Between science’s eternal youth, forever sprouting green shoots, and the crumbling timelessness of art’s old age, there may yet emerge a new, a third kind of time, a crossing between the unique and universal which could bestow a new measure.
The dream is young, the awakening ancient.
Between the transformation and the formula, in the middle of the two shores of language, a glittering goal which shifts along with us, a nearly-invisible position which threatens to forever slip between the stories and theories into the depths.
Between itself and itself, the earth is always the story — the only one we can remember or tell, that is, the one we are — this dream, and this awakening.
On the surface, the two series don’t align, cracks burst throughout the volume. A map of hidden tensions is revealed. The lines don’t originate from a central point. They swerve and intersect madly, though they may sometimes seem parallel.
It is only in the depths, where mixtures reign, that all is equilibrium — a transcendental immanence. All impossibilities are nullified by a smooth consistency of oscillation, a balance without ratio. All formulas, and none.
Perfect peace, though it may sometimes seem chaotic.
And between the surface and the depth, an interval, the third space: the profound Being of depth crossed with the mad beings of the surface — a plague or a prophecy?
Even now, I still do not know.
The law of bifurcation rules the depths of the sea, of the skies, and of time. Everything is reversible. It is a lesson found in the most ancient books, the law of the parasite, whose tiny silver thread always manages to cross the borderline.
The least can become the greatest: everything can become nothing, and nothing — everything.
Thus, upon the surface, reversibility gives way to the irreversible. The law of anarchy, of entropy, rules the surface — a kind of royal madness which sets about organizing chaos, even creating complexity to maximize disorder. Time itself expresses this blistering of the surface, the irreversibility of creation.
Finally, there could be no formal law for the space in between, spoken of even less than the depths and repressed by the surface-depth system — another wisp of Plato’s ghost. Yet it would be that ratio whose reason was precisely pure love, or humility — the meaning, and perhaps the very reality of humanity.
Fractal Ontology 
I feel like the last man…excuse me for blinking too much. You should be more careful or reckless about your uses of (ir)reversibility. Don’t fold it back into love and humility/humanity so quickly. You barely remove it from its hiding spot before setting it upon a pedestal. Ratio…I can see you are still snagged by the 2/3=3/2 which does not equal 1/2. That’s (perhaps) what you should address, if not more explicitly.
Thank you!
It’s a good question. To be honest, I still cannot understand Laruelle very well when he starts speaking about the fractional 2/3 matrix… I think he’s much clearer, for example, when he’s speaking about the fractional nature of power — e.g., from your translations of the definitions:
“Power is a fluent matter, continuous, unlimited, i.e. also infinitely divisible. If it thwarts all the forms of representation and even the scales of size, it is because it is in affinity with an order which does not result from the mixture (dialectical or not) of Large and Small, but which explains the possibility of these mixtures. This order, it should well be named-here, will be called the “fractional” or the “machinic.” It has a certain characteristic to impose an unfolding, a lengthwise cleavage, a duplicity rather than a duality, between power (fractional also) and its essence, i.e. the internal condition of its production and its “deterioration”. Hence the division of power between its Principle and the Beyond of this principle. This is the Beyond that explains at the same time the need for the existence and the coercive character of all powers, and the need for their “decline.”
I think this may be more in line with what I’m doing here. At the least, we see a pointing towards a beyond of power — and why not identify this with humility? As for the pedestals, I’m not sure what to say except that even reason can learn to limit itself — and perhaps that, put another way, it’s also the question of sustainability.
Joe