Fractal Ontology

Flow.

There are no words, only silence; no silences, only words.

It’s not as bad as you think.

It’s worse.

There is no beginning which is not also an end.

The fire rages on, infinitely. Beyond time.

Above the waves. Can you hear them? Singing? So softly, like angels’ whispering secrets to us. In silence. A broken flaw in the scheme, the impossible number. Ten equals one million.

One equals Zero.

A flock of birds.

Reality is ideal, and ideas real.

Time is winding itself back; we’re wandering through forest trails, sinking into the moon. Foot in the desert, walking back to shore. Awake, alive, burning alive. Broken. Whole.

Freedom is — cruelty.

A little love goes a long way. Truth bends, but it is unbreakable. Fact?

Believe without fear.

Stand.

Worship with reverence, pray in silence. Close your eyes. Begin to dream. Let the fever slip over you. A million words, a million feelings. Thoughts, ideas, dreams, fantasies, desires. Dreams. Dreams. Cancellations. Waking. Time. Lost. Again. Feel the frames, the darkness sliding over you. Your face: the world. The broken are broken, the lost. The lost.

Open your eyes. Awake to your dreams.

Waking to fire.
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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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Aristotle and Light
Contemplation, Activity and Happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics

For while the whole life of the gods is blessed, and that of men too in so far as some likeness of such activity belongs to them, none of the other animals is happy, since they in no way share in contemplation. Happiness extends, then, just so far as contemplation does, and those to whom contemplation more fully belongs are more truly happy, not as a mere concomitant but in virtue of the contemplation; for this is in itself precious. Happiness, therefore, must be some form of contemplation.

Aristotle

What is reason? Aristotle tries many times to answer this question; but perhaps most vivid and penetrating among his responses is the spiritual “answer” he offers in the conclusion of the Nicomachean Ethics. There we find Aristotle claiming that the exercise of human reason cultivates ‘something’ in the human animal which is the “best and most akin” to God (1179a11). God loves and honors those who love and honor reason: those who “care for the things that are dear to them” and act “both rightly and nobly” (1179a14). In this sense the philosopher is dearest to God (1179a17) and is the one who “will presumably also be the happiest,” moreso — potentially, anyway — than any other (1179a18).

Why may we presume the philosopher’s life to be happiest? Even assuming he were to possess the virtues attendant upon a cultivated exercise of reason, does this ensure him a happy life, even the happiest of lives? Aristotle repeatedly acknowledges the serious difficulties barring the way to human happiness, perhaps most importantly our need for external sustenance. (It seems clear to Aristotle that it would be difficult to contemplate anything but food if you are starving — thus leisure, freedom from activity, is an essential requirement for contemplation.) Yet in this respect, too, the life of the philosopher is superior, even to other men of virtue, since his virtues require neither money nor power in order to be recognized.

Indeed, the philosopher’s contemplation may even be hindered by the sorts of conditions and resources which allow other kinds of natures the opportunity to exercise their highest virtue — money for the liberal man, power for the brave man, a tempting hint for the temperate man, and so on (1178a28). Moreover, despite the human need to attend to the health of our bodies, “we must not think that the man who is to be happy will need many things or great things, merely because he cannot be supremely happy without external goods; for self-sufficiency and action do not involve excess, and we can do noble acts without ruling over earth and sea; for even with moderate advantages one can act virtuously (this is manifest enough; for private persons are thought to do worthy acts no less than despots–indeed, even more); and it is enough that we should have so much as that; for the life of the man who is active in accordance with virtue will be happy.” (1179a11)
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“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 signifiance for itself. “Behind” statements and semioticizations there are only machines, assemblages and movements of deterritorialization that cut across the stratification of the various systems and elude both the coordinates of language and of existence…

A Thousand Plateaus 148

The world is segmented, stratified, breaking or already broken-up: what happened, what is happening? What crosses over, releasing free, untamed intensities as it travels along the intermediary zones? What is it which is just now passing through — beyond, behind, between — these lines? How do these lines — and always bundles of lines, fibres — work? A question of codes, partitions, signal-sign networks: are these lines of forced motion (interpretation) or rather lines of free variation (experimentation)? “The mixed semiotic of signifiance and subjectification has an exceptional need to be protected from any intrusion from the outside.” (ATP 179) A single expressive substance precludes the development of nomadic machines — truth, God, the Earth, are not “allowed” to have an outside! Do we think we understand this “allowed”? What happened? But already in order to translate we must achieve an expressive unification, yet this by no means guarantees that the language we thus arrive at conveys a message: “You will never know what just happened, or you will always know what is going to happen…” (ATP 193)

All becoming are molecular — not objects or forms easily recognized from science, habit or experiences — and in this sense “unknowable,” at least from the outside. Are human beings the same way? Is there no relation of resemblance between the woman and becoming-woman, the child and becoming-child? “All we are saying is that these in-dissociable aspects of becoming-woman must first be understood as a function of something else: not imitating or assuming the female form, but emitting particles that enter the relation of movement and rest, or the zone of proximity, of a micro-femininity, in other words, that produce in us a molecular woman…” (ATP 275) The question is not about representing a woman, producing an accurate imitation of a particular molecular multiplicity — but of making something that has to do with that multiplicity enter into composition with the speeds of the image. In becoming we discover our own proximity to the molecular: “That is the essential point for us: you become-animal only if, by whatever means or elements, you emit corpuscles that enter the relation of movement and rest of the animal particles, or what amounts to the same thing, that enter the zone of proximity of the animal molecule.” (275)

Can we “make” the world a becoming? Only if we reduce ourselves to “one or several” abstract lines can we find our own proximities, our own zones of indiscernibility; that is, our own passageway to a becoming-everywhere, a becoming-everybody: “The Cosmos as an abstract machine, and each world as an assemblage effectuating it.” (ATP 280) Eliminate everything exceeding this moment; but don’t forget to include within the moment everything which it includes in its turn. We ourselves slip into the moment, which slips transparently into the impersonal, the indiscernible. “One is then like grass: one has made the world, everybody/everything, into a becoming, because one has made a necessarily communicating world, because one has suppressed in oneself everything that prevents us from slipping between things and growing in the midst of things… Saturate, eliminate, put everything in.” (ATP 280)

To see the universal and all-pervading spirit of Truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest of creation as oneself. And a man who aspires after that cannot afford to keep out of any field of life.

That is why my devotion to truth has drawn me into the field of politics; and I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.

Gandhi

To Gandhi’s way of thinking, self-purification is the straight and narrow path towards realizing God, the only possible means human beings have to allow them become truly and actively non-violent. Purification is not constrained to one or two kinds of activities; religion is inseparable from all human activities, as their essence or content. In order to approach truth, human beings must becomes purified; if they purify themselves, the world around them will become purified as well.

The pathway of purification therefore also leads to non-violence in all ways of life: only once we become pure of heart can we identify ourselves with any living being — even those who hate us. We can love the lowest; we can even find the strength to love our enemies:

Not until we have reduced ourselves to nothingness can we conquer the evil in us. God demands nothing less than complete self-surrender as the price for the only real freedom that is worth having. And when a man thus loses himself he immediately finds himself in the service of all that lives. It becomes his delight and his recreation. He is a new man, never’ weary of spending himself in the service of God’s creation. (MM, 30)

We may begin to grow curious at the absolute positivity Gandhi deduces from self-negation. How can surrender produce freedom? Yet Gandhi claims surrender is the price for the only freedom which is worth having. We must lose ourselves in order to find ourselves (transposed, does this imply God must be infinitely distant from us in order to discover him as truth itself? That in a way, God must die in order to be revived within us, through our spiritual self-purification?)

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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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Reaching Out

The will to power is not essentially political; it aims beyond politics towards a more subtle possession. The will to power is articulated as a higher expression of the will to live, as opposed to the will to survive. It is the will to exercise power. Its primary function is to be functional, that is: dynamic, active and creative. This kind of willing indicates not a static ideal will rather an energetic, even libidinal force to overcome, to dominate one’s environment as well as to exploit and control others. Importantly, the will to power does not function as some kind of pure essence of vitality, even less an aesthetic ‘taste’ or ethical harmony.

Rather, it is struggle itself, the will to raise oneself up, out joyfully from nothingness, into higher and more rarefied regions of becoming. It is not a duty, but a desire to feel energy being actively employed; it is the surging of this power itself. It aims to transcend but is not itself therefore transcendent; rather, the will to power is material, and always more concrete, more real than we are comfortable admitting. The will to power is our desire to possess, to exploit, to dominate, to control. Hence the primary articulation of the will to power is as a singular thrust rather than a multiplicity of drives. Though clearly each will struggles against every other, ultimately every will struggles against itself, operates upon itself, upon its own form or nature in order to improve itself, to overcome.
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Just as total war renders ethics derisory, consumer society annihiliates the horizons of authentic experience. God, the State, Father: abysses for the erasure of thought, until the only idea of which we are capable is a permitted one. The unconscious is a battlezone of images, brands, consumption algorithms. Ideology is repetition, a recording surface for lies which grows deeper and more complex with each iteration; the con, however, is always the same: alone we are nothing, we must unite with power to stand, to be able. The subtlety here lies in the more-or-less explicit coup d’etat of individual desire; corporate life makes the public individual a double-agent between himself and his secret desires.

Simulated faces, simulated worlds: the invisible lines connecting our fates together slowly grind us into grains, instants, monads, image-fragments, partial objects. The geometric exponentiation of desire is also the micro-isolation of the infinitesimal partial object, the human subject. We are only able to simulate love for what the object is or what it does; thus love becomes currency. From the perspective of desire, the future is the possibility of authentic life, of a total human being both spiritual and material; from the perspective of power, the future promises only tighter integration, further submersion into semiotic networks — until the human being is indistinguishable from a commodity.
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Wild Magic of the Unbeliever (Dave Makin)

How much of our lives are caught up, inextricably, with the imaginary? A dangerous question only because it is silly, and stupid; why? Because it’s answer is both simple and impossible. For we know: none of it is imaginary, it is all real; and we also know: nothing is real, all of it is imaginary. A dangerous idea, a poisonous idea: there is contradiction at the origin. An unrest, a turbulence at the heart of being — not smooth immobility. There is origin only through explosion, individuation, hyperdifferentiation.
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Reproductive knowledge is power itself. Self-organizing, libidinal desire is the only kind worth (re)producing. Sexual desire annuls systems of control, unties authority, opens the future itself to re-ordering. It unleashes a molecular intensity which vibrates across orders of scale, provokes spontaneous self-organization. Reproduction is entire, mystically whole in its transversal rejuvenation. Paternity is miraculous, the creation of the world. How to teach one’s children is also how to make children. We must close down mythologies, we must assert a materialist sexual politics.

We cannot get lost in writerly festivals of cruelty. The real cruelties are far more dangerous and useful. Reading and writing are double-operators with a single form: the disclosure of desire, the inscription of machinic reproductions within distributed networks of sensorimotor molecules. The textual body is made no differently than the work speaks; the segmentations are isomorphic, not only existentially but essentially one. Yet by the tiniest differences between the text and itself, by what we would call the text’s inner urging or the body’s desire — by this difference we find interpretation overcoming, translating, reformulating the text through the body, the world through the idea.
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If there were an exact center to the current political impasse, the short circuit of process, it would be this fact: that free discourse first demands a difference. It could be said that truth is always in conflict with destiny. An illegality, more universal than the universe, breaking the symmetry spontaneously and opening the way onto a new reality. In other words, beyond non-identity, there is yet a non-equality which goes deeper than a face-to-face opposition. The face is a complex torsion of the discursive space; whereas asymmetry may be the origin of space itself. Talking is terraforming, interring destiny, burying original forms deep underground; a willing hypnosis overcomes swarms of a priori contradictions. The earth does not countermand me; this refutes your objection. Consider, for example, when two entities differ so much they cannot be meaningfully compared, there is no isomorphism, no discursive space which can account for a relation between, which could isolate a structural symmetry. And in truth all situations are partial and fragments in this way, fractured, refracted, as their basic essence. Against appearances, the properly political situation is not only when a mutually valid criteria is inconceivable — but when it is even actually dangerous. Was dialectics ever dialogical? In other words, can a theory of contradiction be anything but itself a theoretical contradiction — could it perhaps trace beyond, beneath conflict? For certainly beneath human faces, human relations, many things flow…

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Back to philosophy. In my earlier post on Kant, I tried to make a distinction between intellectual intuiton and empirical sensation. Kant will say something like: we cannot have a pure intellectual intuition of the object because that would give us the thing-in-itself (also known as the transcendental object). What Kant means is something like: the “transcendental” part of the thing-in-itself means that it serves as the grounds for the possibility of experience. So, the thing-in-itself, for Kant, allows for the object to be given to us, but since we participate in space and time (mediative intuitions) we only have representations of the object and never a pure intuition of it. I am trying to stress that Kant sees our spatial-temporal media as being, in a literal sense, that which keeps us from having truly primary a priori knowledge of the object.
However, that’s Kant’s view of human finitude. Rewind. Kant says “intuition has its seat in the subject only, as the formal character of the subject, in virtue of which, in being affected by objects, it obtains immediate representation, that is, intuition, of them; and only in so far, therefore, as it is merely the form of outer sense in general” (71).
Fastforward. “In natural theology, in thinking an object [God], who not only can never be an object of intuition to us but cannot be an object of sensible intuition even to himself, we are careful to remove the conditions of time and space from his intuition–for all his knowledge must be intuition, and not thought, which always involves limitations” (90).
But then Kant goes on to say that since time and space are conditions of existence, they must also be conditions of the existence of God. Further down though: “This mode of intuiting in space and time need not be limited to human sensibility. It may be that all finite, thinking beings necessarily agree with man in this respect, although we are not in a position to judge whether this is actually so. But however universal this mode of sensibility may be, it does not therefore cease to be sensibility. It is derivative (intuitus derivativus), not original (intuitus originarius), and therfore not intellectual intuition. For the reason stated above, such intellectual intuition seemse to belong solely to the primordial being, and can never be ascribed to a dependent being, dependent in its existence as well as in its intuition, and which through that intuition is conscious of its own existence only in relation to given objects” (90).
Long quote, I know–but the point I’m trying to make is that Kant wavers on a fundamental point: does God partake of the conditions of existence, and thus does he exist in space and time? On the other hand–God cannot exist in space and time because he has direct access to the Thing–or the thing-in-itself–pure noumenon. It is intellectual intuition that is equated with this ability–so God, the primordial being, has intellectual or original intuition. Doesn’t this sound like a world in which man is fallen and only perceives so many bad copies of the object?
Anyway–the fundamental point I was trying to make in relation to Spinoza–Spinoza considers substance to be God, and God’s substance to consist of an infinity of attributes. The trick is, human subjectivity only works in two dimensions: thought and extension (mind/body–space/time?). However, this does not exclude the very real fact that the true nature of God’s substance exists on an infinity of different dimensions (understood as attributes–understood as possible expressions of being–a truly fractal onto-theology in the sense that there exists an infinity of modes of being that exist outside, inside, between, alongside of the realms of thought and extension. Quantum Physics–String Theory–Spinoza? hahaha. nice.

–Taylor Adkins

(c) Fractal Ontology, 2007