All posts filed under: structure

Statement

Thursday, July 15, 2010
by Joseph Weissman
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assemblage / becoming / code / differentiation / disorder / escape / grammar / heresy / language / Nietzsche / structure / virus

Hypermediation. What is a statement? But the problem is already determining the singular projection of the statement onto life: both to identify the variously formed matters contained within it, with each of their constituent speeds and trajectories; but also the strata which capture and isolate (or ramify and merge) these intensities through one another. A statement is attached to productive networks which run throughout society; it is an auto-projection of the truth of society onto […]

Return

Wednesday, July 22, 2009
by Joseph Weissman
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becoming / difference / flow / recurence / structure / transversality / truth

Will. The question of the will is not whether to emphasize cycles or fluxes (identities or events, structures or processes, concepts and percepts or acts and effects); still less how to conduct a grand unifying synthesis of the two — events and processes as differing stages or aspects of what is ultimately some overly ideal dialectical Unity; the question is rather, first and foremost, to determine how we can possibly proceed (vis a vis the […]

Subtraction

Tuesday, June 17, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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algebra / desire / force / form / lacan / libido / love / real / signifier / structure / transference

Responding to a question concerning the loss incurred by the sexuation of living beings, Lacan correlates the opening and closing of the gaps of the unconscious to the opening and closing of the orifices of the body. This inter-relation is real because it is in the unconscious the presence of the living being becomes fixed. The erogenous zones are indissolubly linked to the unconscious, the organ of the libido itself. At the level of the […]

On Learning

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

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

For Lacan

Wednesday, February 20, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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attention / barrier / deconstruction / lacan / language / metaphor / signifier / structure / subject / Thought / unconscious

The question of vigilance is important. It is as if a demon plays a game with your attention [lit. “watchfulness.”] Lacan To identify a “subject” is not only difficult, but truly impossible: we always only ‘nominate’ in the last instance one of its barriers; or rather, we indicate only what is barred, but we do so by signifying the barrier. How can we understand this barrier — this imaginary line of symbolic exchange? In what […]

Counter-action: Reflections on Sensory Anthropology

Wednesday, January 23, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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counteraction / difference / ego / experiment / infinity / information / intensity / light / machine / media / metaphysics / monad / noise / origin / society / structure / transcendence

Towards a Metaphysics of Noise Let us return to the ‘alternate’ origin in noise, the conditions for any structure. From background noise to blank nothingness to signification: three distinct moments. Back again to the process of the development of the other structure: from noise into information. Mediation: the propagation of light which opens up space by filling it, makes absence present, sensible. The other structure: from spirit to letter; from ruptures, an alien coherence; from […]

Universal Computation and The Laws of Form

Sunday, November 25, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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algorithm / complexity / computation / consciousness / cybernetics / deduction / emil post / godel / hologram / hooft / information / information processing / laws of form / physics / psychoanalysis / quantum gravity / spencer-brown / string theory / structure / Turing / wolfram

Remarks on Turing and Spencer-Brown (Joseph Weissman) Introduction Computation is holographic. Information processing is a formal operation made abstract only by a reduction in the number of free variables, a projective recording which analyzes from all angles the entropy or information contained in the space. Thus, basing my results partly on Hooft’s holographic conjecture for physics (regarding the equivalence of string theory and quantum theory,) and by extending Spencer-Brown’s work on algebras of distinction (developed […]

Simondon and the Machine: Technology, Individuation, Reality

Tuesday, November 20, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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biology / crystal / cybernetics / form / individuation / knowledge / machine / physics / psychology / Science / Mathematics / Technology / Simondon / structure / technology / tension

Fractal Effervescence (2006), David April   Simondon and the Theory of Individuation There is something eternal in a technical scheme… and it is that which is always present, and can be conserved in a thing. Gilbert Simondon Gilbert Simondon’s reformulation of information theory on the basis of a new philosophy of technology has, in comparison to earlier attempts, at least the following major advantages to its credit: – His thought introduces us to an entirely […]

Cyborg Nietzsche: Conscience, Affect, Transvaluation

Saturday, November 17, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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algebra / complexity / decay / diagnosis / ethics / insanity / language / literature / machine / mathematics / Nietzsche / Politics / prejudice / psychoanalysis / schizophrenia / Science / Mathematics / Technology / society / structure / transformation / truth / unconscious

Part One: Criticism and Untruth-Machines A. Neurosis and Transcendence: the Algebra of Bad Conscience We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full.  Marcel Proust For Nietzsche, uncovering the peculiar logic of the unconscious, revealing the function of this or that unobserved striving, would only form part of the analysts’ role. A rich, analytic transformation of the real space of mental (political) activity is the full meaning of diagnostic criticism. Any real […]

Symmetry within Chaos: On Science and Difference

Sunday, November 4, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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certainty / chaos / complexity / creative / decay / ontology / Science / Mathematics / Technology / space / structure / symmetry / theory / time / universe

Symmetric Relations A scientific theory classifies phenomena based on a universal set of structural relationships. Experiments and theories which deserve the name scientific thus share a coherent set of properties. First, they are systematic, meaning that phenomena as presented possess certain structural or virtual unities despite actual or potential diversities. A fully systematic theory is also complete in that nothing is arbitrarily left out of the universe of discourse. Events, spaces and processes are presented […]

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

Friday, October 19, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
comments 8
abstract machine / assemblage / autopoeisis / becoming / being / change / communication / complexity / differentiation / Disparation / formalization / French Translation / individuation / information / materiality / metastability / model / modularity / morphogenesis / morphology / ontogenesis / ontology / philosophy of science / production / self-actualization / Simondon / singularities / structure / system / technology / Untranslated Theory

In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather ‘metastable,’ endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed. (Potential energy is the energy of the pure event, whereas forms of actualization correspond to the realization of the event). In the second place, singularities posses a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a […]

Freedom and Becoming

Tuesday, October 16, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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artaud / becoming / chance / change / freedom / hunger / necessity / power / religion / structure / Theory / Philosophy

Jacek Yerka, Port Artaud writes that there is a possibility in theater for the creation of a new freedom, under the light of a “strange sun, [with] an unusually bright light by which the difficult, even the impossible, suddenly appears to be our natural medium.” His unusual description points to the possibility for a radical transformation of psychic and social capability; it also points to the very real likelihood (though not certainty) that all such […]

Machinic Autopoesis

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

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

Translation: Raymond Ruyer and the Genesis of Living Forms

Saturday, September 22, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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French Translation / knowledge / la genése des formes vivantes / morphology / ontology / physiology / Raymond Ruyer / Russell / structure / Uncategorized

Ruyer, Raymond. La genése des formes vivantes. Paris: Flammarion, 1958. The following is my translation of the introduction pg 5-9. Morphology, the study of forms and their arrangements, does not present any fundamental difficulty. It needs more than precision and meticulousness. It requires, more frequently, indirect methods that demand a lot of ingenuity, like those methods that led to the structural diagrams of organic chemistry or to the genetic cartography of cellular nuclei. The results […]