or topology of the conditions of the event.
Perhaps more simply, there cannot be an ontology of sense per se because events are meta-logical interfaces which transcode energy. The ontology itself is an event, it is an oscillator or transducer–and thus it follows from the political which conditions and energizes it. There are only ever ontologies of nonsense: the conditions of the political are never stable, even for the serial time of contiguous moments. But the temporality of the political attains to an imperceptible time, as though from a cosmic energy-source. Thus singular, historically-contingent unities charade as both one and infinity: so the law manifests and miraculates itself as pure infinite judgment, born of an alternate temporality, perfect assemblages of an ‘eternal’ time.

Corollary: Thus we can understand the autogenesis of sense and sexuality at once. For sense partakes of yet a third order of temporality, as an interface between evolving forms and static forms. The flow is reciprocal: we should try as hard as we can to view sense as a kind of radically comprehensible mediation between the (infinite-dimensional) temporality of the law and the cartography (or four-dimensional tensor geometry) of bodily affects. Thus the categorizers of being’s being always miss the encounter. For sense is already the first permeable membrane, the mending of a gap, not the void but a breaking and recomposing. Sense is an intermediation, an interface, a transimulation: the sense event happens within, or between two layers or stages: sensitive zones, sensual coordinations, sensible conjugations.
This break is sexuality, or the real of the sexual encounter. A contact interwoven with non-contact, an infinite reflective image-density, in short: a distance more precious than contact. This infinitesimal or pure difference between surfaces mirrors the abyss of the depths of bodies, but spectrally, transcendentally, vocally — it engenders the very production of sociality, even perhaps of light itself. For there is a face before being and the void. Neither God, the Universe, nor Nature is silent–why, then, should we fall quiet before the very specters which shape and haunt our world, which speak through static? Why should we not sing with the boundless chaos just behind the glittering splendor of exteriority? We would rather howl than fall silent: for the true danger of a critical mass is never in relation to the social order which it would threaten to fragment, but only in relation to its own trajectory of escape.

Axiom III: Just as politics precedes ontology, an ‘ontology of sense’ would be a map of the singular points and vortexes of the process of social abstraction, or the tracing of flows, of machinic and virtual surplus-values.

Proof: It should now be clear that this is true because no event is possible on its own. Events are subjects in an autometric space, or a radically extrinsic geometry: events are possible only when compossible with every other event in their (pseudo)logical space.

Corollary: This also means subjects are events within an autopoetic space, or radically intrinsic rhizome: the pure difference between the event and itself is a minimal cut or hole which stitches the interface back onto historical praxis.