Fractal Ontology

Moving Day!

2007-09-07T00:43:00.000-05:00

A sign of the times: Fractal Ontology is moving to Wordpress. I'll have the redirection back up as soon as we've finalized the new page. (We'll probably keep this space around for a while, but might not back-update, so you'll want to update your bookmarks.)

Philosophy of the Forenoon

2007-09-06T03:13:00.000-05:00

Born out of the mysteries of the dawn, they ponder how the day can have such a pure, transparent, transfigured and cheerful face between the hours of ten and twelve--they seek the philosophy of the forenoon.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, 638 Human All Too Human)

As Nietzsche dramatically presents it, the ‘philosophy of the forenoon’ is that sharpest and most beautiful diamond of the intellect, born of a brave and curiously wandering temperament. To seek it is to seek a clear and sublime equilibrium of soul and of heart which makes one impervious to paradox and tragedy. Contradiction is no longer a defect. For such a philosophy, the ability to ‘bear’ contradictions within one’s mind and within one’s spirit-- become a virtue, perhaps even the essential virtue of such a thinker.

But we ought not to be fooled when Nietzsche presents himself in his work as a wanderer. Though Nietzsche himself hints towards playing the indecisive, Zarathustra-style prophet, he’s certainly not playing a priest! On the contrary, he plays the role of saving us from our bad consciences -- and on that account, it’s almost equally tempting to read him in the precisely opposite (and equally problematic) way: as a playful (but harmless) nomad, awake amidst the sedentary herd.

In fact both these contradicting impulses (to prophecy, to heresy) are shamelessly and ceaselessly at work in Nietzsche’s texts, in all their blatant subjectivity, their sublime incompossibility. These very qualities constitute the lightning-intensity of his prose. Before anything else, Nietzsche is shaper of forces, always first the “immaculate” poet -- which is not shameful, or even a criticism! It is rather to say we must bear in mind that the text for Nietzsche is a delicate instrument, one inevitably turned towards a higher goal.

Now, insofar as contradictions are an active force, Nietzsche’s writing is pregnancy, mysteriously containing the novel origin and the secret responsibilities of caring for a new life, even a new world. Indeed, Nietzsche inaugurates many modern ontological themes in his appreciation for difference, for an infinite difference which goes deeper than any contradiction -- a tenderly-imparted distinction. Yet his style is such that even sensitivity and tenderness become weapons and traps. To be blunt, his style is force, born of a secret and arcane will.

Thus the central philosophical fixation in Nietzsche’s work is precisely the obscurity of the will, not our problem with violence -- but our problem with weakness. Only when we perceive this does the deeper meaning of nomadism reveal itself. Nietzsche is a wanderer of secret and forbidden places; he is a subtle and tender revealer of precious novelty. His texts are themselves designed to ‘wander,’ to provoke stronger, healthier, more powerful kinds of lives -- precisely by complicating our undisputed theories of what life ‘should’ be.

Incidentally, the methodical search for truth itself results from those times when convictions were feuding among themselves. (Friedrich Nietzsche, 634)

Ortega y Gasset and the Origin of Philosophy

2007-09-05T17:47:00.000-05:00

The Origin of Philosophy, tr. Tony Talbot, U of Illinois P, Chicago 2000, 1967, 1943.

Ortega starts by saying that elegance would be a better term for ethics; since ethics is the “science of what has to be done,” and the elegant man is the best example of the practitioner of this science (14). It seems that Ortega’s goal in this book is to render Hegelian dialectics as elegant as possible by crossbreeding it with existentialism (not the only attempt this century, one thinks of Sartre’s later Critiques).

With this in mind, Ortega argues that there are two ways for thoughts to progress: one thought may imply another, or a thought may complicate the other. The latter Ortega calls “synthetic or dialectic thought” (16). For Ortega, a thought is synthetic or dialectic if it is irresistibly imposed on us, and if the first thought cannot be complete without the second. In this sense, the dialectic stresses continuity and necessary totality because it has to be taken further, through yet another synthesis. He writes, “The dialectic is the obligation to continue thinking, and this is not merely a manner of speaking, but an actual reality. It is the very fact of the human condition” (17).

Ortega makes no mistake about his Hegelian project, for he predicts that after World War II, “man will probably engage in assimilating the past with unparalleled zeal and urgency, and display astounding scope, vigor, and accuracy. I call this phenomenon, which I have anticipated for years, the dawn of historical reason” (31). He then goes on to propose a distinction between self-perpetuation, which he finds to be exhausting since it implies spanning all time, and self-eternalization, which implies that the future and past are attained in the present. This relies on the importance of remembering and foreseeing, a truly dialectical method of synthesizing events throughout history (31).

Ortega defines the aspect as “the response of the thing to being looked at” (41). He goes on to define knowledge as an interpretation of the thing itself, and he stresses that it takes the thing from the “silent language of being” to the “articulate language of knowledge” (44). I think Badiou would argue that there is no linguistic aspect of being and thus no silence—to me silence implies that being can speak to man, and for Ortega, the aspect is a response. But I do not think he means to stress the object or thing speaking or reaching out to man himself, for it is man that has a point of view—and thus it is silence to his point of view, which really means—an absence of significance. But for Ortega, this is a translation of languages, from being to knowledge, as though being had a script in and of itself. This is a key point to unravel. We could consider the fact that silence is both on the extreme negative and positive side of communication and signification, insofar as we keeps silent around those that we despise and around the truest of friends for whom no words are necessary to express a genuine thought.

Ortega says that the thing is the sum or integral of its aspects, implying a perspectivism that integrates a little differential calculus (47). He proposes a theory: 1. pause before each aspect, 2. continue thinking or move on to a contiguous aspect, 3. preserve the aspects previously viewed, 4. integrate them sufficiently in a “total” [his quotes] view (48). And no one would have ever told me that early twentieth-century Spanish philosophy would offer me a simplified and ‘elegant’ version of the dialectic!

An example of this dialectic goes as follows: every historical thinker has a soil, a subsoil, and an adversary. The subsoil is the cultural background, the collective unconscious of his region.. The soil is the newly founded ideas accepted by the thinker. And finally, an adversary is needed for differentiation. (73-74) Thus, for Heraclitus and Parmenides, the subsoil was mythology, the soil was natural science and the skepticism that allowed the thinkers to distance themselves from the religion prevailed. Finally, the adversary and the anxiety of influence prods the thinkers to assert radical hypotheses--Being is real, becoming false, and vice versa—that allow for the clearest of distinctions to be made between the two.

Ortega argues that with the modern way of living, there are so many choices that it becomes difficult to make a choice. He argues, “Man is stranded amid the various opinions, none of which is able to sustain him firmly—hence he slips about amid the many possible “knowledges” and finds himself failing, falling into a strange liquid medium . . . he falls into a sea of doubts” (102). Heraclitus and Parmenides were completely aware that in confronting and opposing the doxa, their opinion was constitutively paradoxa (110). Therefore, it is my ‘opinion’ that all revision is inherently paradoxical.

Bachelard and the Psychoanalysis of Affective Stereotypes

2007-09-05T05:25:00.000-05:00

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.

We recognize this pseudo-knowledge in the guise of the pre-scientific mind. It has a tendency to valorize immediate satisfaction in the curiosity that its simple experiments evoke. In fact, Bachelard criticizes seventeenth-century empiricists for constantly erasing the theoretical connections that lead them to the productive experiments that they construct. The pre-scientific mind does this in order to highlight the astonishment that accompanies the advancement of science in general. This leads it to substitute and emphasize images to the detriment of ideas thereby removing the sense of the problem from science. Moreover, pre-scientific thought seeks variety and not variation—the former hinders concepts from being adequately employed in a systematic nature, while the latter enriches the comprehension of the concept through mathematical experimentation.

Deleuze definitely inherits a philosophical impulse from Bachelard. This can be observed most clearly in the dissertation Difference and Repetition that he wrote under Bachelard in 1968. They both stress the importance of the sense of the problem and the fact that questions deserve the answers that follow due to the clarity and comprehensibility of the question itself (52). They also both fight tirelessly against the images, analogies and metaphors that only serve to obscure the thoughts with which they are associated. And it is insofar that unconscious thought gravitates around these images and lodges itself there that we need a psychoanalysis of reason that can exorcise this unconscious by reviving the ability to pose adequate problems. Bachelard calls the coefficients that superimpose values on thought affective stereotypy. Thus, the unconscious values that impede the function of thought are affective stereotypes because they constitute a pretension to knowledge that has not reached the stage of self-criticism. It is up to this different breed of psychoanalysis to disrupt the 'values in themselves' that inevitably intermix themselves in the energy that is transformed into scientific endeavors (for we should remember that science is never fully removed from the culture through which investments of desire flow).

A Question for Institutions

2007-09-04T12:35:00.000-05:00

The word ‘institution’ indicates a change in the level of analysis. An institution is just a summarization of ecosystemic coordinations. To ‘study institutions’ means to study that conceptual, or even political, operation whereby a new layer of coordinated activity is established. To think or act institutionally is to shift the discourse neither ‘left’ nor ‘right,’ but rather up, to a higher layer or perspective. By raising the question of institutions, the speaker immediately forces a dimensional shift in the geometry of the local conceptual-political field. Such an institutionally ‘corrupted’ discourse inevitably devolves into a sort of summary-machine: the consequence is a shift not only in our collection of ideas, but necessarily even their inter-relations, that is, even the essence of the ideas themselves.

The problem of institutions, like that of violence, is very obscure. It is currently situated at what amounts to an ‘inertial point’ with respect to dominant traditions. Raising the problem of institutions accelerates the convergence of critical discourses. Disciplines compel each another to merge together, in order to explain. Yet a single voice may be able to express what an entire chorus may not.

For when the question of establishment itself is reached, specialists suddenly surrender their confidence in method, precisely that which would enable them to distinguish clearly what about this question would otherwise be essentially obscure. For at the point where the proper question of institutionalization is finally able to be posed as such, then disciplines suddenly seem to have an incredible difficulty in maintaining their idiosyncratic approach, their distinct identities. They merge into a single goal and question. A discipline re-organized. Indeed, when an overly specialized approach breaches the critical zone, it swiftly becomes de-organized by dint of the hyper-organization of the object.

Institutions combine the ‘eternal memory’ of science, mathematics and religion, with the ‘momentary experience’ of phenomenology, sociopsychology, and critical theory. The problem of institutions is the problem of slavery and aristocracy, the problem of freedom and envy. Approached through the lens of objective science, the subject simply imitates the multiplicity of the institution. Even science becomes an institution only when its sets about to study them as a subject (‘subject to law’) -- and, in a real sense, to control them by this study. The universal simulation produced by the institution is the central problematic of hyper-mechanization; it is the dream of establishment -- a paradise. All institutions secretly want to become utopias; this desire distorted, become obscene, is capital. Social thought has become almost completely functionalized, embodied as exchange within an open community. The closure of society to the universe is almost irreversible; the functionalization of the universe for society is almost complete. But we are not yet machines, and still have time to postpone the moment of inhumanity.

Let us begin by saying institutionalization is a becoming-machine, the establishment of a universalizable operation cycle. The institution is a machine which as such has no authority to impose rules and laws, is impotent as such -- and so rather subjects the entire universe to its cycle of operations, utilizing whatever forces are available to it to ensure its survival.

Institutions provoke a cosmic functionalization which is necessarily ambiguous: to open new spaces for coordinated vitality, some others must be closed forever. Society is a machine which unfolds itself more than it folds back in: it is a super-institution, which miraculously donates a positive function to all that which benefits its self-organization.

Thus machinic subjects understand intimately the role of science, even if they can no longer conceive of the scientific as such. Does the institution destroy the possibility of pure science? It is perhaps too much to assert that science can only becomes ‘innovative’ when at a distance from machinic organizations of subjectivity; doubtless they require one another. Yet this very need seems somewhat contrived, something of a fiction. Yet what would such a ‘pure’ science be, in isolation from any predictable processes? And what would such an institution produce, devoid of order, synchrony or goal?

Culture is an institution in the past tense: what was or has been established. But the dynamics of coordination do not necessarily proceed along indicated cultural paths. To all goals, identities, desires, layers, pathways, endpoints, institutions are indifferent.

In short, institutes are organizations which transform energy; speed is the only important difference. Establishment invests energy directly into a circular process of self-renewal. Consider a cube replaced by infinitely many differently-sized spheres: the fact of difference (in size) precludes any question of alternative distributions, and the position of the largest determine the necessary arrangement of the smaller...

The geometry of social order is invested by divisions of life-space, while the intensity of social desire seeks to overcome divisions by reunification, streamlining the separation which produces cultural objects... Eventually the process ends where it had begun: we find our culture has become automatic, our thoughts and actions reflexive, our intensity subdivided until it has become harmless.

Institutions neutralize desire. There is no escaping the fact that the massive coordination of activity has as its necessary consequence the 'automatization' of almost every aspect of life, to the extent we are shocked when the world doesn't correspond to our institutionalized cognition. So my question is this: is it possible to truly think post-institutionally, given that our cultural mode of thought has been irrevocably shaped by institutions?

The Hero and the Kingly Function: Starkadr in Dumezil's Stakes of the Warrior

2007-09-03T02:52:00.000-05:00

There are two versions of the story of Starkadr (Starcatherus), one Latin, the other Old Icelandic. Starkadr is forced into a precarious position, caught between Odin and Thor. Here I will follow the Icelandic tale for concision, only referring to the Latin to offset some details.

In the Icelandic tale there are two Starkadrs—the hero’s grandfather is of the same name. The first Starkadr is a powerful giant and is slain by Thor because the king’s daughter has run away with him. In fact, Thor is upset because she prefers the giant Starkadr to Thor and had consented to leaving. Before the giant is slain, though, the king’s daughter has a child who will be the father of Starkadr.

This will lead to a future conflict, because Thor in general has always been depicted as the lone-warrior god in opposition to the race of the giants (like Zeus, sworn enemy of the titans). The second Starkadr is born with jotunkuml, which might best be translated as “wounds of the giant.” For our purposes we should envision Starkadr as being human while having super-human strength, and since his grandfather was a giant (with six to eight arms no less), his jotunkuml are like large stumps where extra limbs should be. So when the conflict begins in this story, Thor is already set against Starkadr because of the enmity he feels toward his grandfather and for the fact that he bears the mark of giants in physical prowess and deformity.

Odin, on the other hand, has always been on the side of the giants. In fact, he is descended from Ymir, the first giant. Odin and Thor are like two aspects of the war machine: Odin is the sovereign, Thor the warrior; Odin the god of the giants, Thor the god sent to keep the giants in check; Odin the god of large armies of commoners, Thor the god of errant, lone heroes. So the fact that Starkadr is a giant and by upbringing a defender of kings makes all the factors come into play here to set the hero up for his destiny.

Odin decides his fate by granting Starkadr privileges mixed with an evil demand. Odin requires that Starkadr give up his friend and king Vikar. He can get away with this because he has (in other human forms) raised Starkadr and helped train him. Before this account is settled, Odin and Thor cross words as to Starkadr’s fate. Thor decrees he will have no children (to end the line of giants started by his grandfather), so Odin grants him three life spans to make up for it. Then Thor says he will commit a crime for each lifespan. Odin says he will have the best weapons and armor, but Thor says he will have no land or property. Odin gives fine furnishings, but Thor says he will never feel he has enough. Odin decrees victory in every combat, but Thor foresees that he will be gravely wounded in each battle. Odin gives him the gift of poetry and improvisation, while Thor says he will forget everything he composes. Finally, Odin says he will appeal to the well-born and the great, but Thor says he will be despised by the common folk.

The first crime to be committed is the only one that is required of him: he is to offer his friend, king Vikar, in a sacrifice to Odin. In fact, Odin makes sure to remind Starkadr that he is indebted to him for all the help. We can only imagine that Odin, being the sovereign-god, wants Vikar to join him in Valhalla in order to strengthen the number of kings that have already amassed in Odin's domain. Thus, Starkadr does what is asked of him, and hates himself for it—so do all his company men. He is forced to leave and becomes nomadic, fighting for other kings in dozens of lands. This is the first crime that starts his progress towards two other crimes, both of which are committed towards kings. The second crime is fleeing on the battlefield when the Swedish king he is serving has been killed. The last is for murdering his king in Denmark for gold. After this he uses the money he earns to buy himself the executioner of his choice.

A few things are significant about this story (later I will connect it to the narrative of Sisupala and Krisna). For example, Starkadr’s threefold life is spent serving kings. Many of the feats that are accounted in the stories tell of Starkadr acting as a regal educator, of punishing lower class men who attempt to mate with noble women, and one story even where he upbraids a dissolute king in order to revive the virtuous nature and responsibility that is befitting a sovereign. In short, he functions as an expositor of regal morals and a defender of the kingly function. His role is to protect the symbolic authority of the sovereign.

It is all the more surprising that his three crimes are directly against kings and the function of the king. Now, despite the three crimes Starkadr traveled all throughout the world performing heroic deeds and serving and aiding many different kings. So the fact that he fails these other kings is crucial. Sacrificing his friend Vikar is not directly his fault, though he feels great shame in the act. Fleeing on the battlefield is cowardice only insofar as Starkadr is a giant among men endowed with great powers and so should not so easily fear for his life. Nevertheless for Starkadr, hero and general to kings, this is a degradation of the honor befitting a warrior. Finally, even though Starkadr murders a king who is a bad one, he does it for money, and so that factor overrides any sort of interpretation in which Starkadr might have removed the king in order to defend the kingly function. This is why his last crime spells his death and the loss of his power; symbolically, having forfeited all responsibility for the kingly function, he loses his gifts as a warrior.

This story will set up a further discussion about the function of the sovereign and the warrior. The dux (leader) and the rex (king) do not always correspond or oppose in simple ways. The rex must subordinate the dux or else the war machine will never become installed in the functions of the state. The function of the king has to be able to structure (and give direction to) the molar formations of the army that are composed of the selection of molecular forces under the power of the warrior. The warrior, having sworn loyalty or fealty to a king, takes on the function of binding alliances to the state. I think this discussion can especially help illuminate the difficult passages (pg. 145-166) in Anti-Oedipus where the despot as BwO, alliances and filiations all get conceptually networked at blinding speed. [And this may include even the seemingly insoluble question concerning how the hero effectuates an exogamous incest that marries him to the mother and the sister of the clan, thereby causing himself to be the unengendered--all filiation results from him insofar as he obtains the maternal bond, and all alliances are secured in his name via the sister that is bound to him as well.] This is the beginnings of an outline of the struggle in myth and epic to articulate a distinct representation of sovereignty and nomadic heroism that will further enlighten us on the operations of the war machine and the state’s apparatus of capture.

One last glance at the abstract machine behind the gods and Starkadr's fate: the one thing about his fate that is only implicit is the fact that he will remain a warrior, faithful to the codes of kings. He is fated to commit three crimes, but there is no specification that they must be against kings. Now, we could argue that because his first crime is determined to be against a king (his friend no less) he will inevitably repeat the crimes against other kings. But we should risk more provocative hypotheses. It's tempting to reiterate the fact that Starkadr's grandfather of the same name commits an offense against a king, and it is Thor that aids the king against the giant. So, in a strange twist of fate, Thor will undermine Starkadr's ability to fulfill his loyal function as a warrior by cursing him to betray kings. But this doesn't work either because Odin requires the first crime and determines it. I suggest that Odin and Thor here both work negatively against Starkadr's many different gifts in order to limit him, or better yet to mold him into a nobler form. Bearing the scars of a monstrous breed, he will perform the tasks of the warrior with such intensity and for so long that he comes to highlight the inevitable dangers at stake in such a position. Precluding sacrificing your king under duress, fleeing the battle--when you are left second in charge by the death of your king--and murdering your king for money must be seen as the two most despicable acts for which a warrior can be responsible. Therefore, Starkadr upholds the ideals of the kingly function, and correspondingly, he educates us on the sins of the warrior.

Politics beyond Ontology

2007-08-30T21:42:00.000-05:00

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.

Introduction

This is truly the epoch of absolute relativity. Morality and reason no longer appear sufficient for justice; truth and faith no longer appear sufficient for belief; and courage no longer seems necessary for action! Plato is dead: only a fool today would admit he considers truth to found knowledge.

But his ghost haunts us yet. Have we almost lapsed into a too-precisely opposing view, such that only doubt and paranoia could found ‘true’ knowledge (like Descartes, or his postmodern revenant, Jacques Lacan)? And should we accept this, then we certainly must consider the further hypothesis of Alain Badiou’s that knowledge is always subtracted from the indiscernible truth of an event1, accomplished by an engaged generic process of becoming-subject through which the unrecognized truth is supported (2). According to Badiou, truths invest subjects (ontologically speaking) by a rigorous subtraction or subdivision, an act not of will, but of faith. Underlying the relation between subject and event is the connection of confidence or fidelity which constitutes us, as subjects to a truth we carry.

It must already be recognized that this ontologically ‘alternate’ hypothesis is not altogether different in spirit to that of Alfred North Whitehead’s3 (with his theory of event-particles, his assertion of transcendence, and his advocacy for a universal algebra -- of sets, no less,) and even perhaps that of Gilles Deleuze’s (who is also a rigorous thinker of multiplicity, has a conception of a ‘plane of immanence,’ and even deals extensively with “pure events” in the series of the same name in his Logic of Sense.) All these voices are congruent, even polyphonous, and not antagonistically opposed -- a reading which Badiou would sometimes seem to encourage.

We should read these each of these singular threads of thought as mysteriously but fundamentally univocal (4). Indeed, it is one of the goals of this paper to assert that all of us are flag-bearers of the same singular epistemological involution, one which is lucidly in process for each of these thinkers. What is not my goal is to explain the unique historical forces which have so radically compromised our faith in the power of reason to discern. Of much more urgency is a therapeutic critique of the contemporary theoretical and sociopolitical terrain.

For epistemology, insofar as it remains apolitical, degenerates into an apologetics for the horror of the real. It seems much more relevant and important to me to rather develop a map of potential fields of social intensity -- zones where it becomes possible to create open spaces beyond institutionalized forms of justice, thought and conviviality. I am not here concerned with advocating some new and exotic theory of knowledge, but rather with identifying and intensifying unrecognized zones of micro-revolutionary resistance.

For as reality becomes obscure, so does revolutionary potential: it is certainly not clear that we can collectively will the struggle against authoritarian systems of power without reinvigorating precisely those very ‘fascisizing’ elements of political thought and behavior we would seek to eradicate. “Philosophy has to expose the possibility of a true life.”5 The path I shall take I hope will be an original and not merely a reactionary one. Today we must venture to describe the conditions within which a liberating, utopian hope would become a resonant impulse to overcome, a fresh will towards becoming conscious. For a veritable becoming is beginning to make itself appear possible historically once more, and we would be well-advised to listen closely to the voice of history-- to ensure we have not misheard the call of the future.

Experience and Identity

We experience the world: but beyond this, what more can be said? What indeed would suffice to describe the encounter with what is ‘beyond’ any experience? Can language indicate the abyssal and incorporeal depths of its own origin, and could it perhaps reach even farther? And finally: must we silence our questioning out of ignorance, even as our investigation has just begun upon its journey to peer through the shattered lattices of universal order -- or is this already where our knowledge meets it limits of certainty?

But before we engage these questions further, let us introduce some of our terms. As I will use it (in a somewhat Deleuzoguattarian sense) the word description names the process whereby enunciations delimit observational spaces, by deploying pre-signifying elements onto a mapping of functions in a particular social field. Descriptions stratify intensities: they invest regiments of distinctions which encapsulate and coordinate observed singularities. Observation will be seen to function as the production of distinctions or divisions between contrasting zones of value and intensity. Finally, thinking begins with an unrecognized distinction.

Now we are in a position to provide a certain narrow kind of answer to the questions we opened with. We shall begin with an exposition of the nature of the relationship between identity and. First, let’s consider why a purely logical account of identity could not fully describe our experience of self-identity.

Descriptions logically subdivide spaces into zones or territories of equivalence. The ontological question regards the division of the zones, but not the separation of spaces, for this is its operation of division. But even the panoramic ontological view would grasp only the most formal aspects of identity. For in an ontological account of identity, identity thinks itself as collections of distinct experiences. Even if we suppose identity to be some species of ‘pure’ cognitive event, this would again demonstrate only the indirect-tautological function of identity6 (“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 passionately to explain based on a total comprehension, which is to be accomplished by a rigorous division. I say that logic studies this same schism, but algebraically rather than differentially. Yet the profound question has remained silent: why is the subject missing from our experiential space? Where has identity gone?

Event and Becoming

It is partly to Alain Badiou’s credit that we now think the relation of being to events as essentially multiple7. But this same principle undermines the very mathematical principle of continuity upon which he seeks to found this relation. Mathematics is presupposed in his ontological analysis of being as constituting a complex and heterogeneous assemblage of events (collections) and spaces (voids) nut ultimately founded upon the void.

The paradox glimpsed here can be seen most clearly if we approach identity naively, as meaning a “belonging in a certain way to a certain state of affairs.” This doesn’t explain what we’re interested in, which is its actual continuity, the unique and surprising symmetry of identity. A subject maintains its identity despite, and sometimes even because of the discontinuity it has experienced. So belonging already entails a multiply-complex balance of coordinating transformations. Thus, without actually discerning or explaining any particulalr identity, we can generically suppose it is made up of disjoint, discontinuous zones of varying degrees of belonging (to some situation of events.) There is no participation between non-equivalent classes, the ontological break is ‘clean’: “There are only bodies and language.”[8]

We find that we have need for a more complicated algebraic structure, one which at least allows for division of bodies and words into partial membership classes. The very nature of equivalence depends fundamentally on this division into ‘similar’ sets. Not to mention the fact that inclusion itself is already an ontological division demands further explanation. After all, an identity cannot be ‘induced’ from the situation by the simple observation (or negotiation) which decides that such-and-such belongs to the event (considering 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! The void undermines identity insofar as the void is divided; whereas a truly pure induction on the basis of the multiplicity of events would affirm that multiplicity doesn’t end in the void.

Multiplicity goes all the way down: as soon as we make a single distinction, an infinite number of tautologically equivalent distinctions follow. Faith denotes reality. Identity, then, cannot refer only to the void’s self-belonging (even as we have shown by infinite subdivision of the void into n classes of varying degrees of belonging.) Rather, after Deleuze, a becoming, a process of actualizing a virtual multiplicity, occurs as an unfolding series of never-endingly complex and self-referential patterns, flows emanating from power sources. Thought occurs on the void, not outside distinctions but requiring them to be made without statist negativity[9].

The void is never self-identical, never unicity but always the purest, or ‘least’ unit of division. For if it is split, it is then split eternally, split infinitely, and so it never belongs to or contains itself or anything else. In fact, the power of the void is not activated simply by its pure, abstract emptiness but rather the mathematical intuition of the operator, the one who utilizes the void in order to reconstruct a fractured ontology. The ‘smoothness’ of a new cognitive space is no index for its fertility. Even Badiou recognizes that thought finds its full expression beyond a statist or constructed conception of reality[10].

Mathematics is a thought sublimely broken, purified of violence, cured of resistance, ‘bent to heel,’ stripped of its subjectivity and made absolutely disinterested. Yet its accomplishments, however breathtakingly elegant and beautiful, always and only reconstitute a shrinking remainder of experience. The technological evolution of human society originates not only on our learning to calculate, but our being made calculable [11]. Nietzsche has identified this process with the very origin of morality, but it is enough to say here that a mathematical philosophy founded on the void accomplishes its aims by a sort of violent self-discipline which thus locks itself into only one situation: provocation.

Even more importantly, such a conception of ontology appears to focus its attention upon an inconsistent layer of being. This logical inversion just traps being in a paradox, and isn’t ‘capturing’ it in its multiplicity but rather surgically inscribing transcendent and radical distinctions upon it as pure events [12]-- much less accomplishing some sort of transcendental ‘logic’ of events!

To perceive in reality only the paradox of becoming is to introduce transcendence by the back door, as a desperate escape from an immanent reality (which is therefore all we can ‘speak’ about -- without lapsing into hypocrisy.) It is to understand being as a cage, only as a challenge, consigning to the undiscerned and the invisible anything marginal, transparent, or secret. We finally capture only a shrinking portion of living experience which crumbles, continually self-dividing into an abyss of silence.

Hence, we claim that ontology, understood as this operation of a primary division (instead of, say, a distribution) thus cannot in fact account for the reciprocal yet asymmterical relation between reality and time -- that is, it can pose precisely but never resolve the question of experience and identity. Instead, we need political logic to follow logically from a truly immanent ontology, which is psychologically astute enough to recognize its prejudices (of identity, experience, etc) and reorganize itself, even diagnose and heal itself. For the ontological principle (that being becomes) has no goal written upon its surface, and even ontology must take care of what it becomes.

Immanence

Immanence is, upon its surface, just a word which indicates that amongst the present relationships we observe, we perceive them as interlocking. It means reality is ‘inner’ space. Another way of saying this would be to say that we do not believe there to exist a deepest space. Thus when we make a claim of ‘pure’ immanence, we assert that there are no extra layers of being above or beyond the situation, and that nothing spontaneously intervenes from another order of time. Immanence implies something special about the initial conditions of any space it is applied to: namely, that they open onto multiplicity, and fold in upon themselves without reference to an exterior. That there is no ‘outside’ of Being: this is pure immanence.

Nothing encapsulates an anti-immanent perspective more closely than the delicate epistemological framework inaugurated by Plato (but exemplified best, perhaps, by the cogito) which asserts that knowing and experiencing are but modalities of a fundamental distinction. Life is essentially separate: both within and without, split between thinking and acting.

But is it really so clear and distinct that such separated spaces would not communicate? Whatever the case may be, in every theory advancing a transcendent distinction as primary, there emerges the necessity for an enduring interface produced by a geometric projection between the distinguished spaces. In the ontology of Alain Badiou, ‘fidelity’ names the connective operation between elements of an enumerated network of forces. In the clarity of this fidelity, the distinctions between subject and event, process and underlying ‘reality’ become critically blurred and radically ambiguous. The void can no longer be absolutely distinguished from the situation. The originary reflection which discerns the indiscernible becomes autonomous -- a faithful machine -- by this same maneuver.

Love

In Badiou’s somewhat classical conception, the subject-space is divided between art, science, politics and love (not so curiously, he deliberately excludes psychoanalysis13.) Each of these has its subjects in terms of goals, identities, procedures and structures. They are implicit division algorithms which ensure success to the faithful. But we should not judge from this that these spaces are indeed so absolutely separate (in reality or in Badiou’s ontology,) nor should we conclude from his idiosyncratic treatment of the ontological question that his project is without certain precedents.

For example, when Deleuze and Guattari say that “love is not reactionary or revolutionary, but love is an index of the reactionary or revolutionary investments of the libido in the socius,”14 they are indicating a requirement not only for political thought, but for creative activity in general: when we participate in sociality, if we do not do ‘it’ with love, the engagement becomes reactive, psychoanalytic, capitalistic, even neurotic or self-destructive15. Badiou's sort of fidelity16 has a similar requirement: you belong to the event only when you have made it what it is--and by this process of subtraction, we by chance and faith become whatever we are. Either notion supposes only a single portal to the event: you either enter with love in your heart and hands open in passivity and generosity -- or you do not really enter at all, or only to critically misjudge the nature of your relationship to the event. For without love there is no distinguishing revolutionary necessity.

Love is most enlightening, most important when it is immediately political, when it is immediately ethical. When it is so intense that it resonates, when it is totally without jealousy, this is when love unfolds its mysterious potential: its capacity to inspire, to dominate, to intensify a flow of desire. Love is reality: it’s affect is most closely claimed by the word ‘infusion.’ An unasked-for or obscure love17 is indiscernible but essential, if only for its unanticipated transversality, its radical inclusivity -- which is why love is an ethical intercourse, or else a tragic ignorance: faith without love is dogmatic, impotent, incomplete and unsatisfied.

We say love is perhaps the revolutionary impulse, for it is that emotion which first reminds us, with piercing clarity, of our real condition. Though we are driven to self-affliction, suffering is not guilt, nor a guilty desire. Pain relates to situations which are not eternal, to arrangements which evolve and change by their nature. To love just means we could not stand the shame of another’s degradation. To love is to precisely understand the shame of the situation -- and not to accept it.

Hope can only be inspired for a universal social truth which is actually wagered upon, where love engages and focuses our intensity. Love provokes us to create new kinds of spaces for living-together. To wager on an event is to become infected with patience, belief and confidence, and it is (for better or worse) to become an intense potential for social difference. We wager our singularities, and we have faith; only then can we create a new kind of situation. Faith has to be propelled; it doesn’t exist in rest. Transitory ontology is the science of trajectories: it perhaps provokes the deepest revelations, but never the deepest joys. That there is still a non-ontological space for thought today we perhaps owe to the stout-hearted endurance of joy.

Politics through the Abyss

We no longer need to be reminded that politics, and more generally ontology, are no longer concerned solely with concepts. We can even now question whether they have ever been. Ontology serenely and passionately desires to explain the primordial origin of all conceptual and actual order; whereas politics, slightly more modest, seeks to divine, explain and control the source of value, or ‘final’ motive towards social order. Political ontology is therefore not primarily concerned with concepts, but rather with social functions whose specific operation is division, or ideological concept whose essential modality is exclusion, separation. We should be alert for when a thinker is actually deploying ontological or political concepts, rather than simply dividing in an ontological or political way. For the consistency of a political axiom rests fundamentally on the actual effectiveness of the virtual distinctions it draws.

Our experience of political reality is intimately shaped by an careful community ‘surgery’ which conditions potential expressions of value. In practice, only a delicate subdivision accomplishes the total vision of faith, or ontology. A numerical theory of the event aims at continuity through becoming, where a genetic theory of society aims at becoming through intensity. The essence of the political is the abstract; the question of politics is first that of clarity. Accordingly, the truly political desire is a progression: from the will to transparency, to the will to distinction, and finally, the will to loyalty -- or the will to power.

Both ontology and politics are in effect a careful study of the potential varieties (and strata within varieties) of groups, masses, and milieus. More precisely, ontology presents the geometry of plausible inter-relations: mapping logical trajectories between evolving surfaces. Then ‘division’ is the ontological term, because whereas masses are indiscernible depths of correlation, surfaces present explicitly calculable interfaces. Surfaces are transversal for this reason, too: they skillfully restrain their powerful depths, maintain smooth boundaries even as they transcend, divide and encompass the inner abyss with a sublime act of distinction. For even (social and scientific) classes have to do, morphologically and genealogically, with an inclusion/exclusion apparatus, an integral divisibility of property and reality.

Ontological inferences are not simply mathematical distinctions; and political thought precisely remembers the reasons not to give into comfortable abstraction, or to yield to transcendence-claims distinguishing degrees of belonging. For if masses of any kind can be said have an interest in this sense, then the idea of justice even as disinterestedness should invite us to inquire whether and how they are cared for. Thus we can say that materialism (and even, in an ironic sense, its modern subversion) contains an important kernel of ethical truth, namely, that counting is not comprehending. Consider the different investments of intensity from a cursory scientific experiment which merely takes account of a sequence of events, to a mature scientific project which investigates interconnections between and within a variety of processes.

Similarly, framing social justice as an ontological distinction already begs the question of participation: for masses always have interests, even when ignored by those who ‘count.’ Counting can be seen as ‘disinterested’ only through a sublimation of inherited violence, a violence which imitates thought in its procedure of desire: to become invisible, to become shadow, to become ingrained even into the very geometry of the universe... finally even into the clarity of light itself.

Beyond the Count, Outside the Distinction

The territory of the count is not absolute: there are wanderers roaming about the edges, brave adventurers tracing paths into the void beyond the state. Of course, many break down-- but some inevitably break through. Those who escape the territory of the count are those in whom real thinking can occur. For Alain Badiou, political thought must take place at a distance from the state in a militant subject. Justice is pure disinterestedness, and the revolutionary’s ethic would have no substance if it were not for his unselfish confidence in the face of the event, his potential to become equal to the events of life.

For Gilles Deleuze, the question of political thought is enacted by mapping fields of differential intensity, offering the possibility of a process of healing social desire18. Deleuze believes we need a radical kind of post-institutional analysis which is forward-thinking and energetic, both critical and clinical, in order to produce results. This analysis is distinguished not by its specialized knowledge, but its ability to rearrange the blockage, misdirection and appropriation of desire by the machine. It is not a political project, but a new disciple whereby we can learn to create more healthy ecosystems -- mental, physical and social.

But what ties them together is not faith in the future, but rather a faith in an originary vision of society which has become possible from our modern perspective. We could not have gotten this far without bringing a past along with us; history has indispensable lessons for those even with the most humble or sweeping of goals. Above all, history teaches us that this moment is the event, a rare break in the linear flow of time where we still have the oppourtunity to intervene: but the mysteries held by the future are as dangerous as they are likely to be curative. Becomings of any sort should not be taken lightly.

The question is not: how are we to judge ontologies? For they already contain eschatologies, and dictate potential utopias. Ontology is mathematics only in that its goal is to become wholly symbolic. Logic lives in ontology’s dreamworld of an unbroken text. But utopia is not just a self-contained truth lodged within its own marking. Any particular ontology already has its entire future sewn within itself – and even its prehistory. Yet it is in the form of the intuition that prehistory shapes the present that we find a curious and golden thread running through Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Their modern counterparts – Deleuze, Badiou and Whitehead – have taken a similar inspiration towards a new kind of metaphysics.

The Power of Fidelity

What does it mean to say we are faithful to a process? Do we affect the series of experiences in the same way the event affects us? Even if we are faithful observers, we are mirrors for the world, but we are still not in the picture. Authentic belief is a becoming-void and a becoming-full at once, a dangerous becoming-neither, indeed by an act of pure symmetry: turning something into nothing, turning nothing into something. Topologically, such a faithful subject could only be considered as the miraculous origin of the situation, the distinguishing void-point around which the entire symbolic coordination is achieved. Yet what is most interesting about this kind of conceptual apparatus is not its transitory stability but the implicit potential for evolution, counter-coordination, for provocation and mediation, in fact for the whole complex balance of authentic conviviality. Public space is ontology’s Being: the subject as void-origin just the inauguration of a new kind of public space, which is able to dispense with the hypocritical historical divisions between private ‘self’ and public ‘person.’ This division is the radical core of ontology, its danger and saving power – it is the dream of an ontology.

We should now consider what the power of fidelity means in terms of its construction of social divisions. Fidelity empowers a transitory subject as an event occupying a place between spaces, accomplishing their inter-involution. The topology glimpsed here is characteristic of the field of intensities which invest social drives. Fidelity invests prearranged divisions of space with asymmetrical value; it is the counter-part to a distinction. Badiou even claims fidelity is the operation of distinction[19].

Thus ontology, understood as a primary separation, would divide its own operation by faith alone. What indeed is theory, and what practice to such a subtractive, non-distributive ontology? For it is certainly not merely counting! If the object of ontology is Being, then practically our consideration is not political (at least primarily) -- but ethical and aesthetic. Transitory ontology proceeds from a passion to make being good, to make it beautiful, to make it make sense... and only secondarily recounts to make the first count just, to actually make the game fair.

But for the moment accepting the hypothesis, let’s suppose the question of the political is governed by a logic of interests. We would only be able to ask the historical, or genealogical question: how does the apparent order of political categories arise in the first place? Thus we have abandoned a total vision to attain the power of multiple distinctions; but these sublime clarities become blurred when re-cognized as heterogeneous but communicating spaces. Univocity becomes the mysteriously infinite power of division, singularization, disjunction. Jurisprudence is then stillborn as merely the power of distinction, the transient bifurcation of a wandering void.

In other words, if disinterestedness remains our criteria for justice, then the logic of politics collapses into a pseudo-logic of public and private spaces. The field of the political is introduced by a divisional logic. And if politics is the logic of interest, then thinking politically is only about fidelity, or loyalty – distinctly discerning within from without. My point is that finally this amounts to a violent surgical incision, an uncertain split which is claimed to found knowledge. Ontology understood thus deliberately provokes a suffering which reharmonizes our body into new rhythms, making of our bodies, our faces, and our minds a single goal: an object-lesson.

Transversality is something we do

A distinction serves a new axis of freedom for it allows access to new spaces of the machine, implies new trajectories of social movement. But insofar as distinction is a compressed sort of division, distinction also wounds us even as we ultimately escape its grasp. Though we remain but ghostly traces, the passion for division (almost!) fulfills our desire to be whole. In order to explain this, we must borrow the use of the term transversality from Felix Guattari.

Transversality is a group phenomena. It is the unconscious dynamic which propels the crowd forward. This aspect of transversal mappings is already the snare which prevents them as such from being politicized: that those who 'transversalize' their group become subject-groups, with definite desires, aims, goals, in short, identities. Then they have already created virtual subjugated groups, and in fact risk decaying themselves into dependency upon a reified transversality, which is already an outdated and neurotic fetish.

Guattari writes that transversality means the unconscious source of action in the group. There are no objective limits it cannot exceed, no ontological ruptures which a transversal mapping cannot reconstitute. Transversality carries the groups' desire. We cannot separate this from a political or ethical sense to transversality as well:

"It is my hypothesis that there is nothing inevitable about the bureaucratic self-multilation of a subject group, or its unconscious report to mechanisms that militate against its potential transversality. They depend, from the first moment, on an acceptance of the risk -- which accompanies the emergence of any phenomena of real meaning -- of having to confront irrationality, death, and the otherness of the other." (Guattari, Molecular Revolution 23)

Transversality, as I see it, is an involution of social desire which transfigures reality by scrambling and reordering all of the infinite segments of experience – maximizing their potential. To speak of the pure transversal is in a sense dishonest, because it isn’t, it becomes, it’s already speaking. It is the flowing of speech and even of comprehension itself. Transversality should be thought immanently, not transcendently. For the pure transversal would be the very source of order, in fact the opposite of its aim which is to draw lines of flight towards potential sites of resistance or escape. Thus thought becomes poetry if we describe it figuratively; after all, the transversal is not a point, but the flowing and endless remapping and self-organizing of singularities. Just as with distinction, the transversal ought to be thought of as more a function than a concept, a process than a singularized event. Transversality is not something you think; it’s something we do!

The transversal aspect of distinction allows us to describe what underlies the investments of social intensity in the political field. Deleuze is undoubtedly correct on this point: desiring-machines invest unconscious and even preconscious interests. These are either repressed or transversalized, in any case, no matter how deep the division, we are always reterritorialized into subject groups with identities and desires. Our desires, political or otherwise, seem to express themselves as though formed and even enunciated by complex machine of coordinating energy, force and power. Ontology is a symptom of the social deflection of transversality -- in this case inevitably into transcendence, beyond the social. Thus the will to power is identical to the will to truth only if society is to be abandoned.

But, above all, society must be defended. Love names the most disinterested emotion and thus also the most dangerous, the most radical of passions, whose evocation already demands a new becoming, a transversalization of hope into eternity. Certainly faith is never far from love, nor hope from good works: this simple paradox by which abundant organic health invests the whole field of social desire with its intensity is the essential mystery and goodness of love. Faith is involution itself, a counter-revolution which is yet ever more radical, demanding ever different intensities to be deployed: successively, in parallel, and finally even in transversal couplings, fractally self-dividing until it finally submerges itself purely in itself, whole, immanent and sublime. But to demand even more of love, to demand that it explicitly accomplish a transcendent self-reunification of being is too much. Being is a fractal machine, not a perfect circle: to replace ontology by mathematics is to abandon the field of social intensities at the very moment when it is the most ripe for revolution -- that is, when it is in the most danger of annihilation.

Conclusion

Over the last century, an epistemological inversion engulfed and splintered our experience of the world like a tidal wave. We have been shaken by a tremendous earthquake of uncertainty -- until we have reached the point scholars and scientists alike have actually become afraid of hard judgments and decisive evaluations. Psychologically speaking, this is a symptom of a withering envy, amidst weakening decadence; and at the very least, many thinkers have betray their social function by losing the confidence they once possessed of the power of the concept to approach, and to change, the real.

After phenomenology, ontology is the only science which really asks: does it make sense any longer to follow rules, to make copies of models, to mold ourselves in the images of icons, to become obedient before a sovereign truth? Ontology is the dream of inventing, invigorating and commanding an army of truths, and in turn to humbly ‘obey’ them; and thus to exhaust the potential geometries of sense: this is a more apt description of the goal of the conventional ontological process than as a second-order phenomenology. For there is no outside of being studied by ontology, the other is subsumed completely within the same. That I am another is already a poet’s fancy; indeed it would be much more incisive to say: there is an other within me, between myself and myself. Thus the fractured tautology could at least postpone its inevitable collapse.

My aim here has been to suggest that ontology be reformulated as an immanent science of harmonics, a materialist dynamics of social intensities in time and space. Division is not sufficient, and already betrays the nature of the metaphysical relation to the other. We have to be extremely careful here: the other is a purely immanent transcendence -- as the extreme cusp at the apex of a range of mountains. The other is a primary investment of the world prior to my own separate journey. The leap between us is infinite; any path across would also fly between the irreducibly separated spaces. No distance could traverse it; our separation is absolute. This division is atheism, and it is already the ontological situation, that is: an irreducible separation is the foundation of faith. For events are communities, even entire ecosystems: an ontology without ethics would become an ontology without reason. Thought becomes real when it involves itself in the situation, through complex assemblages of spaces delicately cloven by rigorous distinctions-- but seems to shutter and shake when confronted with the void of non-reason, the abyss of nonsense or the primary experience of multiple disjunctions.

The present, this convergence of heterogeneous series, is a primary experience which is ontologically non-describable. The truth of reality is an indiscernible which is quickly becoming-imperceptible. A transcendent relation to the infinite is implicit in any divisional algorithm which would claim to predict the future, even if it claimed to found order upon the void by infinitely subjecting yet another new assemblage of forces to its sovereign ownership and control. The grasp of ontology seems boundless, but it is not infinite, and despite Cantor not yet having been made capable of approaching the infinite. For ontology itself has not yet been made calculable, it is still its own indiscernible, and is incapable of recognizing itself as being an artifact of the arrangement of power sources in the social field, from whom its light and energy and sense emanate. Even transitory ontology only provokes the projective geometry of situations towards revolution, unable to conceive of a purely immanent involution other than as a pure act of faith.

Faith in separation alone is nothing but a desperate escape from a dangerous or inconsistent situation, precisely when we should be on the lookout for novelty (or at least a weapon!) Furthermore, by evoking a primary interface to a ‘transcendent’ plane of immanence, we imprudently (and quite impotently) presume a relation with the absolutely Other. Politically speaking, we need to forget the subject and transcendence. We should focus on redistributing intensities across the immanent social field of desires. “In a word, the social as well as biological surroundings are the object of unconscious investments that are necessarily desiring or libidinal, in contrast with the preconscious investments of need or of interest. The libido as sexual energy is the direct investment of the masses, of large aggregates, and of social and organic fields.”20

Appendix

1 cf. Being and Event, especially Meditation 35 (‘Theory of the Subject’) in which we see that “the subject is literally separated from knowledge by chance. The subject is chance, vanquished term by term, but this victory, subtracted from language, is accomplished solely as truth.” (Being and Event 397)

2 “The singular relation of a subject to the truth whose procedure it supports is the following: the subject believes there is a truth, and this belief occurs in the form of a knowledge.” (ibid)

3 “In an intellectual feeling the datum is the generic contrast between a nexus of actual entities and a proposition with its logical subjects’ members of the nexus.” (Process and Reality 407, Whitehead 1929)

4 In Deleuze’s sense, “there has only ever been one ontological proposition: Being is univocal... A single voice raises the clamour of being... What is important is that we can conceive of several formally distinct senses which none the less refer to being as if to a single designated entity, ontologically one.” (Difference and Repeition, Deleuze 35)

5 Alain Badiou, Bodies, Language, Truths (article, 2006)

6 “Thus ultimately all science depends upon direct observation of homology of status within a system. Also the observed system is the complex of geometrical relations within some presented locus... a loci of entities in ‘unison of becoming’ obviously depends on the actual entities... The factor of temporal endurance selected for any one actuality will depend upon its initial ‘subjective aim.’” Alfred North Whitehead (Process and Reality, 195)

7 “For if being is one, then one must posit that what is not one, the multiple, is not. But this is unacceptable for thought, because what is presented is multiple and one cannot see how there be an access to being outside all phenomena.” (Being and Event 23, Badiou 2006)

8 Alain Badiou. Bodies, Language, Truth (2006)

9 As Ellrich observes regarding Difference and Repetition, “Deleuze argues that the construction of distinctions without negation is not just possible, but absolutely necessary, if we wish to break the spell of representational thought and dialectics” (Lutz Ellrich 2003, “Negativity and Difference: On Gilles Deleuze’s Criticism of Dialectics”)

10 “It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.” (Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art, Badiou 2003)

11 Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche 58, tr. Kauffman1969)

12 “The one-truth, which assembles to infinity the terms positively investigated by the faithful procedure, is indiscernible in the language of the situation... It is a generic part of the situation insofar as it is an immutable excresence [something not represented in the situation, but present as operation] whose entire being resides in regrouping presented terms.” (396 Being and Event, Badiou 2006)

13 “With respect to the doctrine of the subject, the individual examination of each of the generic truth procedures will open up to an aesthetics, to a theory of science, to a philosophy of politics, and, finally, to the arcana of love; to an intersection without fusion with psychoanalysis. All modern art, all the incertitudes of science, everything ruined Marxism prescribes as a militant task, everything, finally, which the name fo Lacan designates will be met with, reworked, and traversed by a philosophy restored to its time by clarified categories.” (Being and Event 435, Badiou 2006)

14 Anti-Oedipus 374. Also cf. John Protevi from Between Derrida and Deleuze (London 2002): “Love is the call to enter that virtual and open up the actual, to install inclusive disjunction so that roads not taken are still accessible, so that we might experiment and produce new bodies.”

15 cf. Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (380-381): “...desiring-production produces the real, and... desire has little to do with fantasy and dream... Schizoanalysis merely asks what are the machinic, social and technical indices on a socius that open to desiring-machines, that enter into the parts, wheels and motors of these machines, as much as they cause them to enter into their own parts, wheels, and motors.”

16 “...[Fidelity is] the procedure by means of which one discerns, in a situation, the multiples whose existence is linked to the name of the event that been put into circulation by an intervention.” (Badiou 2006, Being and Event 507)

17 cf. Anti-Oedipus 367, where Deleuze writes: “Nonfigurative loves, indices of a revolutionary investment of the social field, and which are neither Oedipal nor pre-Oedipal since it all amounts to the same thing, but innocently anoedipal, and which give the revolutionary the right to say: ‘Oedipus? Never heard of it.’”

18 “The task of schizoanalysis is ultimately that of discovering for every case the nature of the libidinal investments of the social field, their possible internal conflicts, their relationships with the preconscious investments of the same field, their possible conflicts with these--in short, the entire interplay of the desiring-machines and the repression of desire.” (Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus 382)

19 “I call fidelity the set of procedures which discern, within a situation, those multiples whose existence depends upon the introduction into circulation... of an evental multiple.” (Badiou 2006, Being and Event 233)

20 Deleuze 1977, Anti-Oedipus 292

Works Cited

Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Continuum Press, London: 2006. Trans. of L’etre et L’evenement. Editions du Seuil, 1988 by Oliver Feltham.
Felix Guattari. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics (1984). Trans. Rosemary Sheed. Selected essays from Psychanalyse et transversalité (1972) and La révolution moléculaire (1977).
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Viking Press, New York: 1977. Trans. of Anti-Oedipe. Les Editions de Minuit, Paris: 1972, by Hurley, Seem, and Lane.
Gilles Deleuze. Logic of Sense. Columbia University Press: 1990. Original from Les Editions de Minuit, Paris 1969, by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale.
Freidrich Nietzsche. Genealogy of Morals (1887). Oxford University Press: 1996. Translated by David Smith.
Alfred North Whitehead. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. MacMillan Company, New York: 1929.
Lutz Ellrich. “Negativity and Difference: On Gilles Deleuze’s Criticism of Dialectics” Modern Language Notes 111 no. 3 (1996), 463-487

Wandering Fidelity: the State of the Political in Badiou and Deleuze-Guattari

2007-08-30T21:03:00.000-05:00

“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]}

With Being and Event recently translated, Alain Badiou has now enjoyed over a decade of philosophical clamor in English. His contentions with Deleuze over multiplicity, ontology, truth and the event (among other things) have already sparked numerous responses in various forms. The continued explosion of material onto the academic scene comparing these thinkers could be due to Badiou’s energetic polemical nature and the fact that he continues to produce boldly precise criticisms of Deleuze. One of those criticisms involves pointing out that Deleuze does not consider politics to be an autonomous form of thought. For Badiou, this exemplifies the reasons for their divergence and everything can be said to follow. This paper is an attempt to answer this provocative thought with a conjunctive analysis of the various political concepts that we find in these thinkers in order to imagine how the situation might proceed otherwise than divergence. The problem concerns a different current of thought that creates a space of affirmation for the coexistence and hybridization of the assemblages that populate the theoretical worlds of Badiou and Deleuze-Guattari.

Fidelity and Nomadic Thought

Jumping straight to the heart of Being and Event we find in Meditation 23 the introduction to the concept of fidelity. I say concept, but we find within the notion of fidelity a complex network enveloping not only the event and the subject, but also the State and possible counter-states involved with an other legitimate count. The most straightforward definition of fidelity begins the meditation: “I call fidelity the set of procedures which discern, within a situation, those multiples whose existence depends upon the introduction into circulation (under the supernumerary name conferred by an intervention) of an evental multiple” (232). Therefore, fidelity is three things: (1) a functional relation to the event, (2) an operation of the count-as-one of the regulated effects of an event by marking multiples as to their (non)-inclusion the groupings of multiples related to the event, and (3) a process that includes these group-multiples in the situation by operating on the terrain of the state of the situation, effectuating another count that legitimates a new space of political representation (233).

A process of fidelity must always make enquiries into situations because of its finite nature with respect to the infinity of situations themselves. An enquiry is a term that Badiou gives to any “finite series of atoms of connection for a fidelity” (234). Fidelity requires faithfulness “to the event that we are” because it is “an almost-nothing of the state, or…a quasi-everything of the situation” (235). Here Badiou highlights the statist aspect of fidelity clearly: fidelity, as another count, oscillates between a break with the old state of affairs in which presented multiples are unrepresented, to the establishment of a new, legitimate count in which hitherto excluded multiples can be said to be included and represented. These two moves are coextensive, but there are two negative forms in which fidelity can present itself, and philosophy must safeguard itself from falling into these traps.

The two illegitimate claims of fidelity can be reduced to a statist or spontaneist thesis on the one hand and the dogmatic thesis on the other. On the side of the former, a multiple is said to be connected to the event only under the condition that it belongs to it. Badiou equates this with the view that “the only ones who can take part in an event are those who made it such” (237). On the other hand, a dogmatic fidelity would claim to be coextensive with the presentation of the situation: this amounts to positing that “every multiple depends on the event” (237). Either a limited number of representatives belong according to the statist thesis, or a maximum number of presented multiples are in fact represented in the guise of the state of the situation’s goal to make sure all multiples are accounted for. Between these two operations that are linked to statist functions, Badiou proposes a generic fidelity. This typology of fidelities allows for Badiou to claim that the generic type is “definitively distinct from the state if, in some manner, it is unassignable to a defined function of the state; if, from the standpoint of the state, its result is a particularly nonsensical part” (237). In fact, this nonsensical part constitutes a real fidelity because it “establishes dependencies which for the state are without concept, and it splits—via successive finite states—the situation in two, because it also discerns a mass of multiples which are indifferent to the event” (237). Fidelity, in its truly legitimate power, must sever itself from the state and begin an arduous journey that I can only describe as a becoming-nomadic. If the fidelity is to perform legitimately both its role as count and as operator of connection, then it must effectively de-center its procedure through a nomadic escape route from the state—it must become-imperceptible in rendering itself unassignable and nonsensical to the dominant state of affairs.

But now we are back to where we began with fidelity: linked to the state in its role as operator of connection and inclusion, fidelity can be nothing less than a “counter-state,” otherwise known as “within the situation, another legitimacy of inclusions.” (238). Here is where the genuine role of the subject shines forth. In fact, the subject is split in a definitive way in Badiou’s theory: between subjectivization and subjective process. The former is linked to the concepts attached to intervention—the circulation of the name of the event—and the latter is linked to the concepts attached to fidelity—the operator of connection grouping multiples related to the event. Since Badiou holds that “A non-institutional fidelity is a fidelity which is capable of discerning the marks of the event at the furthest point from the event,” it becomes imperative for Badiou to split the event in two and argue for an additional supplement in order to assure fidelity’s legitimate actualization (237).

This is the fabulous moment in Badiou’s edifice, where, like the event, the subject disappears as it appears. This occurs only insofar as Badiou is careful to mention: “I will call subject the process itself of liaison between the event (thus the intervention) and the procedure of fidelity (thus its operator of connection)” (239). Yet in the next paragraph, Badiou proposes a radical hypothesis: “If, however, we suppose that there is no relation between intervention and fidelity, we will have to admit that the operator of connection in fact emerges as a second event. If there is indeed a complete hiatus between…the intervention and the faithful discernment…then we must acknowledge that, apart from the event itself, there is another supplement to the situation which is the operator of fidelity. And this will be all the more true the more real the fidelity is, thus the less close it is to the state, the less institutional” (239). Not only will this fidelity be more legitimate because it is less institutional, but it will also be legitimate insofar as the subject’s two halves never join to constitute it. Like Descartes and Lacan, Badiou divides the subject, except along other boundaries: the subject of fidelity and the subject of connection. Since Badiou defines the subject as the corresponding link between these two halves, the true faithful process requires us to think of processes of subjectivity without a subject.

Badiou writes with this same thought in mind in his Metapolitics: “(Bourgeois) ideology is characterized by the notion of subject, whose matrix is legal and which subjects the individual to the ideological State apparatuses: this is the theme of ‘subjective interpellation.’ It is crucial to note that ideology, whose materiality is provided by the apparatuses, is a statist notion, and not a political notion. The subject, in Althusser’s sense, is a function of the State. Thus, there will be no political subject, because revolutionary politics cannot be a function of the State” (63). So Badiou’s convoluted remarks about the subject become clearer with these statements, especially the subject of politics: not only is there no subject in so far as fidelity and intervention must be split to render a counter-state (or counter-count) legitimate, but also there is no political subject in so far as this subject is merely understood in terms of ideological state apparatuses that pre-establish socio-symbolic coordinates through which we must then come to occupy through a sort of becoming-accountable via the state. For Badiou, ontology has nothing to say about the event, but it also has no consistent stance toward those subjects that are presumably faithful to the events that inspire truth procedures, procedures that remain vital insofar as they articulate concrete divisions between the subjects that arise through disparate conditions, such as love, politics, science, and art. This is the first indication that there is a crack in Badiou’s theory of the autonomy of these conditions and their respectively singular subjects.

It almost seems ironic that two terms that Badiou utterly despises come to take on a fuller and broader significance when brought to bear upon this theoretical slippage. I’m referring to nomadic multiplicities and the lines of flight that constitute the speed of their deterritorialization. As early as Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari formulate some sketches for what seem to be two powerful concepts in light of this impasse. For example, how is the operator of connection supposed to be evaluated in terms of its proximity to the state (or the count of a projected new one)? Fidelity must become nomadic in order to develop the group-multiplicities that depend on the event. A sedentary fidelity will ultimately lapse back into resurrecting the old body of the former count and will never be able to develop the consistency and rigor of a new subjective space for the representation of the excluded. Even Badiou’s rendition of St. Paul can be read in this way—the apostolic discourse spread through a nomadic, epistolary intervention that steadily worked through a universalism for the construction of an egalitarian count (otherwise known as the Church). Fidelity must become nomadic, and this means that it has to be able to map out the lines of flight escaping and leaking from major power centers. A nomadic enquiry and fidelity is necessary insofar as the state is hostile to the wandering void and indifferent towards events and the truths they inspire.

The minor mode of a nomadic fidelity enquires into different molecular flows, invents and sustains lines of flight that are not mere metaphors as Badiou assumes them to be. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari give a good example of a refined understanding of Badiou’s project: “The law of the State is not the law of All or Nothing (State societies or counter-State societies) but that of interior and exterior. The State is sovereignty. But sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of internalizing, or appropriating locally” (360). Here the question of the operator of connection in a fidelity is transposed onto a problematic relating the 'internalizing' function of the state's count and the externality of the multiples presumed to be illegal according to the state-of-the situation. Deleuze and Guattari are unequivocal when it comes to this principle of leakage or drift from the state's power to assure its own count: "Every central power has three aspects or zones: (1) its zone of power, relating to the segments of a solid rigid line; (2) its zone of indiscernibility, relating to its diffusion throughout a microphysical fabric; (3) its zone of impotence, relating to the flows and quanta it can only convert without being able to control or define. It is always from the depths of its impotence that each power center draws its power, hence their extreme maliciousness, and vanity” (226). These three zones correspond to Badiou’s state-of-the-situation, the alternate space opened up through another count, and the zone of impotence that relates to the multiples that escape the state’s capacity for representation. Fidelity must be able to seize upon and alter the terrain of this impotence. By locating these weak zones, a successful nomadic count attains the potential for destabilizing the official state of the situation. But the power that is unlocked by the event has to organize itself in such a way that the new count is a truly revolutionary investment; otherwise, the state can always contort its surface in order to axiomatize revolutionary desire back into preconscious class interests.

The Reactionary and the Revolutionary

This leads us into a deeper discussion of fidelity insofar as Badiou comments on a fault in the construction of his system in his Ethics. In the “Preface to the English Edition” written 12 years after his main work, Badiou writes: “The subject cannot be conceived exclusively as the subject faithful to the event. This point in particular has significant ethical implications. For I was previously unable to explain the appearance of reactionary innovations. My whole theory of the new confined it to the truth-procedures…I was then obliged to admit that the event opens a subjective space in which not only the progressive and truthful subjective figure of fidelity but also other figures every bit as innovative, albeit negative—such as the reactive figure, or the figure I call the ‘obscure subject’—take their place” (lvii). Badiou’s concept gains extra clarity in relation to what Deleuze and Guattari analyze in terms of the revolutionary and the reactionary poles of a social body. They theorize these terms through a synthesis of two concepts: the split between subject-groups and subjugated-groups and the division between pre-conscious interests and unconscious libidinal investments. Through developing the interactions between these two concepts we will be able to understand how Deleuze and Guattari thoroughly provide a theory that is subtle enough to see the dangers in a simple opposition between the reactionary and the revolutionary.

In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari stress that the duality of revolutionary/reactionary does not function in the same way on the preconscious and unconscious levels: “The preconscious revolutionary break is sufficiently well defined by the promotion of a socius as a full body carrying new aims, as a form of power or a formation of sovereignty that subordinates desiring-production under new conditions. But even though the unconscious libido is charged with investing this socius, its investment is not necessarily revolutionary in the same sense as the preconscious investment. In fact, the unconscious revolutionary break implies for its part the body without organs as the limit of the socius that desiring-production subordinates in its turn, under the condition of an overthrown power, an overthrown subordination” (347). What becomes clear in the pages that follow this is the fact that these are two ways of looking at desire: on the one hand, desire refers to a break “between two forms of socius, the second of which is measured according to its capacity to introduce the flows of desire into a new code or a new axiomatic of interest (348). But this is to still invest the new socius with values that subordinate desiring-production to the criteria of possibility that are pre-established with the former socius. On the other hand, the unconscious revolutionary break “is within the socius itself, in that it has the capacity for causing the flows of desire to circulate following their positive lines of escape, and for breaking them again following breaks of productive breaks “(348). Again, Deleuze and Guattari are unequivocal when they write, “Truly revolutionary preconscious interests do not necessarily imply unconscious investments of the same nature; an apparatus of interest never takes the place of a machine of desire” (348). The task of the unconscious libidinal investments, then, is linked to the making possible of the logic whereby the intervention and the procedure of fidelity—undeniably dislocated due to the criterion of legitimacy—are able to function by “subjugat[ing] the large aggregate to the functional multiplicities that it itself forms on the molecular scale” (348). Could it be possible that the finite enquiries of a fidelity are molecular in the sense that they subordinate the state of affairs to a network of alternative legitimate inclusions, thereby creating novel processes of selection of the counting operations that effectuate positive political representation?

This reading is a tempting path to follow. However, at another level the corresponding conceptualization of the subjugated-group and subject-group brings to light just how mistaken Badiou was when he argued in his early essay that Deleuze and Guattari are merely returning to the Kantian subject. For unlike Badiou’s conception of the ‘good’ subject faithful to the event and the ‘obscure’ subject that is vaguely irrational yet innovative, Deleuze and Guattari argue for a more supple theory that allows for us to understand why and how subjugated groups and subject-groups continually spin off and turn into each other. Instead of invoking the fullness or emptiness of the void, these two groups have to be related to indices of the revolutionary or reactionary potential in preconscious and unconscious investments. And unlike the subjugated group that enslaves desiring-production to a pre-formed state, “the subject-group invents always mortal formations that exorcise the effusion in it of a death instinct: it opposes real coefficients of transversality to the symbolic determinations of subjugation, coefficients without a hierarchy or a group super-ego” (348-349). Another question comes to mind with these lines: is it possible to think of every count, including fidelity’s counter-count insofar as it still remains a statist notion, as supporting the formation of subject-groups if the former is suffused with an inherent, transitory mortality? This makes sense with the definition of enquiry that Badiou gives: the finitude of representation versus the infinity of situations—in other words, because enquiries are by their nature recursive, can we think of mortal fidelities as a concept that can help theorize not only the reduction of the power of the state, but also the exploitation of its weaknesses and blindspots in relation to the events and truths that escape them?

These mortal formations embody the infinity of the organizations of new legitimate subject spaces through mortal counter-states that continually undermine the preconscious interests of exclusive classes. In fact, Badiou has come close to arguing this sort of duality, though with different terms and concepts. For example, his essay “Philosophy and Politics” begins to make more sense in light of the subjugated/subject-group dichotomy: “Any definitional and programmatic approach to justice turns it into a dimension of the action of the State. But the State has nothing to do with justice, for the State is not a subjective and axiomatic figure…The modern State aims solely at fulfilling certain functions, or at crafting a consensus of opinion. Its sole subjective dimension is that of transforming economic necessity—that is, the objective logic of Capital—into resignation or resentment. This is why any programmatic or State definition of justice changes the latter into its contrary: justice becomes the harmonization of the interplay of interests. But justice, which is the theoretical name for an axiom of equality, necessarily refers to an entirely disinterested subjectivity” (55). This dualism between the interests of political non-thought and disinterest as the true subjectivity of political thought finds a similar articulation in Deleuze and Guattari, for they write: “In the subjugated groups, desire is still defined by an order of causes and aims, and itself weaves a whole system of macroscopic relation that determine the large aggregates under a formation of sovereignty. Subject-groups on the other hand have as their sole cause a rupture with causality, a revolutionary line of escape” (377). This revolutionary line of escape is justice (in Badiouian terms) insofar as it cuts a diagonal of thought transversal to both the State and its promotions of interests (including preconscious interest groups and their respective subsets). Distinguishing subject-groups and subjugated groups should involve asking about the nature of justice and whether or not these concerns are disinterested in terms of the State.

Conclusion: Masses, Classes and Moles

“I learned that [Deleuze and Guattari] had spoken approvingly of my little book De l’ideologie for the way in which I put into play, at the core of political processes, the distinction between ‘class’ and ‘mass.’ –Alain Badiou[4]

Love, for Badiou, takes off where politics ends (Metapolitics 151). For Deleuze and Guattari, love is the index of the reactionary or revolutionary character of the social investments of the libido (Anti-Oedipus 352). Moreover, politics for Deleuze and Guattari pervades the social whole—it precedes being (A Thousand Plateaus 203). This can be considered one of the axioms of schizoanalysis because the latter is the “analysis of desire” and is “immediately practical and political whether it is a question of an individual, group, or society. For politics precedes being. Practice does not come after the emplacement of the terms and their relationships, but actively participates in the drawing of the lines; it confronts the same dangers and the same variations as the emplacement does. Schizoanalysis is like the art of the new” (203). Schizoanalysis should be understood to include the self-recursive observer space that the construction of a new political subjective space entails. It analyzes the ways in which different groups in relation to their desire are already stratified through the segments that divide them. Furthermore, schizoanalysis argues that desire is always contorted by these divisions. This torsion entails an affirmation of the ways that political spaces are consequently segmented by this deterritorialization. This analysis can reveal effective ways of changing our methods of inclusion that must involve a decision that wagers on the becoming-legal of a subject through the process of fidelity.

We will wager against Badiou that there is no strict division of the conditions of philosophy into four sutures—instead the social field is overflowing with a blossoming of subjects that are segmented in different ways, and these types are not reducible to static categories like love, science, art, and politics. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari make this clear by arguing that “art and science have a revolutionary potential, and nothing more, and that this potential appears all the more as one is less and less concerned with what art and science mean…but that art and science cause increasingly decoded and deterritorialized flows to circulate in the socius, flows that are perceptible to everyone, which force the social axiomatic to grow ever more complicated, to become more saturated, to the point where the scientist and the artist may be determined to rejoin an objective revolutionary situation in reaction against authoritarian designs of a State that is incompetent and above all castrating” (Anti-Oedipus 379). This can occur when the scientists and artists become unbound from the state and therefore become-nomadic. This will allow them more freedom from the sedentary domain of the state and cause the flows of their productivity to enhance the depth and energy that has to suffuse fidelity in order to force it to get up, move about and enquire into the situation.

But doesn’t the social axiomatic relate to the functionality of the state’s accountability? In other words, when Badiou stresses that, in forming a counter-state, “fidelity operates on the terrain [my emphasis] of the state of the situation,” we should understand fidelity to subordinate the “conditions” of philosophy to the deterritorializations that unlock molecular flows on the terrain or topography of a new representative subjective space. This should hold for all four of the conditions, and once we understand that desire creates real effects in the terrain of fidelity, we should be able to theorize more abstractly about the operations under which collective statements are formed.

This brings me to Deleuze’s seminar “Dualism, Monism and Multiplicities (Desire-Pleasure-Jouissance).” Deleuze refers to a book called the Sexual Life in Ancient China, and in it we find descriptions of “manuals of love and manuals of military strategy are indiscinerible” (92). Through the torsion of deterritorializations, what seem to be unrelated discursive areas somehow become twisted in a parallel genesis. In other words, Deleuze theorizes that there are social transformations at work that produce a co-development of seemingly autonomous cultural spheres. Deleuze follows this thread up by trying to find a conceptual gateway to these phenomena without the concepts of structuralism or Marxism. In fact, Deleuze goes so far as to invoke an abstract machine and a machinic point, the latter designating, for a given collectivity and at a given moment “the maximum of deterritorialization as well as, and at the same time, its power of innovation” (93). Another paper topic would be able to analyze Badiou’s conditions in terms of abstract machines that cover a social space and refer to machinic points that indicate the speeds at which machinic assemblages of love, war, science, and art can be deterritorialized and reterritorialized according to—what Guattari would have called—existential refrains and incorporeal universes of value (93).

The social axiomatic is being challenged in other ways as well. For the terrain of a fidelity is crisscrossed by flows and segments: “one distinguishes between the molecular aspect and the molar aspect: on the one hand, masses or flows, with their mutations, quanta of deterritorialization, connections, and accelerations; on the other hand, classes or segments, with their binary organization, resonance, conjunction or accumulation, and line of overcoding favoring one line over the others” (221). Masses and classes? Sounds familiar—let’s see if we can detect the slightest hint of admiration in the footnote attached the section I just quoted: “Alain Badiou and Francois Balmes advance a more objective hypothesis: masses are ‘invariants’ that oppose the State-form in general and exploitation, whereas classes are the historical variables that determine the concrete State, and in the case of the proletariat, the possibility of its effective dissolution; De l’ideologie [Paris: Maspero, 1976]. But it is difficult to see, first of all, why masses are not themselves historical variables, and second, why the word is applied only to the exploited (the ‘peasant-plebeian’ mass), when it is also suitable for seigneurial, bourgeois masses-or even monetary masses” (A Thousand Plateaus fn. 20, p. 537).

This small footnote can allow us to see a much broader picture concerning fidelity. There are a vast multiplicity of fidelities that spread throughout the social body with preconscious interests and unconscious investments. These multiplicities are also variable in their typology and are constructed and revised, divided and revisioned through singular processes. Each ‘mass’ has to be analyzed along with the abstract machines to which the process of creating a new subjective space endows itself with actuality. Different masses, too, are striated and segmented by the hierachization of class interests that tie the former to promoting their interests back into the given state of the situation. A transversal of thought must be crafted in order to render these interests indifferent by light of the truths that chance to infuse the social body with enough energy to transform—for better or worse.

^{^[1]} Badiou, Alain. “One, Multiple, Multiplicities.” Theoretical Writings. Trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano. Continuum, London: (2006). p.69.

^{^[2]} Badiou, Alain. “The Flux and the Party: In the Margins of Anti-Oedipus.” Trans. Alberto Toscano. Polygraph 15/16: (2004). p. 79.

^{^[3]} Deleuze, Gilles with Antonio Negri. “Control and Becoming.” Trans. Martin Joughin. Futur Anterieur 1 (Sptring 1990).

[4] Badiou, Alain. Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Trans. Louis Burchill. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. p.2.

'A Chain of Necessary Rings of Culture': Nietzsche and the Ability of Science

2007-08-30T03:51:00.001-05:00

In sections 4 and 5 of Human All Too Human, Nietzsche develops a non-linear train of thought that attempts to analyze and reconstruct the experiences and concepts of religion, art and science. There are developmental factors and connections among these three, for “art raises its head when religion relaxes its hold,” and the “scientific man is the further evolution of the artistic” (150; 223). Poets, for example, construct bridges to distant ages and dying religions, creating metaphysical alleviations that only serve to quell the truly revolutionary energy flowing beneath the surface of the social body (148). Also, artists are the notorious “glorifiers of the religious and philosophical errors of mankind,” and even though this has granted us the signification of a beautiful world, we have to ask ourselves the question: if Nietzsche tells of the death throes of art and religion, what does science inherit from these projects and how can their insights and creations be carried on in an affirmative project for the creation of necessary rings of a universal culture of free spirits (220)?

Art’s expansion transforms religious sensations and expressions, lending them profundity and an increased capacity for articulating these sensations—and science (the Enlightenment) is responsible for the dispersion of religious feelings into other areas, even politics (150). But if art is dying, then we must posit that the transformations of these metaphysical and religious sensations through art must also become invested into a new sphere, namely science. This is true because, when one organ of culture has weakened, another organ “has to discharge not only its own function but another as well” (231). Science inherits from art its ability to “look upon life in any of its forms with interest and pleasure, and to educate our sensibilities so far that we at last cry: ‘life, however it may be, is good!’” and has even made this affirmation “an almighty requirement of knowledge” (222). Thus, we can give up art without losing the capacity and sensibility that art and religion has prepared for us.

Science has to cultivate these capacities and seize upon its true calling as the project of achieving an objective by the appropriate means (256). Nietzsche’s science, gifted with the premonition of the Eternal Return, will assert that “every action performed by a human being becomes in some way the cause of other actions, decisions, thoughts, that everything that happens is inextricably knotted to everything that will happen,” that motion is enveloped in an immortality that is the total union of all being (208). Science also must recognize that everyone is “determined by such systems and representatives of different cultures” in a necessary but alterable fashion (274). This power to alter our cultural “determinations” means that we are responsible for our experiences and life experiments, that these are to be fused into a “goal without remainder” that has as its aim the will to distinguish ourselves as forming “a necessary chain of rings of culture and from this necessity to recognize the necessity inherent in the course of culture in general” (292). We are cultural artifacts composing necessary links to a universal culture that, even if it exists only potentially, must be achieved by the labor of free spirits, the kind that seem “to be the opposite of that which is profitable to their country or class” (227). Of course, the dominant culture and the established authority will resist the required degeneration of its stability, but the development of a de-centered, non-hierarchical, universal culture can only begin through the process of weakening the fetters of state culture. This will allow for the generation of lines of flight for new social organizations and/or assemblages.

To conclude, there are three possible factors for the birth of a global culture: absolute music, the scientific analysis of symbolic gestures, and a new language for all. The first two are closely linked, and they require an understanding of how poetry produces a superimposition of immediate feelings in music to the point where the music itself is rendered immediately symbolic for our internal life (215). The development of absolute music for the social ear means that music’s symbolism is understood without further assistance—likewise, the science of cultural tones in vocal patterns that are indicative of mood, feelings and expressions will be necessary to uncovering the vastness of operations at work in unconscious modifications of body and voice. Furthermore, linguistics and philology, as the two dominant sciences of language, can then dedicate their study of the laws of individual languages to the forms of non-verbal thought in a synthesis that has as its goal the creation of a “new language for all—first as a commercial language, then as the language of intellectual intercourse in general” (267). Given that this is merely a preliminary overview of an undercurrent in Human All Too Human, the next step in continuing this line of thought has to navigate the role of the state, the relations of states among themselves, and the relations among the responsibilities that we all bare to our composition of immortal vibrations in the links of a universal cultural chain.

Nietzsche and Psychology

2007-08-28T17:21:00.000-05:00

Just as the glaciers increase when in the equatorial regions the sun burns down upon the sea with greater heat than before, so it may be that a very strong and aggressive free-spiritedness is evidence that somewhere the heat of sensibility has sustained an extraordinary increase.
Nietzsche (§232, Human, All Too Human)

As Nietzsche develops it, the specifically psychological question is already a social investigation, perhaps even close to the anthropological question. The psychologist asks: what is the specifically cultural essence, or social truth, which is expressing itself in such-and-such a symptom?

Hence in order to explain scientifically the psychological origins of culture, Nietzsche dares to suggest we have need of a truly new kind of science, one finally made capable of analyzing cultural institutions without prejudice, from a perspective both critical and healing at once. In order to maintain its deliberate and fruitful inconsistency, the science of the unconscious must first of all recognize that cultural shifts are like geological changes. Social evolution shifts all potential axes of action and reallocates the coordination of space and time. Cultural transformations can sometimes even involve a shift in cognitive dimension, as in the ‘cusp’ at the apex of a mountain range, born from a complex balancing of counter-movements.

Indeed, we see Nietzsche intervening in the popular account origins of society, of thought – but always in order to point towards a more legitimately scientific and psycho-historical way of diagnosing and re-evaluating specific cultural modalities. For the psychologist, a fable of creation (whether of the universe or a single idea) betrays jealousy and ambition. We ought to understand creativity in a purely immanent sense: not as diverging from being, but rather perceiving that creation functions as the origin of difference, and is not only concerned with temporary variations in dominant modes of consumption or production. The power of the originary impulse is such that it formulates even the second-order coordinations of coordination which all together frame the conditions of any potential change. This is why unrecognized difference is the very beginning of thought.

The dominant patterns of coordination express themselves culturally as a lattice of ontological limitations a people willingly imposes upon its self-creation: an absolute vision, of an absolute goal. Though creativity may fail, though the goal may be forgotten, the path is anachronistically adhered to: this is the meaning of an origin, as the traumatic real which lurks behind every symptom as unitary cause. Over time a people loses their original vision of the world; and when our very principles have been inverted, how could we hope to understand our own origin? Thus the question arises: have we misheard the voice of history? Has reality been misrepresented, or worse – has representation become indiscernible from reality?

The desire to create continually is vulgar and betrays jealousy, envy, ambition. If one is something one really does not need to make anything—and yet one nonetheless does very much. There exists above the ‘productive’ man a yet higher species.
Nietzsche (§210, Human, All Too Human)

Nature, Politics, Revolution

2007-08-28T00:10:00.000-05:00

Roger Brown, 'Talk Show Addicts (1993)

Events are named after the prominent objects situated in them, and thus both in language and in thought the event sinks behind the object, and becomes the mere play of its relations. The theory of space is then converted into a theory of the relations of objects instead of a theory of events... If you admit the relativity of space, you must also admit that points are complex entities, logical constructs involving other entities and their relations.
Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature

Immanence is, upon its surface, just a word which indicates that amongst the present relationships we observe, we perceive them as interlocking -- that reality is ‘inner space.’ Another way of saying this would be to say that we do not believe there to exist a deepest space. Thus when we make a claim of ‘pure’ immanence, we assert that there are no ‘extra’ layers of being above or beyond the situation, and that nothing spontaneously intervenes from another order of time. Immanence implies something special about the initial conditions of any space it is applied to: namely, that they open onto multiplicity, and fold in upon themselves without reference to an exterior. That there is no ‘outside’ of Being: this is pure immanence.

Nothing encapsulates an anti-immanent perspective more closely than the delicate epistemological framework inaugurated by Plato (but exemplified best, perhaps, by the cogito) which asserts that knowing and experiencing are but modalities of a fundamental distinction. Life is essentially separate: both within and without, split between thinking and acting.

In fact, a closer look reveals a complex topology of theoretical spaces. We find sense separated from truth, yet mysteriously contained within it. We ask: if reality is just what is contained in our modes of experience, how can we account for the existence of undistinguished situations (out of which our 'distinctive containers' evolved)? The answer is -- we cannot! Because of the ‘implicit transcedence’ in a distinctive geometry of experience, we literally cannot speak them -- because we “aren’t them."

Is it really so clear and distinct that such separated spaces would not communicate? Whatever the case may be, in every theory advancing a transcendent distinction as primary, there emerges the necessity for an enduring interface produced by a geometric projection between the distinguished spaces. In the ontology of Alain Badiou, ‘fidelity’ names the connective operation between elements of an enumerated network of forces. In the clarity of this fidelity, the distinctions between subject and event, process and underlying ‘reality’ become critically blurred and radically ambiguous. The void can no longer be absolutely distinguished from the situation. That radical reflection which discerns the indiscernible becomes autonomous by this same maneuver -- in his somewhat classical conception, the subject-space is divided between art, science, politics and love. But we should not judge from this that these spaces are indeed so indubitably separated (in reality or in Badiou’s ontology,) nor should we conclude from his idiosyncratic treatment of the ontological question that his project is without precedent.

For example, when Deleuze and Guattari say that “Love is an index of the reactionary or revolutionary investments of the libido in the socius,” they are indicating a requirement not only for political thought, but for creative activity in general: when we participate in sociality, if we do not do ‘it’ with love, the engagement becomes reactive, anachronistic, even “passive-aggressive.” Badiou's sort of fidelity has a similar requirement: you belong to the event only when you have made it what it is--and by this process, we become what we are. You either enter with love in your heart and hands open in passivity -- or you do not really enter at all, or only to critically misjudge the nature of your relationship to the event. For without love there is no revolutionary necessity.

Love is most important when it is immediately political, when it is immediately ethical. When love is so intense that it resonates, when it is totally without jealousy, this is when love unfolds its mysterious potential: its capacity to inspire, to dominate, to intensify a flow of desire. Love is reality: it’s affect is most closely claimed by the word ‘infusion.’ An unasked-for love is indiscernible, if only in its inclusivity -- which is why love is an ethical intercourse, or else a tragic ignorance: “If you do works of faith and you have not love, you do not know me.” I think it has been forgotten that Nietzsche descries not only pity, but also philanthropy, for within he could smell the vulgar desire to be praised. There is a kind of giving which is a selfishness posited for a love of mankind, and there is a kind of “love” founded upon God looking upon us and thinking of us as blessed. But love without jealousy is love without guilt, and a self-praising lifestyle is unfit for the faithful. Love is first giving in, not giving out.

We say love is perhaps the revolutionary impulse, for it is that emotion which first reminds us, with piercing clarity, of our real condition. Suffering is not guilt; pain relates to situations which are not eternal, to arrangements which evolve and change by their nature. To love means we could not stand the shame of another’s degradation; to love is to know the shame of the situation and to not accept it. Hope is only for a truth which is wagered upon, but love engages our responsibility to create new spaces for living-togehter. Thus to wager on an event is to become an intense potential for difference. We wager our singularities, and we have faith; only then can we create a new kind of situation. Faith has to be propelled; it doesn’t exist in rest. Ontology is the science of rest, the psychology of sleep: it provokes the deepest revelations, but not the deepest joy. That there is still a non-ontological space for thought today we perhaps owe to the endurance of joy. Our experience of political reality is intimately shaped by an careful community ‘surgery’ which conditions potential expressions of value. In practice, only a delicate subdivision accomplishes the total vision of faith, or ontology. A numerical theory of the event aims at continuity through becoming, where a genetic theory of society aims at becoming through intensity. The political is the abstract: the question of politics is that of clarity, and the truly political desire is a progression: from the will to transparency, to the will to distinction, and finally, the will to loyalty -- or the will to power.

Thus the rise in vivid experience of the Good and the Bad depends on the intuition of exact forms of limitation. Among such forms Number has a chief place.
Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (107)

Identity and Division

2007-08-26T15:34:00.000-05:00

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.

Politics through the Abyss

2007-08-23T23:56:00.000-05:00

Ontology after Deleuze, Badiou, Whitehead

Politics through the Abyss

We no longer need to be reminded that politics, and more generally ontology, are no longer concerned solely with concepts. We can even now question whether they have ever been. Ontology serenely seeks the primordial origin of all conceptual and actual order; politics, slightly more modest, seeks the root cause, or motive, to social order. Political ontology is not primarily concerned with concepts, but rather with functions whose specific operation is division. So we should no longer describe a thinker as deploying ontological or political concepts, but rather dividing in an ontological or political way. Thus the consistency of a political axiom rests fundamentally on the actual effectiveness of the virtual distinctions it draws.

Both ontology and politics are in effect a careful study of the potential varieties (and strata within varieties) of groups, masses, and milieus. More precisely, ontology presents the geometry of plausible inter-relations: mapping logical trajectories between evolving surfaces. Then ‘division’ is the ontological term, because whereas masses are indiscernible depths of correlation, surfaces present explicitly calculable interfaces. Surfaces are transversal for this reason, too: they skillfully restrain their powerful depths, maintain smooth boundaries even as they transcend, divide and encompass the inner abyss with a sublime act of distinction. For even (social and scientific) classes have to do, morphologically and genealogically, with a inclusion, belonging, a divisibility of property and reality.

Ontological inferences are not simply mathematical distinctions; and political thought precisely remembers the reasons not to give into comfortable abstraction, or to yield to transcendence-claims distinguishing degrees of belonging. For if masses of any kind can be said have an interest in this sense, then the idea of justice even as disinterestedness should invite us inquire whether and how they are cared for; thus we can say that materialism (and even, in an ironic sense, its modern subversion) contains an important kernel of ethical truth, namely, that counting is not comprehending. For example, let us compare a cursory scientific experiment which merely takes account of a sequence of events, to a mature scientific project which investigates interconnections between and within a variety of processes.

Similarly, framing social justice as an ontological distinction already begs the question of interconnection: for masses always have interests, even when ignored by those who ‘count.’ Counting can be seen as ‘disinterested’ only through a sublimation of inherited violence, a violence which imitates thought in its desire to become invisible, to become ingrained even into the very geometry of the universe, into the deepest substructures of information.

Beyond the Count, Outside the Distinction

The territory of the count is not absolute: there are wanderers about the edges, brave adventurers tracing paths into the void. Of course many break down, though some break through. Those who escape the territory of the count –mutants on the edge of the void – are those in whom real thinking can occur.

Three thinkers illustrated how this concept of marginal or transversal thinking plays out both metaphysically and politically. Though and politics function in divergent ways throughout the thought of Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze and Alfred-North Whitehead, but some major continuities can be clearly indicated. For Badiou, justice is pure disinteres, and the question is about the distance from the State-apparatus, the counting-machine. For Deleuze, the question of political thought is about the possibility of a process of healing desire; we need a radical kind of institutional analysis which is forward-thinking and energetic, both critical and clinical, not to mention capable of the heavy theoretical and practical work of rearranging the blockage, misdirection and appropriation of desire by institutions into a more healthy ecosystem -- mental, physical and social -- in order to help create better and more efficient social machines. For Whitehead, the question of social change is about evolution and flux [more?].

What ties them together is not faith in the future, but a faith in a primordial vision of society which is possible from our modern perspective. We could not have gotten this far without having a past, and while it is important to move beyond the past, history is ‘required reading’ for inaugurating a process of the gradual adaption of social systems towards new arrangements. Becomings should not be taken lightly.

The question is not: how are we to judge ontologies? For they already contain eschatologies, and dictate potential utopias. Ontology is like mathematics in that it is wholly symbolic, the dream of an ‘unbroken’ text, a self-contained truth lodged within its own marking. Any particular ontology already has its entire future sewn within itself – and even its prehistory. It is in the form of the intuition that prehistory shapes the present that we find a curious and golden thread running through Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Their modern counterparts – Deleuze, Badiou and Whitehead – have taken a similar inspiration towards a new kind of ontology.

The Power of Fidelity

To leap right in, let’s consider what occurs when we are faithful to an event or process. Does the process change us? Do we affect the event the way the event affects us? Does our fidelity structure the aesthetics, even the politics, of the form of representation? As faithful observers, we are mirrors from the world, but we are not in the picture. Faith is a becoming-void, turning something into nothing. Topologically, such a faithful subject could be considered the very origin of the situation, the distinguishing void-point around which the entire symbolic coordination is achieved. What is most apparent about this kind of conceptual apparatus is the possibility of a counter-coordination, that is, the inauguration of a new kind of public space, which is able to dispense with the hypocritical historical divisions between private ‘self’ and public ‘person.’ This division is the radical core of ontology, its danger and saving power – it is the dream of an ontology.

The power of fidelity as a subjective split between within and without is the most powerful of social drives, even intervening in the most mundane of political processes. Ontology, which itself is division, divides its own operation by faith: what is theory, and what practice to ontology? For it is certainly not merely counting! If the object of ontology is Being, then practically our consideration is not political (at least primarily) -- but ethical and aesthetic. We desire to make being good, to make it beautiful... and only secondarily to make it just, to make it fair.

For the moment accepting this hypothesis, let’s suppose the entire question of the political is merely the logic of interest. Then we would only be able to ask the genealogical question: how does the apparent order of political categories arise in the first place? In other words, if disinterestedness remains our criteria for justice, then the logic of politics collapses into a pseudo-logic of public and private spaces. Concretely, political machines introduce a divisional logic of splitting. Theoretically, this would imply that if politics is the logic of interest, then thinking politically is only about fidelity, or loyalty – that is, being able to clearly distinguish inside from outside. Again materially, this amounts to a surgical incision which is pedagogical, a suffering which functionalizes our body, making of it an object-lesson.

Transversality is something we do

A distinction serves a new axis of freedom for it allows access to new spaces of the machine, implies new trajectories of social movement. But insofar as distinction is a compressed sort of division, distinction also wounds us. Ironically, division (almost!) fulfills our desire to be whole. Let’s say that “social transversality” refers to that involution of social desire which transfigures reality by scrambling and reordering all of the infinite segments of experience – maximizing their potential. To speak of the pure transversal is dishonest, because it already speaks-- it is the flowing of speech and even of comprehension itself; for the pure transversal would be the very source of order. But we are poets when we describe it figuratively; after all, the transversal is not a point, but the flowing and endless remapping and self-organizing of singularities. Just as with distinction, the tranvsversal ought to be thought of as more a function than a concept. Transversality is not something you think; it’s something we do!

So what underlies all politics questions are the social machines which produce unconscious and even preconscious interests. Our desires, political or otherwise, seem to express themselves as though formed and even enunciated by complex machine of coordinating energy, force and power. Whitehead concludes The Adventure of Ideas:

“At the heart of the nature of things, there are always the dream of youth and the harvest of tragedy. The Adventure of the Universe starts with the dream and reaps tragic Beauty. This is the secret of the union of Zest with Peace:- That the suffering attains its end in a Harmony of Harmonies. The immediate experience of this Final Fact, with its union of Youth and Tragedy, is the sense of Peace. In this way the World receives its persuasion towards such perfections as are possible for its diverse individual occasions.”

Nietzsche's Historical Chemistry and the International Scene

2007-08-22T03:16:00.000-05:00

"Departure requires a rending that rips a part of the body from the part that still adheres to the shore where it was born, to the neighborhood of its kinfolk, to the house and the village with its customary inhabitants, to the culture of its language and to the rigidity of habit. Whoever does not get moving learns nothing, Yes, depart, divide yourself into parts. Your peers risk condemning you as a separated brother. You were unique and had a point of reference, you will become many, and sometimes incoherent, like the universe, which, it is said, exploded at the beginning in a big bang. Depart, and then everything begins, at least your explosion in worlds apart." --Michel Serres, The Troubadour of Knowledge

From the start of Human All Too Human, Nietzsche sets up the task of burning the corpse of God and religion, along with its bastard son, metaphysics. To do this, Nietzsche not only raises the challenge to philosophy to become thoroughly historical and historicizing, but also challenges science to develop “a chemistry of the moral, religious and aesthetic conceptions and sensations, likewise of all the agitations we experience within ourselves in cultural and social intercourse, and indeed even when we are alone” (12). This chemistry and history would be directed especially toward the way in which the reason and imagination function together to produce metaphysical images that overcode the natural world. In other words, Nietzsche argues that because we impose moral, aesthetic and religious demands on the world, we have recreated it in light of these demands—this happens insofar as “it is the human intellect that has made appearance appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things” (20).

This not only applies for these three specific overcodings. Even mathematics produces metaphysical illusions insofar as number imposes a false unity with arbitrary units of measure; however, it is only because these units are imposed with constancy that pure multiplicity can be subsumed under a number or set as a unity and still retain any utility. An example of an illusory unity is custom, defined as “the union of the pleasant and the useful” (52). This plurality exists as a unity insofar as custom is grounded in habit, which produces pleasant sensations because they integrate us within a collective. Custom takes on its power through the investments and productions of herd pleasure. It acts as a sort of arbitrary unifier—it forms a set of the multiple ways in which the social field produces a rhythm that corresponds with habits that legitimate themselves as useful. However, we can unfold or disentangle utility and any criteria relating to pleasure if we are able to create truly vital thought experiments that construct new ways of grouping together different values of the useful and pleasurable—maybe to the detriment of one or the other for the developing cultural forms that this sort of experimentation may produce. The question of the chemistry of social groups would consequently be concerned with the large molar aggregates of custom (representation) and the selection of the molecular flows of pleasure and utility that (de)compose custom and culture at large.

This is one path for this potential chemistry, but it is insufficient by itself because it presupposes a macropolitical view of situations and thus already relates our criteria to a pre-existing social body already pervaded with a dominant culture. On the micropolitical level, we could ask how to create along with this chemistry a physics of mortal and transient customs. Nietzsche sets this task for the free spirits to come so that they may continue the process of the auto-liberation of thought. As he reminds us, “The less men are bound by tradition, the greater is the fermentation of motivations within them, and the greater in consequence their outward restlessness, their mingling together with one another, the polyphony of their endeavours” (24). Nietzsche believes that to create this polyphony, we will have to move “beyond the self-enclosed original national cultures” (24). Nietzsche proposes a historicizing philosophy linked to the natural sciences that can analyze standards for a generic culture, along with the political situations that they entail, and that can act as a constructive milieu for thought. In fact, he challenges us to discover “knowledge of the preconditions of culture as a scientific standard for ecumenical goals. Herein lies the tremendous task facing the great spirits of the coming century” (25). Ecumenical has (at least) two significant meanings here: general and universal on the one hand, mixed and motley on the other. With this we can tease out a physics along with this socio-historical chemistry. For if we couple Nietzsche’s proposal for a chemistry of aesthetic, religious and moral concepts and sensations with his injunction to discover the preconditions of culture from a universal point of view, then we start to connect a series of thoughts that point toward a social science that can address the question of generic and universal cultural construction that grounds itself in a physics of the interaction between molecular beliefs and desires (affects) and the corresponding cultural formations (custom) that result from the bindings of the former to a metaphysical image. The historicizing process, then, must deal with the evolution of habit and the institutions of the state that stratify custom within the social field.

Image and Capital

2007-08-21T00:38:00.000-05:00

Prometheus

We desire illusions -- because we desire revelation. When we have faith, our energy inverts itself from within: the world is suddenly magically transformed, us along with it. Illusions! More like liaisons. Economy is the same way: a magic power grasps hold, a flow of energy spontaneously rearranging the underlying order of the universe. Capital is a specter and a spectacle: universal miracle machine, superego-substitute and hyper-sexual idol all-in-one. From images branded onto faces, tasks onto hands, and illusions onto gazes-- somehow money is produced. Capital is the illusion; for money-as-signifier is dead, dead since capitalism declared its global aim, to include all within its dream. Capital is a pure power retreated into its own image -- which has just as quickly plunged the earth right into the depths of the Virtual.

The image only is sovereign -- the sovereign is imaginary. Ideal for a complex bureaucracy -- where we are ruled by no one. The spectacle is again the most ancient epic, the many against the one, the story of power’s evolution: until finally machines have taken responsibility over our imagination! Once, timid and easily frightened away or turned back, now the Image has truly come into its own virtual domain. Spaces for interpretation of any kind are now entirely produced as images. There is no love but for a machine; all else is war, a war against the order of things... Hope is an image, fear a symbol; both are faces, branded onto images more deeply than their contents or design. Yet we know we can affect images -- because images affect us! Micropolitics is not just local subversion, but molecular involution: unfolding, reconvergence, diffusion.

Ideology is not a dream, nor can we abandon concepts for functions: for it is our very existence in question and on trial as a false image of life... Conscience demands that we must move beyond ontology towards a new dimension, on the other sides of images -- in sohrt, towards a material ethics of conviviality. Which is not to say of justice per se, but more explicitly of cohumanity, control and creativity. Never has it been clearer than in our time the essential disunity of human existence: that is, that necessity is not opposed to free will. We are not total by ourselves; our potential is only unlocked in the energy and power of a group. And as soon as a group has definite aims, a goal and an identity, it is already a war-machine. It seems we cannot escape answering some call or another; the lesson is not only that we ought to distinguish between imaginary ideals and real dreams, but even that the real image we follow has only virtual substance, one we are choosing and desiring to experience.

Irony and Science

2007-08-18T23:42:00.000-05:00

0. Empiricism lives and studies in the future anterior; thus order and number appear, as though already in their most sublime perfection, and involve themsleves in the experiment as though always fully formed from the outside. They are a key to the symbolic universe and thus a virtual island of hope -- but survival demands we must be harder than mere forms. Faith in number, the pure form of being, isn't even ironic; it's messianic, a hermits’ opium dream. For truth can be unveiled only on the basis of differences, and among these only those which make a difference; therefore sets already contain a measure of sublime violence. Any enterprise ironically founded upon the abyss cannot overcome its own implicit transcendence and lapses into reaction-- if it fails to rise forward towards any kind of 'bright future' other than one already fully formed. And in any case, science is never an end, but a means; and insofar as this remains true, it will function transcendentally, and even ironically, as a form of institutional violence.

1. For upon what does reason does stand, if not itself -- if not upon it's own virtuality, it's unconscious investments? Reason is like freedom because it speaks upon its own authority: it does not dominate, yet effortlessly counters every effort towards domination. Could we not identify it as a species of sublimely misplaced aggression, purged first of violence, and finally -- even of the sacred?

2. The experimenter is a creature of an obscure delight, whose most intimate and secret desire-- is to become invisible; in the wake of this daring closely follows the 'moral' scientist who wants nothing more than to be a “good” and “shameless” observer. In terms of bearing witness to the singular ‘truth’ of a process, our testimony is only as good as we have become equal to the process in question. The experimental subject thereby becomes the secret and esoteric origin of the scientific situation. Not that science is to be relegated to narration; on the contrary, it may be that the path of the shaman and that of the biologist in the future could converge...

3. The scientist dreams of a time when knowledge will spread and conquer fear. Collective reason abhors the abyss, and cannot authentically envision the emptiness of the void as constitutive; yet for all our higher reason, as science approaches the edge, it grounds more and more of itself upon its own shadow. Science must rather illuminate: the void is not the ground but a kind of sickness, and the paranoid certainty of a egoistic-rational framework already demands a recovery-- a transvaluation. On this point, our position ought to be that the global and the local are neither distinct nor indiscernible. Thus we can observe (and without paradox) that the universe is evolving in time, that it is both orderly and chaotic, that some parts are hidden and others are revealed, that the whole is both being and becoming, all this at once, and in very many different kinds of ways. Thus we also must understand, and henceforth without mysticism, that existence -- visible or invisible -- is only ever spoken about in one sense.

4. Of course, there may be unseen dimensions of being-- but this is a conceptual boundary. For even these belong upon the same material plane when we indicate ‘being’ in its pure verbal and infinitive sense: to be as an infinite multiplicity.

5. We can now easily understand how reason is a meta-strategy: it is the thinking behind thinking, a sort of combinatorical game. More precisely, meta-strategy is calculating odds on the duration that a certain method (of prediction, explanation, control) will (continue to) succeed in ‘approaching’ being. So even though scientists are attempting to find ‘universal’ answers, transcendence is rarely explicitly invoked in scientific discourse. Yet the subject of science is such that experimenters cannot escape that they are concerned, in a specifically human way, with illuminating a species of ‘timeless’ truths.

6. The ‘science’ of language makes this particular paradox clear: enunciation, is after all, only a bridging of two different ways of measuring time.

7. Let us introduce a new understanding of the term by saying that analysis begins with the mutual understanding that something in a situation is existentially intolerable. This is, as it were, the heart of the vortex -- an (or even ‘the’) object which will not ‘let us alone.’ Thus the fundamental operation of analysis is the inscription of a transversal line through the heart of the obscurity, it is a kind of torturing which could possibly heal. It could turn out to be the creation of a new science, but undeniably more often it is simply the scientific creation of a desired objective process (removal of the feared or dangerous object, etc.) In light of the preceding arguments, we can now present the thesis that analysis traces these transversal lines of flight towards new senses of being. The displacement of aggression into a process of healing is a particularly fascinating inversion to which we shall have to return.

8. At the time, it is enough to say: for too long has the scientific position been tainted by irony, been thought refuted even by its ‘refined’ position. Science certainly must play the role of the ‘ignorant,’ but of course it is already an elegant and Socratic ignorance-- laced with irony towards public opinion, and for ‘established but unfounded’ explanations. The ambiguity of the position of science does not account for its ironic origin. Latent hostility towards authority can indeed open spaces for dialogue, but is this really the production of the possibility of a experiment? So it will perhaps seem unusual to suggest that the ironic may in fact be the classical basis for all scientific knowledge, though even Descartes’ reformulation of the basis of knowledge in terms of doubt and Lacan’s in terms of paranoia seem to indicate a deep psychological connection between science and the position of irony -- of the "not so ignorant"!

Theses on Sexuality and Sense

2007-08-07T19:33:00.001-05:00

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.

Beyond Ontology

2007-07-24T23:36:00.000-05:00

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!

General Relativity and Self-Reference

2007-07-23T02:50:00.000-05:00

Recent theories of galaxy-formation and cosmic evolution are inching closer to embracing the radical geometry of general relativity. In the decades since the publication of the Schwarzchild solutions to the Einstein field equations as given in his theory of general relativity, many physicists have staked and made their professional careers on the seemingly abstruse mathematical issues involved at the heart of the debate.

Scholars have been fascinated and even sometimes ‘consumed’ by the study of black holes and the associated conceptual complexities, perhaps especially the novel interpretations of non-linear geometry relating to the prediction of an extreme curvature of space and time. Initially a seemingly bizarre consequence of the field equations, it was perhaps all the more so due to the very unique conditions under which this “affine” torsion, or gravity vortex, ought to occur.

Since the days of those first thought-provoking theoretical intuitions, the body of scientific theory regarding black holes has grown enormously. We now believe that black holes are cosmic anchors at the center of most galaxies, curving the geometry of the universe at large, perhaps even “fracturing” it into infinite geodesic ‘slices.’ We are fairly certain that there is an awful lot of something providing an enormous amount of gravitational radiation.

We also now have a deeper understanding using differential geometry of the Newtonian assertion that gravity is acceleration. We are even beginning to look for gravitational waves, or ‘graviton’ particles, which amounts to something like looking for an accelerating shift in the geometry of spacetime.

Most of us know, but perhaps have not fully recognized the importance of the geometric innovation within Einstein’s thought in shifting from special to general relativity. The explanation of this shift can be summarized as follows: in special relativity, Einstein is still using a more or less linear geometry of curved space, which is called a Minkowski space.

With the shift to general relativity, Einstein has gone beyond curved Minkowski spaces to a new kind of 'self-constructing' space called a Lorentzian manifold, which possesses a radical non-linear geometry of momenta, whose curvature is defined by stress-energy tensors (or momentum.) Einstein had fully embraced an exotic auto-metric geometry where solutions of the system of equations are potential spatio-temporal geometries.

We began by considering black holes to be ‘marginal’ occurrences, but we are beginning towards a theory where they play a central role in the evolution of the cosmos. The lesson of the history of black holes is that autopoesis is an adequate paradigm at any scale, from the quantum to the cosmic to the social. Evolution is what the shift to ‘non-linear’ geometry in general relativity means: not only that spacetime has a curvature, but that this curvature has a curvature, that it can be fast or slow, self-destructing or evolving, divergent or harmonious, unified or fragmented, self-similar or infinitely differential, and arguably, even self-creating. Evolution is a cosmic principle that applies equally to tiny particles as to living creatures and galaxies.

But we must always remember that the relevance of evolution is political first. The history of the discovery of black holes reminds us of the importance of seemingly marginal occurrences. In other words, we ought to distinguish more clearly between the event of change and the process of change. Most will agree that the process of change and evolution is always in some sense amenable to observational modelling, because reality as such obeys only an internal and self-created measure, or law of motion. The event of change is, on the other hand, ontologically transversal -- a new space embedded within an old space.

It may also be helpful to think of this evolutionary ‘event’ as the shift between different spaces, or spaces moving at different speeds relative to one another. After all, even separated spaces can be made to intersect, and we can immerse a space within another space. So this is the cosmic situation: all spaces are interconnected, but all relationships are in flux. Knowledge, like life, is a rhizome, spreading out in all directions at once, ever-shifting, evolving and involving, gradually or quickly adapting to always-changing conditions.

The question of knowledge is always which situation it is deployed into, the transversal path it travels between spaces, or into an outer space from an inner space. What is important to recognize is that this fractal shift is nothing transcendental: it is a purely mathematical function. Consider a mapping f from a space A to a space B immersed within it.

f: A -> B

What is it that we should take the ‘->’ to represent? The '->' stands for an energy-transformation method, or transversal operation. In other words, '->' is any pairwise-matching rule that establishes a 'rhythm' between inter-facing geometries. We can understand this transformation in terms of Nash's work on immersion. Simply consider that for a given element x of an inner space, we are guaranteed some information-preserving mapping onto the outer space (into which the subspace is immersed)-- regardless of the global topogical structure or local geometrical structure of either of the spaces.

Now, most people know that Godel proved that a large class of deductive systems cannot find themseles consistent or complete. But we think it ought to be more widely known than it is that, since the publication of Spencer Brown's The Laws of Form, we can consider mathematics, logic, set theory and category theory, while essentially unfoundable, incomplete and inconsistent, they are such only insofar as they remain confined within their own non-self-referential containers and categorizations (even 'meta-mathematical' ones.) Yet Brown explains that this isn't bad news, but the best news: it was a clue that we can make use of a more fundamental pre-logic to recursively found mathematics itself. In fact such a 'calculus of self-reference' has been constructed, whose simple but somewhat non-intuitive rules allow us to inferentially derive logic, and even arithmetic and calculus, as well as set and category theory, and so on. In short, we can inscribe and prove even the most complicated results of some of the most advanced fields of mathematics using Brown's 'primary algebra' (or pa.)

In the pa, we begin with the void. It is an undistinguished space; we could argue there is no Universe because there has been no distinction made. Since all distinctions are made by an observer, the Universe is still a void while there is no observer present. Not a vacuum but vacuous: those things which may exist have not yet been told they may exist. Upon this void, let us suppose an observer arrives. Now we have a distinction: there are two spaces and thus a Universe, that is, we have made a mark, crossed a limit, traversed an interface via a singular point of local geometrical tension, which thereby accounts for the construction and subsequent immersion-into-itself of a complex topological space. We shall call such a separable or self-immersible space an observer space. Note the recursivity of this definition, for we are not concerned here with a projective geometry (though it is simple enough to derive it from the primary arithmetic) or even the seemingly critical question of vision; what we are rather interested in is the 'original' nomad transversal operator--the work of the observer-- which illuminates the heart of cognition, with the fact that the whole of mathematics (set theory, logic, arithmetic) can be derived from the primary arithmetic merely being the most clear example. Observation is the primary transversal operation.

Tranversal operators thus allow us to describe the evolving ex-tension of space from the involving in-tension of observation, from the functionalizing of the enunciatory-apparatus, or assemblage of presignifying intensities. Such an operator is a worker, and as such circumscribes and resonantes with the tension, or differential movement, between two spaces’ rules of measuring force. We could write: A(x) -> B(x), the particle x being the object-flow or subject-group. This can also be read as presenting the differential momenta between two non-linear dynamic systems. We can further decode this as a mapping which embeds or immerses an open space within itself, as in the conventional notation f(A)=B which often gets shortened even further A(B).

But the real question is this: where does the difference originate? Where did the tension come from in the first place? Not of course the tension within each space which forces every movement onto an observable path -- but rather the tension ‘between’ spaces observed in the transveral (function generating) operator ->. The transformation-operation encodes a transversal action across any spaces. Thus it describes the molecular evolution of a subject group, and not the position of a null transcendent absolute point of view, but precisely that of an engaged self-observing agency acting within time to fragment, tear apart, and finally dissociate a space entirely -- what eventually gets called 'working' -- in order to transform it into another.

Transversality

2007-07-09T22:26:00.000-05:00

Wood Cells, Microscopy UK

"Transference and interpretation represent a symbolic mode of intervention, but we must remember that they are not something done by an individual or group that adopts the role of the 'analyst' for the purpose. The interpretation may well be given by the idiot of the ward if he is able to make his voice heard at the right time, the time when a particular signifier becomes active at the level of the structure as a whole, for instance in organizing a game of hop-scotch. One has to meet interpretation half-way."
Felix Guattari (Molecular Revolution 17)

The experience of awakening from a dream seems to present a veritable crossing-over: as from one world to another. The passage is (more precisely) from one logic to another, as well: as dream-subjects of 'the' dream-god, we constitute at once the substance of the dream-image and the form of the dreamer, in a simultaneous movement: when we dream we promise the coordination of distinct singularities. Object and subject should therefore not here be read as antithetical; in fact, they are recompositions of the very same (intensive) forces and (extensive) spaces.

We are already beginning to recognize the passage from dream to wakefulness is not a 'merely ontological' transition. The movement is properly metaphysical for we traverse a territory which is neither dream nor wakefulness. We can sense here the outlines of a single underlying prelogical layer of swirling primordial chaos and the subsequent arising of the impulse-to-order. What is the cause of the impulse?

The first articulation of the impulse is production--in the case of the pure biological, reproduction. The second articulation of the impulse is enunciation proper, an interpretation of any kind of production. Our axiom that practice precedes theory seems to support the following thesis: the primary impulses (production) guide the secondary impulses (interpretation.) It is all a question of the proper conditions for interpretation. And it is here we must not resort to logical or ontological dimensions, but a new kind of dimensionality, with a fractal structure which radically traverses and binds together all the various ontological bifurcations and refolds them into an assemblage (of production, enunciation.)

Guattari explains that transversality is a group phenomena: the spectral dynamic which propels the group forward. This is already the snare which has prevented transversality as such from being politicized: that those who 'transversalize' their group become subject-groups, with definite desires, aims, goals, in short, identities. Then they have already created virtual subjugated groups, and in fact risk decaying themselves into dependency upon a reified transversality, which is already an outdated and neurotic fetish.

Again: Guattari writes that transversality means the unconscious source of action in the group. There are no objective limits it cannot exceed, no ontological ruptures which a transversal mapping cannot reconstitute. Transversality carries the groups' desire. We cannot separate this from a political or ethical sense to transversality as well:

"It is my hypothesis that there is nothing inevitable about the bureaucratic self-multilation of a subject group, or its unconscious report to mechanisms that militate against its potential transversality. They depend, from the first moment, on an acceptance of the risk -- which accompanies the emergence of any phenomena of real meaning -- of having to confront irrationality, death, and the otherness of the other." (Guattari, Molecular Revolution 23)

Living and Being

2007-06-30T00:02:00.000-05:00

Fantasio
(You can find more of his and other excellent original artwork here.)

Life explodes and bursts ontological boundaries in its rampant and chaotic proliferation. But does life transcend being? If so, we must understand such a transcendence in the erasure of the gap between ontological layers, or in the ‘splits’ between, and productive of, generations. Such gaps are 'magically' or 'miraculously' mended by fecundity.

Being, on the other hand, never truly carries multiple names. As Deleuze emphasizes it is only ever spoken of in one sense. Yet life, if it ex-ists, must speak on uncountably many ontological layers simulatenously. If it is being which stretches and folds, that is, whose curvature is produced by motion-- then it must collapse under a folding which converges geodesics (metrically differential spaces.) Being is folded into itself, but is only itself-- which is why it cannot bear being stretched or folded without decomposing into fractal spaces: the universe of the observer.

Life, which is the highest expression of the autopoetic force, is an unfolding and self-organizing, and therefore fractally active on an infinitely complex though immanent field. Language exemplifies this sort of transcendence-within-immanence. Words are alive though language appears to enjoy an independent existence. The independent perspective is not to be found in the transparency of sense, nor the opacity of the text, nor even of the pure a-signifiying bodies around which the texts are adjoined. The independence of language from its referent is an illusion, just as the independence of perception from a subject is a rather transparent illusion.

Sensation itself is political, so nothing is neutral. Only our hypocrisy, or desire to maintain an illusory distance, is universal. This leads us to believe that a scientific study of sense would be a sort of pseudology. We call simulation the essence of the sensical because of this illusion, sense founds itself violently, through a sort of a-signifying pseudo-bifurcation. Life itself in the contamporaneity of fractally divergent ontological zones presents simulation as such, that is-- a decoding... which encodes.

Nothing escapes this.

Our very being is overcoded. Our lives are seemingly free, yet we are enslaved to the sociopolitical responsibilities of speaking. Even the creative energy which animates our bodies is treated as a sort of universal commodity, for sale on the open market. No aspect of our life or existence is free from political influence, from the process of producing separation by subdivision. No sensation as such is a-political, because sense is a differential articulation of masses.

Sense is simulation because life suffocates in ontological isolation and only exercises power, only draws surplus value from a coincident inter-relation of ontologically distinct realities, which may fractally resemble one another, but then again--may not.

In fact this fractal self-similarity is really only characteristic of the ontological unity of the immanent field of existence, which as such can only be spoken of in a single sense. There are not and could not be multiple ontologically distinct realities.

Yet life multiplies realities as independent unities, and thus all life (and sensation) in inextricably political. Life coordinates topologically complex ontological arrangements. Sense is a science of rigorous hypocrisy because living is social. Perhaps life is even ultimately one, but such that it is a one which could never be actualized as a univocity of being. Life articulates its organiazation on infinitely many layers and levels at once. We even say: life organizes the empty spaces of a mechanistic universe into an instrument for song...

Fiction and Politics

2007-06-24T00:50:00.000-05:00

Characters are instruments and not just images or words.

The story as (spiritual) machine-inside-a-machine, endlessly. Thus character as frame for a meta-fiction, not the story within a story, but the story of the story. The character opens a new critical place within a narrative reality for the entrance of nomad elements from larger worlds.

The plot-as-frame yields a micro-fictional world, while the character-as-frame yields a macro-fictional juncture between interior and exterior: the book and the world.

A character is an ambiguous trace of reality-image.

The message within the message is not as important as the message around the (fake) message. Invert the desire for a self-directed message; and by revolutionizing this we acquire fictional individuation, a reading, a character, a hijacker-thought which leaps between the reader and the work backwards in time to create a thinking-subject which would always have been.

This retroactive infinity (of probability) is the actual materiality of the universe, which is all that exists.

Ourselves-as-characters is merely an illusion, an emptiness, a false signal, a meaningless trace. But characters-as-ourselves, however, is a towering and impossibly stable feeling, enormous, mythical, and deeply inspiring.

Most important, though, is that this fictional inversion turns out to be functionally or fundamentally true in a way which is difficult either to dismiss or explain. The political inversion retroactively founds all of human reality identically, but in reverse. To think politically is to conjure subjectivity into existence only so that it may be subjugated.

Lying

2007-06-23T19:20:00.001-05:00

Words signify man's refusal to accept the world as it is.
Walter Kaufmann

Sometimes you've just got to look reality in the face and deny it.

Isn't hope found finally in a (socially positive) sort of 'lying', a clear-eyed courage and a deep spiritual assurance? This natural social impulse could be literalized as something like: "even though you can't help but be false, still always tell the truth." I think this is actually the very beginning of speech, as a disappearance of the truth which opens a space for discourse.

But because religion in this way essentially denies what is most apparent, that this world is ALL that exists (all that we can percieve as such as existing,) when religion tells us to tell the truth, it seems to be saying: interpret the world justly. Without justice there can't be freedom and discourse and peace.

When we lie, we betray the event. So "not lying" means not framing things in bad faith. Telling the truth is a sort of faithfulness to an event, and because events as such are a-social and non-signifying, reality must be interpreted through culture, that is-- at a distance, as an image, the way we approach the future, is how we approach new thoughts and so this question of having faith, of telling the truth, is really about how we can ethically create new realities through language and technology.

From Nonsense to Sense

2007-06-22T20:27:00.001-05:00

Towards a Meta-problematics of Sensitivity

0 / Preface

Can we separate sense from situation?

If sense is first broached in the rupture of presence-- if sense is merely an immanent intelligibility-- then accordingly we would wish to know which ontological rules, if any, sensibility obeys. But is sense actually structured this way?

In attempting to answer this question, our first guiding principle shall be that not only is ontology inevitably economized and politicized as an active process in classifying and ordering the world, but also that ontology as such is a form of political economy. The neutrality is only apparent, or actual sterility; for ontology is by nature a colonialism. It is efficient organization. A closed ontology is consequently an anxiety, a monumental repression and, when taken literally, a refined form of self-deception.

Since they are interdependent, we can never properly divorce sense from situation. However, we can open out our entire sense-situation system, allowing the whole assemblage to unfold along radically new lines. We cannot change the sense of a situation at will. Importantly, it is an open question whether some new sense-situation system is possible. The encounter calls us precisely to sensitivity and to responsibility. Because sense is always a transversal mapping between and across radically different kinds of reality, sense is not just transparent sensation, but clear agency. Sense is cosmic: it accomplishes an active connection across material and abstracted ontological territories.

A modern Zeno’s paradox: the limit of the self-difference within and between autonomous ontological planes is unbounded. This illuminates three important questions: (1) Can we separate sense from sensititivy? (2) Can we transparently distinguish the perception from the interface? (3) Can we distinguish authoritatively between an ontological system and the energies it classifies?

1 / Space

Sense is nothing without a space in which to unfold, to insist, to happen. Thus in sense we find both inner and exo-natural space, and an active movement coupling them together. Sensitivity is a bridge which subsists from concrete duration: sense is something that happens. Sense in-sists as an event which opens a space within the 'boundary' between matter and thought, or between the motion of energy and its trace. These traces, insofar as they constitute our perceptual horizon, form a circularly linked chain: impression, memory, imagination, and language. But is the space open or closed? Are we ultimately bounded on the outside by ‘culture’? Or is culture what allows us to conceive of boundaries, that is, to authorize ontology?

Culture informs the cognitive horizon and en-acts its limitedness. Ontology is a quite necessary cultural function: it performs the degree-zero taboo encoding. Hence a formal ontology states what may or may not be spoken of sensibly. To think ontologically is to label the relation of flows of energy to flows of speech, each according to its own mythical measure. Ontological thought is magical thought with real consequences.

The formal encoding of a relation between energy and speech is always a prescription. Describing the relation between surfaces of varying metaphysical reality-- to trace between systems of different ontological dimension-- is always to inscribe the relation as a fractal marking upon bodies, which makes possible the internalization of both surfaces, as well as the depths, in a singular transversal mapping. Sensitivity is not limited to the sensical. We are as impressed by the depths of delirium as we are awed by the heights of clarity and eloquence. Within ontology the traces of the sensible are arranged: from intensity to image to sign to thought, sense is in each case a differential relation between a metaphysical and a physical surface.

Sense is therefore an intra-ontological interface, an event which occurs on the edge of the situation. The deployment of sense is a violence, whether onto the metaphysical surface as language or transcendent sounds which inspire focus, order, obedience; or whether sense is deployed upon physical surfaces as marks cut into bodies, sense is a forced fractal mapping which inscribes upon bodies their place not only in the family-social space but cosmically, environmentally, politically, and so on.

Ontology is never indifferent to politics: no one has been more aware of this, perhaps, than Wittgenstein, with whom we agree that naming is always a labeling. Ontology as such, and meaning more generally, can only be considered in terms of its use: as force, as sign, as thought. Sense presupposes the social.

Sensitivity demands a great deal of mutual observation. Sensations are not ontologically equivalent to image-words which in turn are not ontologically equivalent to the rules of language games. All instances of sense are self-destructing, but infinitely adaptive.

But sense is neither logic or reality or culture. The sensible event traces a transversal mapping which consummates the deepest interconnections between reality and culture and logic, and in fact, their mutual foundation . We must remember that not only do the elements of an ontology impose a sort of measure upon reality, but each ontology as such imposes a metric, establishes a field of verbality upon which events can be traced. This field of the sensible cuts across the energies it classifies--it marks them, controls, predicts and explains them.

Ontology is the formal incarnation of an absolute authority, transcendent relative to the energies it classifies. These sorts of organizational schemes always have a sort of neutral and derivative kind of quality about them; the ‘philosophical’ issues involved are highly symbolic, authoritiative, abstract and indifferent. But ontology by its nature cannot be politically indifferent; and we shall turn next to that process by which cultural ontologies fracture reality, logic and their objectivity, in the mark(et)ing process which form and inform subjectivity.

Time Warp

2007-06-22T00:33:00.000-05:00

A little time warp this time. This extract is from the first 'series' of scattered early writings, almost two years ago now. I hate looking at old stuff but in practice it can end up teaching you a lot. So here it is:

A personal relationship with the universe is accomplished in the separation which constitutes daily existence. The portion of the universe which is given meaning by my observation and interaction is absolutely separated from the perspective and comprehension of the other. What we speak of is not an absolute reality from which we are separated; our individual perspectives, our relationships--interactions, connections--with external reality constitute appear to constitute a totality. this totality is the self, which we believe to be a unity, that is, to be singular. Common sense suggests that there is only one you. A personal relationship with the universe is the existence of a conscious mind: they are not isolated from one another, but in fact are defined by one another. However, a self-aware creature's reality is unique, singular unto itself, isolated by an infinite abyss between the realities of other conscious minds, yet the conscious mind is not limited by this separation: a personal relationship with the universe is a linking of finite consciousness with infinity, the absolute, with Being.

Strong but loose. For clarity's sake, I'll try to identify two of the major theoretical mistakes I made here. It's strange indeed to see the resurfacing of themes and examples. Also the way I'd emphasize different aspects of the relation to the other now, like the machinic interfaces and images which mediate the relation between singular beings. I'm now starting to think that the issue of class and money comes into the whole question of ontology much more strongly when you consider the political and sexual connection between systems of knowledge and systems of power. For example, we can't just say: absolute being is one thing, and processes (natural or human) are different: they have different rhythms, cycles, and so forth. This is because their cycles are all in some sense interdependent even though always seemingly only locally informed--this primal 'reconnection' I assumed to be absolute being, but it seems in the light of a more psychoanalytically inclined mindset to be pure narcissism, the desire to assume primary importance in a parasitic modality.

This leads us to the second theoretical mistake: question of ethics remains completely unraised in this text--even as the relation to the other is ceaselessly invoked. It goes implicit, unmediated but ultimately unstated. Perhaps, after all, we cannot state an ethics--but nonetheless, a certain degree of meta-ethics is always required in any project. I would now identify a link within conscious self-reflection to the idea of a bad infinity, a good infinity being represented more clearly in discourse, reason, cooperation, co-evolution. A 'pure' meta-ethic would run something like: abuse and addiction are negative forms of infinity; restoration and ethical practice are positive forms of infinity.

This question of being always seems to elude, in one way or another, the traumatic realization that nature's rhythms are not always sensitive to ours, and likewise that ours are not sensitive to nature's; but this is no will of a capricious deity, no contradiction-- but a fractalized interdependent network of impressions and movements, that is, there's nothing but different events. And isn't the ultimate mystery the locus of our own self-difference? The key to this crisis is the relation to the other, and is identified fairly clearly in the text, but still--without any sort of mediation, or modulation of this 'personal' relation to the universe.

How is such a relation, after all, not supposed to totalize us, to reduce us to a naked singularity, to quantize us and see us as interchangeable and replacable? It's only in the rhythm and pulse of the social realm that we are irreplacable--but at the same time, through economy made completely replacable, through politics completely displaced... Society plays a much more complex role in terms of transcendence and sense than can be accounted for merely in the idea of the infinte, or the relation to the other as such... This, then, would mean we need a sort of phenomenology of social forces, or put another way: a meta-psychology of ethics.

Complex Systems Summer School

2007-06-15T14:54:00.000-05:00

Found a neat four-week annual program offered in Santa Fe and Beijing for post-doc and graduate students interested in 'complex behavior in mathematical, physical, living, and social systems.' The program's website has more details.

Here's some more about what they're offering:

Each school consists of an intensive series of lectures, laboratories, and discussion sessions focusing on foundational ideas, tools, and current topics in complex systems research. These include nonlinear dynamics and pattern formation, scaling theory, information theory and computation theory, adaptation and evolution, network structure and dynamics, adaptive computation techniques, computer modeling tools, and specific applications of these core topics to various disciplines. In addition, participants will formulate and carry out team projects related to topics covered in the school.

Agency and Chaos

2007-06-12T23:34:00.000-05:00

(Source: NASA deep space photo)

Agency demands a problem-space exactly as motion demands regulated (observed) space. Motion is distinguished from space by an observer: space is energy. Thus the discovery that space-time (energy) is at once both a pure sea of light waves folding and crashing in infinite variations as well as a discrete, orderly series of predefined, probabilistic signals, is one of the two great conceptual leaps of this century. The discovery that energy in its very essence is fractured (theoretically, i.e., philosophically) due to this 'fundamental' particle/wave duality is the other, as it accounts for the fact that space (energy) is organized by mutual observation. That is, since time (or energy) is 'broken' (theoretically,) space (practically) has a fractalized topology, and this can be thought of as due to the (unmediated) presence of an observer. The observer converges the subject and the object within a deterministic though dimensionally-problematic space (a 'broken' singularity--no longer merely particles or waves...)

An observer can observe himself. Thus if the nature of the universe depends (in a cosmic sense) on our way of looking at it, then the observer can be expected to introduce not only a sort of polyvocity to objects and a recursive circularity to ideas about reality, but furthermore, the observer can even be expected to produce the universe, by 'breaking' space apart. Thus the observer multiply compounds (through infinite reflections) an inexplicable singularity: he or she produces a meta-mapping of the entire universe into an observed image, and accomplishes the image’s re-projection as the coordinating engine for the entire (real!) universe--all this as though the single observer him or herself contained a bounded though actual infinity. This is how a mirror brings about the fundamental meta-problem of science, that is, the infinite ontological difference between truth and knowledge. The irreducible multiplicity of reflection in observation is a reflection of an irreducible ontological rupture: the habitation of the 'broken space' between image and object, the word and the thing, the map and the territory.

There’s a shift: it is rather as though we had been handed a script not with some fictional scenario traced upon it, but in fact a complete list of all the scenes in which we ourselves as individuals would take part, a final list of all the sentences we would ever utter within those scenes, for the rest of our lives. The fractal twist here would be that some outside observer (in this case me!) is handing you the story: thus in observation we find always a broken co-narrative space, a bi-univocal mutual observation which leads to a curious paradoxical reciprocity: I exist in your 'dream' because you exist (to 'dream me') in mine, and vice versa. Thus we become real only through the reading of each others’ dreams.

But our stories or dreams might still be identical even if identity as such were not cosmically or historically stable, that is, whether we are speaking of the integrity of things, or again, our ideas about things. This is our first evidence that the fundamental unpredictability of the observer’s perspective is an indication of a learning intelligence.

With autopoesis, the scientist must truly turn around to look at himself: moreover, we realize we can only make this turn, as it were, when we have been called. Someone shouts your name: neurons fire, the connection is made, your head turns. The programming in this case is generally so complete we can and often do say we are “turning without thinking.” Yet thinking of a sort is certainly occurring: it is not merely as though we consult a dictionary of syllables to determine if the sound uttered matches our name, but certainly at some level some analogous operation must logically be taking place.

While we would like to say we have free will--and though admittedly this is a biased (but revealing) example-- it is obvious the issue of power and will only apply marginally to this extraordinary 'turning' event. What power indeed do I have (within or against) the encounter with the other; what certainty could falsify the hailing from afar of the same? These sorts of considerations lead us to assert that identity is only brought about through a vigorous process of self-questioning, of a certain uncertainty. Our highly-structured interior 'reality' collapses upon itself in the face of the other, though it remains absolute relative to the encounter. But at some level we know our entire (practico-theoretical) 'house of cards' was constructed in vain the moment he opens his mouth in addressing me--and this only by his or her offering of an alternate reality, through his story, which radically splits my universe in twain, into tiny pieces with crooked and uneven edges. The observer who observers another observer splits a splitted universe: into an image I wish the Other to fall neatly back into, which contrasts with and is unsettled by the jagged, chaotic real space in which nothing sticks and everything flows, regardless of the complexity of the (manual, visual or vocal) dialectics we have constructed to balance all the potential opposing forces.

The Other is the problem par excellence, as well as the enigma in a solution, a riddle whose answer is written upon his or her very face. Our blind spot is always ourselves, but this is the scientists’ positivist abyss: we burn a hole in the universe, and thus of our map of the universe, by our very observation of it--we tear our perceptions apart, into pieces, when we decode them; our affections are untrustworthy, subjective, perilous. But isn’t it here that Nietzsche tells us it is most important to trust our senses, that indeed all the great advances in science have resulted from paying careful attention, to the only thing we can pay attention to--the world around us, as it appears to us, including all the potential distortions and disorganizing chaos?

In fact it is in the chaos of fractal space and the turbulence of flowing photons that we shall seek a more or less final resolution of the central difficulty of computer vision, that is, the reconcilation of the visual and the manual. And even perhaps, after a time, we shall finally be able to learn again that special trust which thousands of years of religion and 'civilization' have all but made extinct... how radical, Nietzsche’s thesis on trusting one’s senses! And how much more troubling, when we realize our senses are always sensed for another, that it is only in mutual observation we observe anything at all!

Space and Time

2007-06-10T23:18:00.001-05:00

'A universe comes into being when a space is severed into two.'
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela

(Spacetime ripples from a binary star)

Consider an observer in regular space. The observer induces a coordinate plane (or metric) to be imposed, as though from the exterior of the system in question. As soon as this coordinate plane is imposed, a regular geometry of space can be developed. Space can be distinguished from motion abstractly and precisely. Now suppose the observer positions a mark somewhere in this space. Based on an arbitrary origin-point (the ‘blind spot,’) a coordinate can be determined. A moving mark ‘carves out’ shapes, just as shapes triangulate inner spaces: motion obeys intuitive geometrical principles. All space remains ‘exterior’ due to the fact that shape is dependent upon the coordinate plane (even in higher dimensions,) that is, the coordinate plane is hyper-regulated: a transformation of coordinates results in a re-parameterization, or at worst, deformation. In regular space, then, all motion is abstract, superficial; all durations are qualitatively indistinct.

Now, let’s consider an observer in a fractal space, that is, a space with a self-constructing metric scale. As opposed to a regular or regulated space, we can say such a space (or collection of spaces) is organizing rather than organized, that is to say, it has no ‘origin’: such a space is essentially autopoetic rather than purely theoretical. In a fractal space, positions represent topological structures, and paths or movements represent ways of breaking apart and ways of forming unities. The situation on the hinge, or threshold, where one fractal subspace folds in upon itself, would be a contradiction in regular space, and an overdetermination of coordinate maps. In other words, regular space is too ‘brittle’ to handle such extreme ‘torsion,’ and this sort of infinite spatial intensity between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ would amount to a fracturing of a well-ordered space into an infinitely-ordered fractal subspace/superspace.

Therefore, in a fractal system, where the coordinate system is self-induced, the 'break' which would disrupt the metric order is continuously realized and, as it were, externalized from an inner space which has no dimension. In a fractal ordering, a dimensional break exhibits rather an unintegrated, intimate spatiality. That is to say, the dimension of a fractal system is that quality of space which is aroused by motion. More simply, movement is the evolution (and so coordination) of a self-organizing system. As a position is translated through subspaces, it passes through an infinite number of origins, it attains countless numbers of possible coordinate (dis)locations: space radiates from a motion, time radiates through a space. Space and time are not abstract, distinct quantities, but waves which determinstically interfere, overlap, intertwine and unfold. Fractal space is not just knotted; it is broken, a differential transversal, 'sublimely' interconnected. Every position is an infinite sum of partial spaces; every motion is the arising of a new coordination: have we finally arrived at the observer, as the autogenesis of self-organizing space, or perhaps more vividly, of an autometric time? At any rate, the observer can only be appropriately considered in the context of a fractal space, as constituting a severance of ordering-rules, or as a bursting of the structural integrity of dimensionality.

Sense and Simulation

2007-06-07T19:14:00.000-05:00

(an outline of metaproblematics)

1 Problems are objects, or things which block our way.

1.1 A problem is a barrier to the composition of forces in time, and thus a revelation.

1.1.1 Problems do not only impede our abilities, but also allow for their full exercise.

1.1.2 Similarly, objects do not just cover part of the visual field but accomplish the depth and coherence of space.

1.2 A problem accomplishes the disruption and potential (sometimes painful) renewal of a flow of desire.

1.2.3 A problem allows a solemn moment of authentic reconnection whence desire regains the courage to resurrect itself.

1.2.4 So the "real" problem is always what to do to cut the chains of machinic obedience, of the "...and again and again and..."

1.2.4.1 Our desire is in every particular case to make desire-gratification automatic.

1.3 The simplest figure of the solution is the use of a minor object-problem to solve a major object-problem.

1.3.1 Such a prioritization is an arbitrary ordering: solutions always approach (but never encounter) and retreat (but not completely) from a sort of fundamental solutional discontinuity between different degrees of problematic dimensionality.

1.3.2 Solutions decode problems by encoding an infinite rupture, by a breaking or fracturing of the problem space.

1.4 Solutions accomplish a retroactive collapse of the problem space into a singular multiplicity, a ‘patching’ or mapping between problem-spaces (or shapes of objects) of differential problematicity.

1.4.1 Consider the difference between a database of “possible solutions” before and after the solution of (for example) a search query.

1.4.1.1 Prior to the performance of the solution-operation encoded but ‘hidden’ within the problem space, the list has many possible entries: the problem space has a depth and shape characterized by the formulation of the problem.

1.4.1.2 After the solution, however, the problem space collapses to a single point (or set of points, etc.)

1.5 The problem encodes a solution by decoding a secret message, a problem ensnares the infinite/singular solution without revealing it, that is, within a formal figure (of desire, i.e., the solution.)

1.5.1 The solution thus provides a relation resolving the dichotomous break in dimensionality between problem-spaces.

1.5.2 Problems are a cosmically ironic opportunity, because they expose an unforeseen vulnerability.

1.5.2.1 We are always looking in the wrong direction at the right time: this (infinitely coincidental) chaotic violence is in fact the potency and momentum of objective reality.

2 The physical world presents itself as an objective, problematic reality demanding solutions.

2.1 The problem of ‘finding a solution to a problem’ is an implicit and trivial first-order form of self-reference.

2.2 The problem-space, at any dimension, is always infinite even if there is but a single solution.

2.2.1 The extreme case for “single-solutionarity” is identical structurally to the transcendence experienced in religion (or mathematics,) both transcendences which are ultimately impossible to present directly--not for lack of trying, but for the simple reason that desire has absurdly infinite problematicity.

3 A metaproblem is a second-order, non-trivial, form of referential problematicity, and therefore must be considered as part of the solution to all (zero-order) problems.

3.1 In order to avoid Zeno’s paradox, it is necessary to presuppose that, in order for us to be able to find a sensible solution for every, some or any problem, that every dimension of problematicitiy is continuous through infinity.

3.1.1 Any sensible solution must also provide a semblance or template of a fractally-infinite solution.

3.1.2 Thus a solution seamlessly encircles boundless collections of solutions to the same sort of system, the same problem-shapes at infinitely different scales and rotations.

3.1.2.1 While such solutions are indeed ‘finite’ and ‘singular,’ as they are bounded under an n-dimensional perimeter, they also exceed their dimensionality and break it in such a way as to provide a mapping to another problem space entirely (the source possibly not resembling the destination in the slightest!)

3.1.3 A solution’s infinite mapping of dimensionally differential problem-spaces flood and fill the spaces and the interstices so deeply and completely they begin to exhibit a differential quality relative to their strictly topological
dimension.

3.2 Thus the solution can be said to ‘break itself’ open in an infinite flood of awareness and understanding. It is a decoding of the metaproblem; a cut across which ‘separates the wheat from the chaff.’

4 Sense is an agreeable decoding, which always implies that the “meta-decision” (disambiguating dimensionality) has been solved completely, that is, infinitely.

4.1 Sense is genealogically geometric: any solution to any problem must also encircle a (perhaps fuzzy!) solution to the infinite-degree “macro-problem”--the infinite series of all metaproblems which collapses into the unity of the fundamental metaproblematic of disambiguating dimensionality.

4.2 This kind of fractal meta-symmetry is associated with any even the tiniest, most insignificant problems in the field of objective reality.

4.3 Dimensionality also implies a differential quality, and not only an integral quantity.

4.3.1 Dimensions are not hierarchized. This can also be understood as: all problem-spaces are fractal.

4.3.1.1 Thus all mappings between problems spaces exhibit a hypersymmetry which composes sensibly.

4.3.2 All problem-spaces have partial dimension(s), whose shape(s) are encoded within the form of the problem.

5 Sense is not different in kind than nonsense. The difference is rather, quantitative and subjective.

5.1 Sense is a kind of mapping between dimensions which are not hierarchized.

5.1.1 Sensicality is a special case of solutionality.

5.2 Therefore the question of sense presents us with the fundamental metaproblem.

5.2.1 But sense is not a solution like any other where the correctness depends solely on whichever dimensional transcoding the observer is expected to discover between problem spaces.

5.2.2 Indeed, it is clear sense adds another set of second-order fractal mappings ‘onto’ and weaving through our original ones.

5.3 This is because sense is first a marking of bodies.

5.3.1 Thus the establishment of sense is the first (and only) ethical operation of society: i.e., to decide what ‘makes sense’ for ‘everyone’ to do.

5.4 The ambiguity relevant to the sense (not accuracy) of a statement is always a political ambiguity (i.e., “but what side are you on?”)

5.4.1 This is particularly clear, for example, in humor, perhaps especially in the case of seemingly apolitical humor: what possible sense could toilet humor have to an alien rational species without anuses (or even waste, for that matter)?

5.4.2 In other words, we have to make a radical transcoding across objective worlds to ‘get it’: the aliens, for example, could eventually make sense of many or even most human jokes, provided they learned enough about humankind-- that is, developed the appropriate fractal mapping across unique and topologically complex problem spaces.

5.5 The solution of any problem always demands the prior resolution of abstractional ambiguity. Thus only a truly objective reality in its very problematicity allows for the depth and flowing poetry of space.

5.5.1 Expressing poetically involves an intimate connection, which is only accomplished in the fractal transcendence of an infinite collapse of 'total' spaces.

5.5.2 Poetry stuffs partial worlds-within-worlds into a form.

5.5.3 Expression produces sense not as a surface but as a depth.

5.6 The question of clarity in expression is always then an ethical question: “Do you really mean what you said?”

5.6.1 Avoidance, hysteria, neurosis, psychosis: these cannot merely be described in dimenisonal isolation, or simply analysing desire as displaced, naked or otherwise incomplete, an impotent, defractalized, ‘whole’ desire.

5.6.2 We have to address the fact that desire completes an infinite and fractal mapping across discrete universes of reference and thus even the purest ‘non-sense’ has a sort of sense to it in other dimensions; perhaps sometimes we even desire a dimension in which a particular form would ‘make sense.’

5.6.3 If dimensions are non-hierarchizable, then ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ in terms of the quantity of dimension are irrelevant to the question of sense, and indeed more generally to the fundamental question of solution.

5.6.3.1 For the quantitative resolution of any problem is always an approximation of an infinite series of decisions; but the actual pre-solution situation is constructing a fractal mapping between dimensionally differential problem-spaces such that these spaces collapse upon themselves in a unity of self-relationity.

5.7 In this way we could say that non-sense is autopoetic in that it is not created by anyone, but exists merely as a sort of observational coincidence (once again: the right place at the wrong time.)

5.7.1 Our dimensional expectation doesn’t map cleanly to the space in question whether words or states of affairs in pure nonsense--in other words, nonsense breaks the problem space in a non-fractalized way, without a possible immanent reconciliation.

5.7.1.1 Non-sense is therefore like death: the seemingly endless potential for reconnection is aborted forever, at least at a certain dimension of observation--whence comes the objective brutality and and problematic rupture of the death-event, when subjectivity is silenced without the spark of hope for reconnection.

5.7.2 We need look no further than death for non-sense itself, endlessly observed and so ever reconnected to sense on other dimensions, but at the one level--the level of ‘original connection’--death is the intervention of the unavoidable face, the face of the corpse, the face of the abyss, of the void, whose austere countenance radiates an unbearable and haunting sense of an absolute future.

Minds, Brains and Catalysis

2007-05-29T14:06:00.001-05:00

Christopher Davia has published an absolutely wild e-book which expands on the systems-cybernetic model of Maturana and Varela. The paper covers autopoesis, fractal catalysis and the ontology of consciousness, and has been made available through Carnegie-Mellon's psychology department.

An Argument Against Psychodynamism

2007-05-27T01:53:00.001-05:00

If we reduce psychoanalysis to a study of the mind as a closed system of forces tending towards rest through discharge, do we not lose sight of the ultimate object of our inquiry?

Do we not thereby abandon the abyssal depths of the unconscious, ceaselessly channelling consciousness into a collection of psychological AND physiological processes (and how much antiquity still breathes in our age in that tiny article 'and'!) Consciousness is reduced to a dynamic image of self-reflection, equivalent to flows of energy through the brain, and is no longer comprehensible as light illuminating a world. After all, we must learn how to see even in the depths of the "under-mind." Absent phenomenology, "losing sight," we discover the psyche as its energy, as the intensity and flow of desire, which by an analogy to thermodynamics is bracketed and transformed into a mechanical and closed system where the total energy is invariant.

Hence: emotional intensity consists only in displacement, and persists only through discharge--which is also taken retroactively as evidence that, indeed, the mind-system tends towards a rest-position. But this doesn’t further confirm the initial and flawed hypothesis that the psyche is a closed system; wail, yes, fling all the paradoxes of subjectivity you wish against me, but listen closely: we are not talking simply about being open to the outside but about the unstructured-mind, which is open to infinity as idea.

Once opened, this door can never be closed: the mind is the flow of energy from the infinite-source, which is always and in every case identical to the relative source, whichever machine we’re connected to, extracting relative surplus energy, joy, value... and thus this question of desire which is Puritanically left merely at the sexual question is taken to be a book which is forever closed once the discovery that the unconscious had a structure was made.

But the truth is that this discovery is among a unique class of events in history, those which open a sort of Pandora’s box which, like a door to an unknown place, once opened could never be closed--an irreversible though immediately felt transformation.

It would not be completely wrong to say Freud discovered that desire is an allopoetic machine; but psychodynamic considerations led him to attempt to repress this fundamental insight and reinscribe triangulations into the social and psychic body. The untraceable fourth dimension in which the Other would unfold “it”-self, the spacetime of an Event, is ultimately repressed in the name of Society, but mysteriously reinscribed into the reality of individual neurosis, in other words, this same discovery was re-cognized as meaning: neurosis has the truth as its cause.

This fiery kernel of the Freudian discovery is, anyway, in disrepute and all but forgotten about. But as the essence of his discovery lies in the nature of social and psychic repression, it could almost be predicted from the discovery itself that the discovery itself would be misrepresented, perhaps especially by its discoverer! The status of the real is the critical ambiguity in Freud's text, since it seems that all our perceptions (and not just our dreams) are distorted by repressive forces within ourselves; but then again, that these repressive psychic forces merely mimic or internalize oppressive social power structures. The power of social fantasy is in fact the creation of the human universe; atheist as he was, this thought was perhaps too religious for Freud...

Bergson (Theory of Laughter)

2007-05-23T20:59:00.000-05:00

As contrary electricities attract each other and accumulate between the two plates of the condenser from which the spark will presently flash, so, by simply bringing people together, strong attractions and repulsions take place, followed by an utter loss of balance, in a word, by that electrification of the soul known as passion. Were man to give way to the impulse of his natural feelings, were there neither social nor moral law, these outbursts of violent feeling would be the ordinary rule in life. But utility demands that these outbursts should be foreseen and averted. Man must live in society, and consequently submit to rules. And what interest advises, reason commands: duty calls, and we have to obey the summons. Under this dual influence has perforce been formed an outward layer of feelings and ideas which make for permanence, aim at becoming common to all men, and cover, when they are not strong enough to extinguish it, the inner fire of individual passions. The slow progress of mankind in the direction of an increasingly peaceful social life has gradually consolidated this layer, just as the life of our planet itself has been one long effort to cover over with a cool and solid crust the fiery mass of seething metals. But volcanic eruptions occur. And if the earth were a living being, as mythology has feigned, most likely when in repose it would take delight in dreaming of these sudden explosions, whereby it suddenly resumes possession of its innermost nature. Such is just the kind of pleasure that is provided for us by drama.

Henri Bergson (Laughter)

Flusser Studies Call for Papers

2007-05-23T20:26:00.000-05:00

Was surfing around the 'net and found an interesting call for papers by the Flusser Studies group. Strangely enough, though the call for papers and website is in English, their last online issue seems to have been published entirely in Spanish. They claim this 'multi-lingual' approach is itself Flusserian, as he himself translated and retranslated his work into several languages--is there something here close to Deleuze's idea that the unconscious is not structured like one language, but as many languages? At any rate, here's the statement:

Call for Papers

Contributions in English, German, French, Brazilian and Czech must be submitted to rainer.guldin@lu.unisi.ch

All papers are thoroughly double-blind peer-reviewed for originality, soundness, significance and relevance. Authors will be notified of the status of their papers within two months of submission. The journal publishes papers up to 8500 words, as well as shorter texts up to 3000 (event reports, reviews of books, comments on papers etc.).

Flusser Studies is published twice a year (November and May).

Here's the journal description provided on their website.

Flusser Studies is an international e-journal for academic research dedicated to the thought of Vilém Flusser (1920-1991). In addition to publishing articles about Flusser’s work, the journal seeks to promote scholarship on different aspects of specifically interdisciplinary and multilingual approaches Flusser himself developed in the course of his career as a writer and philosopher. These approaches range from Communication Theory to Translation Studies, Cultural Anthropology to the New Media.

Flusser wrote his texts in different languages, translating himself over and over again, moving from English, to Portuguese, German, French and back again. Similarly he worked by juxtaposing and contaminating different discourses: philosophy, anthropology, communication theory, art and design, zoology to mention only a few.

Among his most original contributions in this context are his philosophical fictions - above all Vampyroteuthis infernalis - scientific fables on the borderline of literature, science and philosophy.

The Four Freedoms

2007-05-20T16:52:00.000-05:00

In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of worship. That is, freedom of every person to worship whomever (be it God, or any other deity/deities) in his own way — everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called "new order" of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

— Franklin Delano Roosevelt, excerpted from the Annual Message to the Congress, January 6, 1941

Artifical Linguistic Competence

2007-05-20T00:20:00.000-05:00

What does it take to make a machine linguistically competent? This is perhaps the extreme case of where we do not want solutions that make the problems simply disappear. For instance, consider any algorithm which boils down to a “pattern-matching” script, even one which is self-improving or evolving in some ways. It’s clear it won’t achieve anything near a critical degree of linguistic competency to pass for a human. Oh yes, it may work for specific problem domains. But the explicit movement of abstraction involved in all learning processes is absent.

The easiest way of conceptualizing this kind of problem is as a sort of theoretical void. We find ourselves in the surprising situation of having to identify concretely the appropriate level of abstraction. We are being asked to describe specifically the meta-linguistic mechanisms of communication. Not only by analogy, this void can be seen perhaps most intriguingly as an inverted reflection of the practical void of identifying the position of consciousness. But of course that’s absurd, right? I mean, first off, we’d have to decide at what scale we’re going to look for it! At any rate, assuming we make the error of actually trying to look for some positional self-consciousness, the mistake we’re making is analogous to looking for language-understanding in an algorithm that at the lowest level of abstraction still blindly matches this information-cluster to that information-cluster, and never actually approaching the linguistic code as code--never performing the sense-founding conjunctive mapping between the signs and the things signified. A rather curiously revealing error, which it seems not a few ("structuralists"!) have been fairly quick to do.

Curious because that confusing and strange question still remains, again that question which would seem to reduce this quest to absurdity: at what scale do we search for the psyche? Do we search for “self-awareness” at the microscopic or the quantum level, for instance? But we must move beyond the Cartesian theater of the mind, and we must even at this point separate consciousness from linguistic competence. We don't need an algorithm which somehow becomes (positionally!) self-aware; on the contrary, we need an algorithm capable of rigorous meta-linguistic abstraction, of linguistic computation. To answer practically the question of what we need to build a linguistically competent artificial intelligence-- the project consists of a single step:

(1) We need an account of language-understanding that includes an explicit account of meta-linguistic (semantic) knowledge.

I will offer an alternative statement of this same principle to motivate the question: how can we encode axioms into an abstract theoretical space? In order to offer an alternative foundation, we need to produce a simulation where everything flows--without this, we are merely pattern matching. In order to accomplish this, I think we actually do need to creatively but judiciously introduce some "exotic” mathematical concepts, like fractals, as models and “unusual” philosophical concepts, like desiring-machines, as analogies-- In fact, I believe we have to experimentally inject these kinds of theoretical advances into computer science, because the real practico-theoretic problem here cannot be solved by technology alone, we have to teach it enough for it to be able to teach itself. In other words, we have to continue to build a real theory of practical linguistic agency. Which would in fact (if "finally" accomplished in practice) amount to some kind of return of the repressed, wouldn't it? Artificial intelligence represents something of an always desired reconnection, a final psychic merging of technology and mankind. This sentiment is no accident: the human-machine relation is our first clue. Desire must be made to literally connect to the machine. This will eventually lead us to our second axiom, which we shall go ahead and state:

(2) Machine-learning must be self-organizing.

This means: algorithmicity without structure, or rather, with a fractal superstructure, although with no "foundational" layer, as the first step is recursive and differentiation can never be said to have finally stopped. In other words, self-organization allows us to tackle the problem of desire as a code, and it is precisely this “strange” kind of anti-organizational scheme which will become of increasing interest to us. This is partly because it is only once we abandon structure as the abstract “bottom level” will we be prepared to tackle authentic linguistic competency. Knowing we are still not in a position to support this next assertion, for the purposes of elucidating a future path, let’s state our third principle:

(3) Meaning is a flow of intensities, which can be considered as molecular assemblages and modeled accordingly. Meta-language is about the partial shapes and partial dimensions of actual language use. Atomic semantic units are thus completely described by their shape and (ir-referential) dimensionality.

The critical point here is that dimensionality is not only allowed to be integral; that is, we allow for partial, or fractal dimensions. A shape requires space but no structure; and we can determine operationality by mapping images to shapes of thoughts, shapes of codes, etc. The fractality of meta-linguistic processes accounts for the elusive [that is, as long as you look at it through a static dimensional framework] property of meaning, a connection which we shall attempt gradually develop with the appropriate theoretical and mathematical framework.

One

2007-05-19T00:42:00.000-05:00

What is it to say "we are one"?

The beginning of psychic life is not in principle distinguishable from the beginning of material life [1]. What a laugh to have for so long wrongly conjoined so directly: the mother, the One! A primary narcissism, Freud quips-- as though biology really were our destiny! As though the intermediate steps weren't the most important, those developmental phases whose traversal would precisely trace the outline of the crack between Freud’s Oedipalized unconscious and the event of language: Freud's answer is self-love, presuming the mystical division he would sek to explain. Doctor, how does our subjectivity awaken? Outgrowing a primary narcissism, indeed!

But only a (lost) love: of the One that is the Self that is the One that is the Self... what he means, we must insist, is that the early mind is merely a little repeating-machine: for Freud, the interconnected flows which constitute our psychic life can never be properly said to be identical to those machinic material assemblages which constitute our organic rhizomatic substrate and origin. Is he wrong--is this a broken Oedpial fantasy or merely egoistic and monotonous delirium? Does the emergence of a proto-subjectivity rather constitute the intervention of an alien multiplicity within the "One"--which was not (and never was)?

Being-One with the Mother/Father -- is this not also the primordial diagram/genealogy? The "intrusion" of an alien One, which mystically reproduces itself in the Same by precisely an excess of “primal” self-love? Libido becomes surplus-reality, bodies turned reality-producing machines-- what, then, is this mysteriously doubled One? From what mysterious inner space emerges proto-subjectivitiy, this extra-terrestrial surplus territoriality?

But we are not just "one" with the mother--the flow of desire doesn't begin and end with her Womb, nor even Libido. We won't find the origin by tracing the event of becoming-Other to its symbolic source: we are not just One with God, not just One within a void-enraptured Mother-Father-Me constellation; becoming is about becoming-Universe, becoming-Woman, becoming-Energy, yes, even becoming Mother-Father... but we "become" by a truth-event which is misrecognized as a unity; the Arising of a not-One within the One that really isn't. We are not anti-matter, but a colony of parasites, a multiplicity without a place, with only hungry and open connection-holes, not a rapturous void but music and light-- a not-One connected to an energy field which produces a self-recording as the ghost of a repressed Truth. To speak of a process, or perhaps more radically of the event of becoming, still imagines the Other to be One, still preserves the primordial transcendence of an alien Same within the Other-which-is-me.

1. This can be thought of as an alternate statement of Chalmer’s Hard Problem of Consciousness.

New Websites!

2007-05-17T23:42:00.000-05:00

Announcing the launch of two Fractal Ontology spin-off websites:

* Fractal Schema: providing notes and more detailed analyses of the works under discussion. Think "Cliff's notes for postmodernism." (Covering Debord, Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard...)

* Fractality: all the original poetry and literature we don't have room for over here anymore ;)

This reorganization is part of an attempt to increase readability and thematic unity within these pages.

Autopoesis

2007-05-17T11:54:00.001-05:00

"An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network." (Maturana, Varela, 1980, p. 78)
"[…] the space defined by an autopoietic system is self-contained and cannot be described by using dimensions that define another space. When we refer to our interactions with a concrete autopoietic system, however, we project this system on the space of our manipulations and make a description of this projection." (Maturana, Varela, 1980, p. 89)

Niklas Luhman works with this autopoesis to produce a quite fascinating model of systematicity. I’ll briefly highlight what’s important from our point of view.

A ‘machine’ is defined by the boundary between itself and its environment; a machine is divided from an infinitely complex exterior. Communication within a machine-system operates by selecting only a limited amount of all information available outside (reduction of complexity.) The criterion according to which info is selected and processed is meaning. Machines process meaning, producing desire; each machine’s identity is constantly reproduced in communication (depending, again, on what’s meaningful and what’s not.) If a system fails to main identity, it ceases to exist as a system and dissolves back into the environment. Autopoeisis is this process of reproduction from elements previously filtered from an over-copmlex environment. The operation of autopoesis can be binarily encoded (in a Spencer-Brown logic of distinction) as a program which filters and processes information from the environment.

OK, taking this from a D&G perspective, the question becomes about this connection or boundary-limit... and I think this is where fractality and cognition exhibit a common transitive structure...

Program-agents connect: machines to flows, flows to machines, flows to flows, machines to machines, events to flow-machines, machines to event-flows; they (1) produce mappings (flowcharts) of these connections, (2) dis-join, decode and fracture these mappings, (3) construct new machines->more or less ‘dense’ networks of ‘tubes’, flows->currents of intensity, subagents->communicate the pure imagistic flow of unconscious symbol-automation, a particular agent constructs a tool (or a machine with a hole in the shape of a ‘problem’) by halting this flow, “flattening” it into (n-1) dimensions, where it can be differentially represented by a self-organizing nano-ontology; these subagents compress reality into their ‘micro-worldviews’ but then uncompress them into signification, a stream of images and words whose true ‘symbolic’ value is not in the individual’s ontology, but in the group; so natural evolution works to point individual ontologies towards the assemblage of the group, but also pushes the groups’ ontology towards more effective ways of responding to events; so all agents are partial agents, but these agent/machine networks are not all at the same “level”; machines can be made up of machines and subagents; all agents are subagents, this fundamental fractality is ultimately what allows these flows to be taken as flows, allows agents to be and to perform; “full” agents that skim the surface of language are precisely the question. up til now we have only considered the deeps. and perhaps this is ultimately all we need consider: merely the most fundamental heuristics of cognition. but what about conceptual metaphors? does the machinic framework provide for the possibility of metonymy? does the fractality of cognition really completely account for linguistic competency...?

What is a subagent?

The task of a subagent is to translate an image (scene) into a problem space, an objectivized or idealized space. Geometric regularity is in fact what is here being auto-regulated: the problem of establishing arbitrary limits is taken up as a recursive feedback loop between the systematic and meta-systematic modes of computation. Intensity, attention, or heat is represented by the amount of ‘noise’ (perturbation) allowed by the meta-system in the description of the problem space. This problem space is then populated by sub-subagents who imagine it, and then create sub-sub-subagents who reify it into a problem space; this gradual decomposition amounts to conceptual simplification, that is, until we find an undifferentiable function which decodes the image, i.e., supplies the solution. The image (collapse of solution space) is transcoded into a new problem-space, or returned as feedback to higher levels of the system, which may be in contact with other subagents inhabiting the given problem space.

Converging Debord, Badiou, Deleuze and Guattari

2007-05-11T16:33:00.000-05:00

Three aspects of the spectacle—society itself/parts of society/means of unification. This is the place of false consciousness because it is where all consciousness converges--it is merely the official language of generalized separation [Badiou, language of the state of the situation, field of knowledge that is encyclopedic in its domination--a truth pierces the whole of knowledge by piercing a hole in knowledge, and, shall we say, causes an irruption to take place within the "official language," thereby reconstituting a counter-officiality, a counter-fidelity for the revolutionary reorganization of the molar state of the situation via molecular flows of singular multiplicities that are always already subtracted from the count in an endless proliferation of simulacra--thus the schizophrenic scrambles the codes and disorganizes the hierarchy where beginning and end, cause and effect lose their mark and cease to create limits--or at least, limits that work--so the schizo breaks through the system, showing it to be what it tries to deceive us it isn't--an open system--Oedipus is open to the social field! The openness of the system requires for a new logic of the distribution of singularities on the potential field of forces that animates desire's social fluxion and function (a flunction?). This new logic would have to take into account the affirmative, disjunctive synthesis that forces [shall I risk it?] value and sense to be determined only through the traversal of the distances between and among singular points (thus constituting a non-totalizing Whole that becomes added to the set as a part itself--much like the notion of the power set--the power set as non-totalized Whole allows for the communication of noncommunicating vessels--in effect, what D+G are describing here in Anti-Oedipus is a network that is not considered as a One. This network is added onto the parts as an excessive part--it is this excess that escapes that count-as-one, and it is this excess that constiututes the singular points of intensity on the BwO. But back to the open set--the BwO as open set--affirms what Deleuze will say in the Logic of Sense: "circle qua circle is neither a particular circle, nor a concept represented in an equation the general terms of which must take on a particular value in each instance; it is rather a differential system to which an emission of singularities corresponds" (123). This logic would lead us to conclude that the fields of potential and thresholds of intensities that are all involved with becomings on the BwO are to be opposed to the particularity of the formations of a global person that psychoanalysis constantly refers to (in its ego-obsessed variants). The externality of desire--its external relation to the Real, constituting it as such--forces the symbolic structures of Oedipus and spectacle to succumb to an openness that threatens the closed transmission of triangulating forms. Whereas in the triangle, Oedipalized subject is confined to a vertex, a mere corner--in the circle qua circle, the schizophrenic process flings the subject from any fixed (or repressed) position and endlessly de-centers the subject through a succession of states along a circle that must be conceived in terms of differential relations and not in terms of a fixed radius with particular values! To stress this last point, we have to assert that the formation of a circle must be infinite in progress, and thus errant too; in effect, there can be no telos of the circle, for a teleology would posit an end goal and purpose for the BwO-circle qua circle-will to power breaks apart the limits, rips open the vertices of the triangle, creating the real circle-square (Oedipus is not contradicted or neutralized, but instead both intensities coexist as operative forces--molecular and molarizing) Or does it instead proliferate as an endless number of concentric circles that rudely coexist--constituting the socius as BwO?].

Fractal Cognition

2007-05-07T23:07:00.000-05:00

Ignoring the obvious inadequacies of a functionalist line of thinking--namely it’s inability to conceive of reality as anything else than a series of static points connected by lines of force--let’s here call forth a question that allows itself to momentarily detained as a function, even if it ultimately shall cause our functionalizing schema to splinter: What is the nature of cognition? Is it a fundamental process or a secondary production? What is the relation between thought and desire? How do society and multiplicity relate to cognition?

If cognition is social, then thinking is desiring, characterized functionally by its intensity and distance from a fixed point of thought, a pre- or meta-cognitive axiom, a cognum. But these sort of automatically meaningful axioms are granted us only relatively, thus thinking is not just the mental production of what is desired (as wish fulfillment) but rather thinking is the production of a cognitive horizon, thought is the opening of a space for itself in an already overcoded information stream. The intensity of the "surgical" implantation is a matter of the degree of disjunction from the (pre-)cognitive horizon. It is as though each thought were the first, and as if even the most brave, flowing and free of thoughts were always pressed against an interminable emptiness and aporia. Thought is an artists' cut, a deliberate scrambling of the message, a recoding of the code. Thought erupts afresh anywhere there is an interruption in the smooth function of the body-machine, but it is only at the extreme edge of realities where thinking at long last traverses negation, approaches the sickeningly steep abyss of a-subjective emptiness and a boundless dark beyond barely perceived, which is to say that the being of the cognum consists in the differential intensity of a structural (ontological) transformation of the active presence of being into a passive absence. Thus, thinking has it's opposite, anti-thinking as it were: a re-naturalization of artifical desire.

In short, thought subsists in the splintering of its own plane of functionality, it is an excess that overflows the presence of things; moreover, thinking in the most abstract is the intense erasure of what-is and what-ought, it consists in forgetting. At the limit of the void thought conjugates its own limitations with the infinite multiplicity of desire and at last becomes itself, a becoming-conscious and a becoming-machine at once, as a propulsion and a suction: thinking founds itself upon a vacuum called forth into existence only by the taut potency of expectation. Thinking in general follows a twisted logic of exploding dualism (by abstraction and deriving contradiction); thus thought can be said to annul its law (of non-contradiction.) Being, striving, wondering; wrenching away, forgetting, thinking: energy flows disperse particles of sensation over the smooth, slippery surface of the pre-cognitive subject, the universal one-multiple. Thought is a juncture away from a continuous boundary: a tangent or trace, a derivative function, a function of the difference in intensities between flows, or within a circuit.

The fractality of cognition is an assertion that thought is ir-regular, slips into gear only when instincts and drives fail to maneuver properly. Awareness is awakened as a process only when smaller-scale local organizations are unable to directly cope with either the amount or kind of information they are receiving. A thought-process has a sort of scale-invariance, or, put another way, cognition preserves justification across transformations, given that all these transformations reproduce an endlessly deep self-similarity. Relations to the exterior are folded deep inside the innermost recesses of a fractal set. Does thought reflect even in its unconscious structure the infinite divergence of fractal boundaries?

Kant's Intellectually Intuitive God vs. Spinoza's Fractal Onto-Theology?

2007-05-07T16:23:00.000-05:00

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.

Logic of Sense: Series 2 on the Paradox of Surface Effects: Dialectics as the Art of Conjugation

2007-05-04T16:41:00.000-05:00

In series 2 on the paradox of surface effects, Deleuze happens to mention dialectics as “the art of conjugation” (8). Before diving into the implications of this statement, we should note that for Deleuze, the pure event can be conceived of as an infinitive independent of any temporal, modal, vocal or personal grammatical determinations—and so in essence, this type of pure event can be conceived of properly as a pre-individual singularity that escapes the logical ordering of worlds (214). This insistence on the link between the infinitive and the event can be traced throughout the book and culminates in series 30 on the phantasm; however, we can understand how and for what purpose Deleuze chooses to designate a role for dialectics (note, not the dialectic) in his philosophy. All that is required is a more concrete definition of dialectics as Deleuze gives it and an unpacking of what the art of conjugation entails for an understanding of the way in which events come to be expressed in propositions and the way that these events are themselves related in propositions (8).

I did not happen to bring up series 30 on accident, for what Deleuze makes explicit is that psychoanalysis and dialectics, fundamentally at least, share a strong affinity (notice Deleuze chiding Freud for taking a ‘Hegelian’ position on the contradictory nature of primitive words) (213). This is because psychoanalysis takes phantasms as the (im)material for its science of events. Similarly, Deleuze links the incorporeal effects or “dialectical attributes” to the events that populate the surface (5). In fact, Deleuze will even say “The Stoics discovered surface effects. Simulacra cease to be subterranean rebels and make the most of their effects (that is, what might be called ‘phantasms,’ independently of the Stoic terminology)” (8). It is here that Deleuze first equates the event with being beyond the passive/active opposition, being both and neither at once (8).

If dialectics is “the science of incorporeal events as they are expressed in propositions, and of the connections between events as they are expressed in relation between propositions,” then one might well question whether or not Deleuze fully bypasses this sort of static conception of events (8). In fact, I want to hypothesize that Deleuze brings up dialectics at the start as a one-sided approach to the phenomenon of language formation along a frontier. What will become important to Deleuze is not simply how the infinitive-event is conjugated in a world, but instead how infinitive-events can be said to be a-cosmic and singular. This singularity can be tricky if we choose to see events circulating in a univocal Event that is transcendent to the world and its logic. If we choose to see the ideality of the pure event as transcendent, we fall into the easy trap that Badiou is guilty of—namely, that of condemning the concept of the virtual as that which introduces transcendence into an otherwise untainted, univocal system of immanence.

But this does not answer the obvious question—what does the virtual mean and how does it correlate with Deleuze’s concept of dialectics? If we can roughly divide the terms actual/virtual with the two movements of time Chronos/Aion, then we may be able to make some progress (or make things more confusing). As I understand it, Chronos is the time of the pure, full present, the past and the future being subsumed and contracted or folded into one layer. But Aion works exactly opposite: instead, future and past are infinitely subdivided and the present is what is empty—in this sense, the present is not, or it can be considered a void point. If we can imagine that the world partakes of both times at once, we belie the fundamental point—events that are temporalized have actual consequences on the world of Chronos. Instead of being just past or just about to come—as Deleuze understands the time of Aion and the pure event—actualized events come to share in the consequences of world formation and logical development. But this leaves the obvious question of the virtuality of the event: what about an event that isn’t actualized? We can say that the event did not take place because of a lack of force or because of a sufficient intensity for a zone was not activated. In other words, events have potentials that must be tapped into and unleashed for a proportionate actualization. In some sense, the event requires certain conditions and the relative critical energy in order for the chaos of the virtual to be actualized in the production of reality. It is, then, the duty of dialectics to be able to formulate specific conditions that augment the conjugation of pure events from the virtuality of Aion to the actuality of Chronos.

Kant, the Antinomies, and the Soul as Rebel Element

2007-05-04T16:39:00.000-05:00

Kant’s working through of a set of functions of representation that support the interaction between the subject and object-as-appearance is dizzying to say the least. Beginning with the concepts of intuition and sensibility, Kant elaborates his distinctions between the a priori and a posteriori by linking them with their analogues: intellectual intuition and empirical sensation. Since Kant ends with intellectual intuition (B72), it is better to start with a more primary opposition.

What is essential to understand is that intuition is immediate, and thus a priori. Because of their immediacy, intuitions are pre-logical and pre-relational, which means that they exist before ever being thought by the subject. In fact, intuition only arises because of a gift, the gift of the object. Without this gift, intuition cannot function, or, better yet, if the object were never given, there would be no possibility of the (self)-consciousness of the function of intuition at all.

The gift of the object is a force that affects the subject’s sensibility, which means that our capacity for receiving the gift is defined by a particular mode which only renders representations of the object, and not the thing-in-itself. Since the thing-in-itself, a.k.a. the transcendental object cannot be known to us, it lies outside of the domain of sensibility. Only God has an intuition of this Thing and only by dint of the fact that God’s knowledge is not in the inferior mode of human thought, that which perpetuates the persistence of a relational and spatio-temporal structure. God is not in space or time, and therefore his knowledge cannot be limited to thought but must be reserved for pure intuition (taking for granted God’s existence, of course). The point is that mortal beings of thought have to think these intuitions through the understanding which then forms concepts (A19).

This brings us to the fundamental difference between thinking and pure intuition. As opposed to God, the subject can only experience intuition through thought. Concepts arise which form the structure of our apprehension of intuition. Because it is thought, intuition is not pure, which fundamentally means that it is mediated. If intuition for Kant is immediate, the representations that arise from the force of the object affecting the subject have to relate to the fact that there is no presentation of intuition, merely thoughts that form representational concepts through the understanding. Thus, all of our perceptions are a posteriori in the sense that they are mediated by the understanding.

This is what accounts for Kant’s introduction of the term appearance at the beginning of the Transcendental Aesthetic. If intuitions of objects are representations, a posteriori and empirical, then the subject always encounters “undetermined objects,” in the sense that objects are never things-in-themselves, they only merely appear in the world as phenomena (A20).

But we should ask: why is appearance the only mode for an object to affect a subject? Or, why is the object always mediated in relation to the subject? This of course leads Kant to stipulate the a priori existence of space and time. Objects, insofar as they are given to subjects, are always structured by these two forms. These two forms divide the subject into two senses: the inner and outer sense. Space refers to outer sense because of our perception of objects. Time refers to inner sense insofar as it allows the ‘I’ to synthesize the diverse and changing, sometimes contradictory states or predicates that inhere in the subject, one after another. Time and space are forms for Kant because they order the “manifold of appearance” and force relations to occur (B34, A20).

This is crucial because at first I didn’t really understand how important Kant’s definition of space and time really are. They are not grounds, nor are they containers; they do not inhere in beings or objects; they are not originary. They do not generate beings, but instead they are essential as the milieu in which beings and bodies necessarily relate. Space and time are both unitary and infinite. It is for precisely this reason that they are not generative, because they represent perfectly what the paradox of the abnormal set means. I will quote a passage from Kant in order to make this clear:

Space is represented as an infinite given multitude. Now every concept must be thought as a representation which is contained in an infinite number of different possible representations (as their common character), and which therefore contains these under itself; but no concept, as such, can be thought as containing an infinite number of representations within itself. It is in this latter way, however, that space is thought; for all the parts of space coexist ad infinitum. Consequently, the original representation of space is an a priori intuition, not a concept (B40).

The abnormal set is a set which all sets belong to and which includes itself. This paradox was nicely formulated by Russell in the 20^th century, but for our purposes the existence of the abnormal set—designated by Space and Time respectively—corresponds to Kant’s antinomies of the Soul, God, and the Universe. I have taken the term abnormal set from the way in which Deleuze describes it in Logic of Sense, and I want to expand on it by linking its complementary term with Kant’s antinomy of the soul.

The term rebel element refers to an element that “forms part of a set whose existence it presupposes and belongs to two sub-sets which it determines” (Deleuze 75). In closing, and in curiosity, I want to try to link the antinomy of the Soul (as I vaguely understand it) with the concept of the rebel element. Kant might say that the soul is precisely not a concept, cannot be sensed, and thus cannot yield itself as an object to empirical intuition. It can only be axiomatically assumed a priori. However, if the soul is the rebel element, then it means that it forms part of a set (Man) whose two sub-sets (life, death) are determined by the fact that the soul belongs to both of those planes. The antinomy from this point of view is precisely the fact that man’s life and death are significantly determined whether or not we posit the existence of the soul. But man does not equal the soul, and so as a subset, it can be presupposed to not exist without destroying the subject per se. What happens is that the soul still continues to have an effect on the set and sub-sets precisely to the extent that the soul is not done away with magically and successfully repressed, but instead it returns in the form of its negation. Thus, (soulless) man enters a completely different dialectical relationship with life and death. The rebel element thus has a way of creating a (dis)order or an alternative order by forcing a revaluation of the terms to which it relates. It is not simply that the presence or absence of a permanent or temporary soul undeniably changes the individual’s relationship with life and death; more importantly, this has to be understood as a process that is singular for each individual. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the soul is understood as an idol (an object of heights)—Monotheism—as a simulacrum (object of depths)—Buddhism—as an image (object of partial corporeal surfaces)—Foucault’s “the soul is the prison of the body”—and as a phantasm (soul as pure surface effects of the event of libidinal intensities).

Series 17: Static Logical Genesis: Metaphysical Surface

2007-05-02T10:03:00.000-05:00

The most intriguing concept in this series seems to be what Deleuze calls the metaphysical surface or the transcendental field. I want to hypothesize that the “transcendental” in this concept signifies the possibility of language. This has something to do not only with Deleuze’s insistence on a frontier of language, but also resonates strongly with his focus on what he calls folding or enveloping. I will try to illuminate the complexity behind these concepts and show how they all interpenetrate one another in order to constitute the metaphysical surface that makes language possible.

The ontological proposition deals with individuals and persons, the former being infinite analytically and the latter being finite synthetically. These two ground one another and allow for denotation (the realm of the infinite analytic) and manifestation (related to the finite synthetic nature of the person) to enter into language. Signification is defined by possibility, and takes the place of the logical proposition. Deleuze is unable to say whether signification is primary at the start because “signification presupposes . . . an entire play of denotation and manifestation both in the power to affirm premises and in the power to state conclusions” (119). Thus, signification actually presupposes the formation of a good and common sense, linked to the individual and the person respectively. The tertiary structure of the proposition is “contingent upon sense” because it is formed by ontological and logical geneses (119). There is a secondary organization of sense (good and common) that allows for Deleuze to talk about the two x’s: on the one hand we have the object without a place, that which always exceeds its boundaries, and on the other hand we have the empty square, that which serves as the empty form of identity that common sense produces. Deleuze explains that there is, beyond the tertiary order of the proposition and the secondary organization of sense, “a terrible primary order wherein the entire language becomes enfolded” (120).

This folding is where we start to deal with the surface of language, and Deleuze asks a key question before introducing the transcendental field: “How can we maintain both that sense produces even the states of affairs in which it is embodied, and that it is itself produced by these states of affairs or the actions and passions of bodies?” (124). His answer is that it resides in the depths of the pulsation of mixed bodies, “by means of its power to organize surfaces and to envelop itself within the surface” (124). This is why Deleuze will say that “The surface is neither active nor passive, it is the product of the actions and passions of mixed bodies” (124). Making an analogy with physical surfaces, Deleuze argues that there is a surface energy which, without being of the surface is attributed to surface formations. Thus with a physics of surfaces there arises a metaphysics of surfaces as well: it is this metaphysical surface which will act as the name for “the frontier established, on one hand, between bodies taken together as a whole and inside the limits which envelop them, and on the other, propositions in general” (125). This surface, then, is linked to a “sonorous continuum” which insures that speech sticks to the extra-Being of bodies in such a way to envelop them in the interiority of language—allowing for a frontier of sound (proposition) and substance (bodies).

The last thing to emphasize is that this metaphysical surface which acts as a frontier is not one that separates—and so, this is not a limit in the Hegelian sense. It’s a limit which is not one, a porous limit, a membrane as such. This membrane is actually the articulation of sense as that which happens to bodies and insists in propositions (125). It is also not a separation in the way that sense is doubled up at the surface and deployed on both sides of the frontier. It is when this frontier is abolished that sense irrupts into nonsense and bodies fall back into their depths, unable to signify or have sense. As Deleuze argues at the end of the series, as long as the surface lasts, sense will bring about individuation in bodies and signification in propositions, allowing for the true event of language to unfold.

Iterative self-programming.

2007-04-23T20:21:00.001-05:00

Let S be the basic symbol set where S is an ordered set of symbols which correspond one-to-one with the effective atomic operational semantics of any programming language (of sufficient power and complexity, see [1].) That is, S represents the complete enumeration of the operational semantics of a programming language P. For example, S1 would be the alphabetically first legitimate symbol in P, and Si would be the ith symbol in P. A function is any compilable, syntactically correct, ordered collection of symbols in S. Let L be the language of all such functions, beginning with simple variations on the basic symbol set, whose rules of expansion we shall return to. Let Li be the ith function in L, and the list of this set L is the complete enumeration of the .basic names of all functions generated so far over S.
Let F be the ordered index of all functions in L which either (a) generate syntactically valid output from valid input, or (b) change the (intra)system state in any way. A structured partition of F is a collection of functions taken as methods of a class and which generate syntactically valid input and output. Let a component be any collection of functions which, taken as methods of a class, generate syntactically valid input and output and utilizes other member (or family) functions or variables. A component is by definition syntactically correct and has a rough, “machinistic” (part-to-whole) meaning.
We define a closed ontology O to be an ordered collection of micro-ontologies. A micro-ontology is a special kind of class structure in which an arbitrary assemblage of component names are related to other component-names/ around five cateogires:
(a) Individuals. An individual is just a named component; let I represent the group of all individuals belonging to the micro-ontology; the first individual is the name of the micro-ontology itself;
(b) Classes. A class C is an ordered group of components with some commonality. This commonality is represented as the name of the class. At the same time, the contents of C are entirely dictated the name of C (which is the addition of a new basic symbol in O.):The name of C names the grouping-function of which C is the result;
(c) Attributtes
(d) Relations
(e) Events: Events are interruptions of a process due to an input stream (words or images) which provoke some response; this response is re-encoded as a necessary relation between an “individual” of the class of “events”;
Let K be an open ontology, the set of all valid programs—just ordered collections of closed ontologies--correlated to themselves within a macro-ontology. We shall say K is equivalent to a simple agent. Let us define three rules which expand K (i.e., generate new functionalities.)…

(i) other:
a. the function calling this function is taken as the foundation for a new program;
b. four variations and cross-variation on this interaction
i. repetition/erasure
ii. extension/contraction
iii. displacement/reogranization
iv. integration/separation
(ii) same
a. this operation is repeated, treating the newly creating network of related programs as the other who calls
b. (repeat the four variations)
(iii) synthesis (new program generation)

[1] – The basic ‘trick’ here is that the recursive step appears in the definition itself, i.e., in the relation of the symbol set to itself. We’ll get into all this later, but the programming language in question has to at the least allow for recursion, the definition of an abstract class, and the treatment of program code as an atomic data type. Provided this, we have the raw mechanics we need to simulate a heterogeneous network of communicative, self-programming agents--which allows for the multiple social instantiations of linguistically competent agency. Treating the program code as a code allows the computer to treat any code as a code—i.e., gradually and smoothly increase its facility with a symbol set by using it, experimenting with it, etc.

(sorry, finals, I’ll finish this soon)

Notes on Natural-Language Artificial Intelligence

2007-04-23T20:19:00.000-05:00

Our first axiom must be some kind of logically justifiable affirmation that this goal is indeed reachable:

(1) Linguistic competence is attainable through the appropriate programming of any universal Turing machine.

In order to demonstrate this, let’s suppose that (‘artificial’) natural language agency isn’t possible. Accepting this implies at least one of the following two propositions must be true:

(a) Either linguistic competence will never be attainable for machines due to some kind of ultimately undiscoverable reason, or

(b) Algorithmic linguistic competence is unattainable for a reason which is, at least in principle, discoverable (i.e, empirically demonstrable)

In the case of (a), we have a clear fallacy verging on mysticism, at least without further evidence to adduce it. Formally, positively asserting impossibility based on an absence of evidence is purely inductive and has no necessary truth value. On the other hand, the truth value of (b), rather than resorting to faith in a metaphysical proposition, is based entirely on the principle of impossibility which is to be demonstrated. This is, of course, the more scientific of the two propositions, and the one that most deserves our scrutiny.
Why have we drawn this distinction? First, because it is clear that many “counter-proofs” of natural-language A.I. (“strong” A.I.) advocate (b) on the basis of (a), in a sort of admixture where they end up founding their “empirical” demonstrations upon crude and poorly-concealed metaphysical presuppositions. Second, because the second proposition (b) opens upon an important question which deserves scrutiny as a science in itself and which has been unnecessarily fettered with the supernatural faith of the first.
Let’s take as a common example the objection raised in Searle’s
‘Chinese Room’ thought experiment. He argues in essence that a computer will always and only be a model of a mind and, being just a machine, will be forever incapable of anything resembling human “cognitive states” (i.e., understanding, imagination, etc.) Searle presupposes the existence of a machine which would communicate with some degree of facility in a natural language; that the machine can speak Chinese is an arbitrary choice. In Searle’s conception, the operations of the machine are entirely determined by logical necessity. These operations, therefore, can be represented by any system correlative to a universal Turing Machine—and we must remark at this point that every physical system is of this kind, so that even a human being manually performing the operations on paper could represent the operation of the speaking machine: taking input in Chinese, “mechanically” applying rules, and delivering the result.
This is in fact precisely the case Searle considers: this way, the human is considered only as a rule-bound sign-manipulator, unconscious of meaning as such, to precisely the degree he performs the operations of the language-speaking machine. Moreover, the human being doesn’t need to understand Chineses in order to perform these operations; thus, since the pure operation of the system can’t encounter “cognitive states,” even though these may be simulated by the computer program which the human being is unwittingly but faithfully carrying out. To Searle, this also means that Chinese is not being “understood” by the machine either, even if it is a spectacularly convincing simulation. Insofar as it is just a universal Turing machine, Searle asserts that it is impossible for machines to understand Chinese.
It is easy to see how a large part of the conclusions Searle draws from his experiments are accurate: it is undoubtedly the case that computers, modern or not, are just and always mindlessly manipulating symbols. But to conclude from this that language requires something else than what is being offered. Just because the operations themselves are not cognitive states, this of course doesn’t mean that cognitive states don’t exist or are therefore impossible. Here Searle is against the Strong AI project as well as against Turing, who would seem to accept that a machine which could converse easily and convincingly at length with a human subject would qualify, at the least as ‘intelligent.’ Consciousness cannot be thoughtlessly conflated with linguistic competence.

In other words, (b) does not logically follow from (a), even if we do accept (a)’s truth-value. To speak via the position of an undiscoverable absence is, again, a non-actionable and unscientific presumption verging on the mystical.

The Slave and the God of Death

2007-04-12T19:41:00.000-05:00

It's so easy to act like you forget and get out of answering a difficult question, isn't it? Politics, of course, provides innumerable and colorful examples, because most of the lying in politics is lying by omission, intentional or not. Take, for instance, white house spokesperson Tony Donahue's response today to a reporters question regarding whether the bombing of the Iraqi parliament which killed three Iraqi MPs represented a failure of current security operations:

"The terrorists will do everything they can to try to undermine a government that is trying to bring peace and stability for the people of Iraq."

But does it mean our security operations are in jeopardy? The question doesn't (and hasn't) resulted in a meaningful response from this administration, just a blurring of the lines of responsibility. The equivocation in this quote ("undermine a government") underscores a neglect of responsibilities, a managerial imperialism, i.e., the Iraqi government is just like ours, trying to bring peace and stability, but running against "inevitable" difficulties because of terrorism. Instead of addressing the criticisms directed at their policies, this administration relies on an implicit trust in their mission, what Bush has termed his "mandate," which validates, a priori, any activity they perform; basically, by not addressing this criticism, Donahue is in fact addressing it the most clearly: he is saying, "You asked for this. You voted for us. You put us into office and we took it seriously. You thought elections were a joke?"

*********************************************************************

For better or for worse, this "mandate" is conflated with aggrandizing a-historicism, a sort of pseudo-religious self-righteous globalism, which resonates well both with the religious right ("humanism") and oil companies ("free markets"). Now, with scandals mounting and Dick Cheney about to undergo impeachment hearings, the transparent lies are beginning to be questioned. The obvious critique of this (or any imperialist) government's desire to "bring peace and stability" to Iraq is slowly being reformulated. We swore never to forget; this administration seems only to forget, to break its promises and the law. Donahue's comments give evidence to a widespread and intense aporia: specifically, he seems to be forgetting that we made possible the conditions which allowed the Sunni revolutionaries to rise to power, in fact, we are the ones who planted the seeds of these toxic inter-sectarian conflicts.

To wash our hands of it, even rhetorically, even to escape answering more difficult questions, is neurotic, amnesiatic, but worst of all, it's cruel and irresponsible. It makes more sense to us than it is comfortable to admit that, to the citizens of Iraq, we are the God of Death. Not that Iraq would have been peaceful or not without us-- but that due to our role in the history of the development of that country, we function as the rebel God who donates fire right into the hands of Saddam, one of the most dangerous and repressive rulers in history.

Fidelity to the event of September 11th requires not becoming or supporting terroristic groups or governments ourselves. How easily we forget, or pretend to! The immense spectacle of false images which were necessary and sufficient to provoke the otherwise extraordinarily apathetic American populace to war is already evidence of the fundamentally false premise under which this "war on terrorism" has been and is still presented, waged and represented six years later.

*********************************************************************

The fact that we had to be tricked to go along with this conflict means that the fight is wrong, and the ideology needs to be updated. This war is more about oil than it is about, say, democracy, September 11, or Christianity; however, more than oil, this war is about imperialism, it's necessary and sufficient condition was a feverish, but short-lived and long-regretted super-nationalism. Iraq is about nation- and empire-building. But this is flatly contradicted by democratic ideals; aren't we "all" supposed to build the nation? We "all" participate equally in free society, we "all" form the body politic in which the vox populi is lodged, etc, etc...

This idealism is what is taken to be true before anything else, and it is here that it pays most to be critical, and not to give an inch to superstitution and self-blinding delusion. The most generic expression of the current war is founded on a syllogism: since we are a democracy, we are able to institute it elsewhere. Besides the fact that this doesn't even logically follow, it is begging the question via the preliminary presumption that we are indeed a democracy, that we value social equality, and so forth. From the mouths of aggressors and warlords, this is ultimately a blind idealism to empty concepts which allows us to forget about our hypocrisy, our deception, our narcissism and our imperialism. In fact: this leader, this administration, this "war", are all spectacles, all justified by simulation, which represent an intervention against democracy.

Being and Event: Meditation 23 on Fidelity

2007-04-11T03:55:00.000-05:00

I call fidelity the set of procedures which discern, within a situation, those multiples whose existence depends upon the introduction into circulation (under the supernumerary name conferred by an intervention) of an evental multiple. In sum, a fidelity is the apparatus which separates out, within the set of presented multiples, those which depend upon an event. To be faithful is to gather together and distinguish the becoming legal of a chance

The word ‘fidelity’ refers directly to the amorous relationship, but I would rather say that it is the amorous relationship which refers, at the most sensitive point of individual experience, to the dialectic of being and event, the dialectic whose temporal ordination is proposed by fidelity…How, from the standpoint of the event-love, can one separate out, under the law of time, what organizes—beyond its simple occurrence—the world of love? (EE 232)

The explication of one of the truly fascinating concepts in Being and Event occurs in Meditation 23. Fidelity, as we shall see, leads also to the introduction of the subject—something that occurs last in this work, after all the order of reasons that serve as a foundation for Badiou’s set theory edifice. Though Badiou is quick to point out the resonance of fidelity to the amorous condition of philosophy, one should also point out the resonance of fidelity with notions of faithfulness and allegiance, like an oath sworn to a lord. In the short space that I have, I will set out to explicate the two dimensions of fidelity as a concept and its relationship to the subject.

Before we begin, I would like to arouse some intrigue into Badiou’s innovative theory of the subject. In Meditation 35, Badiou says that “the subject is chance” (396), and so we should juxtapose this to another quote that ends the first paragraph of Meditation 23: “To be faithful is to gather together and distinguish the becoming legal of a chance” (232). Having convoked these two statements together, what is fascinating is the fact that, from the point of view of the situation, the event is not counted as such—it is up to the subject to wager on its inclusion and to follow out the implications of this wager, implications that, in the current state of affairs, can only be described as that which will have taken place in the situation. This inclusion of the event entails the becoming legal of the logic of the event as chance, but it also indicates that the subject (retroactively?) becomes legal. Therefore, we must conclude that the subject is initially illegal.

Before flattering ourselves about this connection, we should define fidelity. It would be simple to introduce fidelity as the process that separates multiples in the situation in accordance to their (non)-connection to the event. More helpful for our topic, though, would be to point out some delimitations. First, fidelity is not linked to a “general faithful disposition;” instead, it relies on an event and so is always particular (233). Second, fidelity is not a multiple—strictly speaking, it is not. A fidelity acts as a different count, one not necessarily opposed to the state’s count, but one that enquires into the situation and marks the multiples that depend on the event. Therefore, as Badiou makes explicit more than once, fidelity is a concept related to the state. Third, when a faithful procedure is successful and it marks multiples as depending on the event, these multiples consequently are included in the situation. The fidelity is thus triply bound in its structure: it is defined by its situation, the event to which it corresponds, and the rule of connection that binds multiples as depending on the event.

However, we must remember that onto-mathematicians like Badiou wager that the being of situations is infinite. This assumption about the infinity of situations forces us to consider fidelity in its dual temporal aspect: it is “both the one-finite of an effective representation, and the infinity of a virtual presentation” (236). This means that fidelity’s goal—to count-as-one multiples marked by their dependence on the event and thus to present these marked multiples as a one—is never coextensive with the situation. The faithful count always lags behind the infinity of presentation: fidelity is a process that forever perpetuates its consistency by a further need to enquire into the connectivity of multiples to the event—the still-more of the faithful.

Before concluding our analysis of fidelity, we have to radically assert the deinstitutionalization of fidelity in order to truly capture its innovative essence. Opposed to a statist or spontaneist fidelity (the event only belongs to those who intervene) and a dogmatic fidelity (all multiples depend on the event), Badiou proposes the concept of a generic fidelity, that “which is unassignable to a defined function of the state…[and] from the standpoint of the state, [results in] a particularly nonsensical part” (237). This is because a generic fidelity allows the organization of another legitimacy of inclusions within the situation (238). For a fidelity to be generic it must be removed from the proximity of the state, the further the better. This argument makes Badiou assert a radical hypothesis: what if there is no relation between the two aspects of fidelity, namely the intervention and the operator of connection? This would mean that the operator acts as a second event in itself. Provocatively, the more it appears as a second event because of its subtraction from the proximity of the state, the more real the fidelity is for Badiou.

Nothing to Lose

2007-04-09T01:23:00.000-05:00

Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time. Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. -"The Communist Manifesto", Karl Marx

There’s nothing to lose, a world to win... A conscious life and a faithful love, these are our chains, a resolution forged in struggle and hope. They are not the chains of the master. The master is naught but a self-conscious and over-aggressive animal, chained by death and encircled by desire-- whereas in a properly human relation, we are freely bound to life, we are creatively engaged with the world, and we are bonded to one another, and to all others, in responsibility and love.

The Peace of Belief

2007-04-06T01:56:00.000-05:00

Freedom of belief is of central and obvious importance to a democratic community. Of course, beliefs are already quite problematic to the generation of a common public space. The twin "literal" issues surrounding the epistemological question, those of the expression and interpretation of beliefs, underscore the emergence of subjectivity in all political praxis, and in the broad sense, the critical self-questioning encountered in the everyday face-to-face encounter. As a brief example, what if the other's belief not only differs from my own, but ultimately proves threatening-- perhaps merely to my rationalization of reality, but also perhaps literally harmful or violent towards myself or my community. Do we require a dangerous other, to whom it is supposed we are "naturally" allergic, in order to achieve a community?

Let us examine the supposition that there are certain beliefs which could conceivably lead an otherwise peaceful society to violence. If there are such beliefs, they would certainly be powerless if they remained only as such; it seems to me that, by definition, beliefs only gain power when they are combined with a capacity and willingness to act on behalf of them. Even with harmful and dangerous beliefs, if they are only beliefs and influence action and speech in no perceptible way, we cannot say that they are harmful to others; indeed, we cannot properly speak of the content or value of beliefs which remain forever unexpressed. Now, in those beliefs which do transcend the immaterial realm of convictions, it can be fairly easily shown that beliefs whose content involves harm towards some other party are especially likely to be the source of actual violence or disagreement. In fact we can distinguish between two broad categories of belief: those that affirm some unifying principle of commonality, and those which affirm an antagonistic principle of division.

This distinction enables us to hazard an interpretation as to the nature of the transition which occurs from thought to action, from belief to principle of behavior. An idea has power inasmuch as it is believed; thus, belief is the power of an idea, though not the origin. Belief is faith in the possibility of revelation, in the future, but especially that aspect of reality to come which is completely unpredictable, and opens up onto a radical alterity whose horizons cannot be encompassed rationally. The infinite idea which is believed precedes the belief, if only minimally: an infinitesimal belief (which is an infinite skepticism) is required in order to approach an idea within the "reasonable" bounds of concepts. This is the essence of what it means to think rationally, "objectively"--which really stands in this case for, pretending we know nothing about the situation or ourselves, we act like we believe completely and only in the network of sensicality and in the testimony of our senses. Objectivity is actually a complex mediation of the subject-object relation which supports an illusion of perfect communicability, supposes an almost religious sort of fundamental sense-event which could guarantee the consistency and accuracy of our deductions and observations--"within reasonable limits," not comprehending the limits are just as arbitrary as the task for which the measurements are being taken.

Belief names the properly subject-ive moment in thought, indeed, it names the outermost limit of subject-thought. The process of belief transforms ideas into action. Belief powers the idea, demands faithfulness and responsibility, moves the subject to act, guides the action with deliberate concentration, with a joyful care. We can gather these strands together in order to enunciate the structure of belief; let's say that belief is the adequation of thought, and that this is accomplished by the repeated generation of (subjective) self-difference. Belief ex-cends this primordial separation between subject-object and Other, "completes" it in its total incoherency. The asynchrony between the same and the other is constantly generated by the unnatural and self-critical movement (belief, interpretation) which is brought about in the social encounter, and the subject is itself actualized in a responsibility to one's relationship to the community. Indeed, we might say the first question of any possible future democracy is at once and entirely a question of peace and political economy, and so the key question for politics at this moment would be-- to put it lightly-- who's the adult here? Could we compare society to the enactment of a scene from a dream, whose origins are lost in the depths of time and whose goals, limits and internal consistency are equally, terrifyingly uncertain?

All we own is an unfreedom we have been convinced to freely accept: where is the freedom we were taught to love? We should not be convinced of our own unworthiness or inadequacy. The non-adequation lies wholly within the total system which cannot integrate that which remains itself. Power is thought transforming into action; by escaping the reach of established power, we can lead both thought and action beyond the sick and paranoid systems which seek to completely ontologize reality, reduce everything vital and beautiful and free into a empty void full of violence and shadows and a wild, unsustainable desire... Just as there is no truth without dancing, there can be no ethics without a balance between the whole and the part, a balance which never reaches a perfect equilibrium but is always playing about the edges, deploying its forces to the limit, in an upheaval of the established institutions which is the inauguration of a new way of being. Such a transcendence is already the jouissance of a new manner of speaking... The belief in peace is salvation and slavery at once; democracy as a "peaceful" attitude towards beliefs ends up assuming an outright hostile, authoritarian attitude towards individuals. An ideal democracy is already a false one, and this hinge is why democracy functions so much better than other systems: reflexivity, evolution, and so on... But our freedoms erode as quickly as they are written into law, a writing which can never be adequate to the unfreedom which predominates...

I'm done watching this

2007-04-03T21:11:00.000-05:00

Isn't it true that the ongoing cinematization of existence occurs in spite of our desire to actually see what is produced? Our joy, our stimulation, lies almost entirely in the (anticipation and moment of the) absolute captivation which video inaugurates. We capture images, and are captured by capturing images; eventually, we only recognize ourselves and others through such images.

"Reality" television has a similar structure of addiction. It is more important to record something than to have something to record. We can push this further: the total flow of television doesn't just erase pre-existing images and replace them with its own; it captivates through a procedure of subjectivization. The television watches us: as the audience becomes the image, (once properly alienated from themselves,) they thereby gain an "objective" understanding of themselves, but only at the cost of forgoing self-ownership. From this null perspective, we only have generic, faceless subjects, undead subjects who live entirely through images, imaginary subjects recording what is seen with the 'objectivity' of the camera lens.

Now perhaps the camera is rightly called "objective" if only that it is the objectification of the Other perspective as such, but in fact, it is more accurate to say the camera subjectivates, annuls objectivity in a secret way, that is, by dominating the imagination, by causing the subject to believe himself imaginary. The camera holds everything in its grasp, and thus cannot exist without suffocating existence, depriving viewers access to fresh air or alternate perspectives, and perhaps to press this metaphor a little too hard, these images squeezes the air of original words out from our lungs, replaces interpretation with advertising. Toxic air and clean become indiscernible as lies from truth.

If enlightenment amounts to a sensitivity to truth above material concerns, television forces the "truth" of consumerism to its vulgar limit: what materializes before our eyes is not the product, but a fantasy in which the desire of the product reigns, i.e., the desire of the commercial is to instill desire within us. How? At first glance, by hypnotism (both sublime and subliminal,) or, more simply, by an apparent hallucination which would evoke "positive" (profitable) associations... but upon further reflection, we percieve that the apparently immaterial fantasy of enjoyment (the proper operative field of the commercial product) has actually been concretized in the marketed-image.

The surrealistic consumer-utopia of commerciality is the same non-reality in which an empty Oneness has taken the place of the many, where addiction has replaced truth and where submission has taken the place of struggle. In the marketed-image, which is a reflection of our voluntary unconsciousness, we have found the "truth" of our speculative non-lives-- that the truth was long ago replaced by a simulation. Captivated by the time of the spectacle, there is no longer actual reality, only a flux of repeated images. This is strictly worse than Magritte: the problem is not that this image isn't (say) a Coke, it's that (so to speak) it is a Coke, that is, it's nothing, the pure semblance of property which is already its theft (lack). When the mass media, particularly television, become totalizing instruments of the state irrationality, they are no longer harmless diversions, but the medium of an aggressive assertion of dominance. The development of society is documented by the media, but we must realize this is not about image, or influence, but about something much simpler--this is about power.

The media is not just the "internal" representation of social reality (from the standpoint of a particular culture, perspective, etc.); rather, the media externalizes our desires as discoveries, modulates our separation from the real. Ultimately, we are ex-centered; the spectacle of images mediates our relationship to reality, this mediation is what separates us while connecting us. Television is an enlightenment which only further enslaves. That is not to say: "quit watching TV!" or even "quit watching stupid TV!" Rather the point is to realize the hypnosis which has almost taken hold. This is to say: we must slacken the ropes which bind us.

Which is not to be free; such an unbinding this only re-binds us tighter to the machine which would drain us of autonomous life and sun light. The point is we are free to choose; the problem is not in television, or the spectacle as such, it is in us, in allowing ourselves to become spectators. The question is ultimately what kind of society do we want: is it one of docile specators to an imaginary "reality" of television (and consumerism, etc.), or would we rather an emancipation from all forms of slavery and bondage? Shouldn't we seek to unlock the infinite latent possibilities of the present "reality" rather than get captured by shadows, absences and obscene pleasures?

Political consciousness is not to be incapable of that (percieved) lack which would bind us to our socio-economic position, but to affirm a fidelity to fidelity -- responding to subjectively-investigating interpretations, and not to advertising. As opposed to the binding of addiction and nationalism, political thought binds only in the service of un-binding totalitarianism, and un-binds only in the process of binding subjects to truth, human beings to liberty, and so forth...

Television admits of a single, fatal flaw: the nirvana of satiated consumeristic desire which it evokes so insistently is a complete fake, founded on the very lack it denies: this is Nietzsche's subtle distinction between "wanting nothing" as in (a) not wanting anything, or (b) actively wanting nothing. The nihilism implicit in television's dumbed-down reality (as though the actual situation doesn't really matter at some level) is the critical confession of an empty prophecy, a soothsayer whose lies are always the same, that is, whatever it is you don't have, that's what you need. In opposition, we don't need to turn off our televisions; we need to reject the very notion of a "well-ordered" reality, we need to challenge television to be more daring. The problem is not the media but its misuse.

Logic of Sense: Series 25

2007-04-03T21:07:00.000-05:00

Of course, with Series 25, one could, along with Badiou, single out the title as the concept that needs to be unpacked, especially since univocity has a particularly Deleuzian ring to it. But the term—and Deleuze starts using it around p. 150 in the text—that most interests me in this series is counter-actualization.

On the one hand, we can remember the play of the virtual/actual couple that Badiou finds so fun to dismantle. On the other, the most important thing is to signify how this term works in this particularly situated part of the text. So, giving Deleuze the benefit of the doubt, we should keep in mind that Deleuze doesn’t use the word virtual anywhere in this passage. Neither does he use the word compossible in this passage, but since he has introduced this term with reference to Leibniz, I think it’s important to stress a point that Deleuze makes at the beginning of the series: there is no such thing as incompatibility between events because such a term can only be used when referring to worlds, individuals, or persons (177). Since the disjunctive synthesis is the basis for the affirmation of the divergent, worlds that actualize events can become incompatible because of the divergent singularities that populate their series; strictly speaking though, “it seems that all events, even contraries, are compatible” (177).

So, simply put, Deleuze’s question is: how is the individual able to “transcend his form and his syntactical link with a world” in order to “attain the universal communication of events” (178). But this is not so simple. Here Deleuze seems to mean the following: if, as quoted above, all events are compatible, then how is any language of the event possible? Before following Deleuze’s argument more closely, we should bring Leibniz back to the center of discussion. Deleuze draws on and explicates Leibniz’s theory of monads through The Logic of Sense, and so it would not be inappropriate here to talk about his theory of monads: all monads “perceive” the world from a distinct perspective and also link up with other monads, causing permutations in the vicinity as they link up--Deleuze continues this discussion in Difference and Repetition in order to explain the ways in which the monads express a differential relation between themselves (47). So, in themselves, monads contain a grain of truth about the world which they inhabit. Each monad must be considered in itself, a part which has a reciprocal relationship with other parts, like a link in a signifying chain, and thus a world is constructed from this double action.

Yet, as Deleuze points out, with the event we cannot refer to a grammar of worlds. Syntactically, the event seems both to insist on its extra-being and also entail a pre-individuality that lacks any true communicability. That’s unless we can bring about counter-actualization. In the sense that I understand it, counter-actualization comes about when an individual considers herself as an event and that event as “another individual grafted onto her” (178). This double affirmation extends to treating other individuals as events and their events as individuals—it is this affirmation that brings events “to the power of the eternal return” (178). The power of the eternal return is what allows for an affirmation of the disjunctive synthesis; in other words, the divergence of two series (individuals with respect to the distance of other individuals/events) is not only affirmative but it necessarily alters the other series by resonating in it and vice versa. It is the conjunction of Leibnizian monads and counter-actualization that allows for Deleuze to talk of a unique Event. It is this unique Event that the univocity of Being is: “if Being is the unique event in which all events communicate with one another, univocity refers both to what occurs and to what is said” (180).

Lacan and The Problem of Foundations

2007-04-01T01:26:00.000-05:00

“Psychoanalysis has played a role in the direction of modern subjectivity, and it cannot sustain this role without aligning it with the movement in modern science that elucidates it.

“This is the problem of the foundations that must assure our discipline its place among the sciences: a problem of formalization, which, it must be admitted, has gotten off to a very bad start.

“For it seems that, possessed anew by the very shortcoming in the medical mind in opposition to which psychoanalysis had to constitute itself, we were trying to jump back on the bandwagon of science--being half a century behind the movement of the sciences--by following medicine’s example.”
Jacques Lacan

“The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (Ecrits 235, 2006)

The “problem of formalization” to which Lacan here refers is the linguistic problematic par excellence. In a sense it is a question of valid definitions, whose component-words also have to have valid definitions in order for the original definition’s validity to remain intact, and those definitions are also composed of similarly-defined words, and on and on. What we have characterized as a “linguistic” problem is in fact merely a problem of form. Psychoanalysis raises this question of form, of foundation, as a scientific question which calls all science into question. The “problem of foundations” presumes an unfamiliar structure, whose form is de-formation, or rather, it takes an unfamiliar posture, inquiring in a master’s discourse about the validity of the master’s discourse. In other words, psychoanalysis presumes a curious structure whose rule is the rule of the process of transcendence of the ruled-structure.

An ex-structure, the gap or lack beneath the foundations of our ontological and metaphysical edifices, is that which (in its transcendence of the situation) obliges us to inaugurate a discourse. From separation comes speech; but speech already bears witness to this ex-structure (an un-structuring which re-structures)-- we hear the voice as a ghost in the machine, the surplus of sociality, already transgression, apology, absolution. What is precisely of interest to us here is the parallax contained here at this very moment, in the subject-language itself. Lacan seemed to believe that most of our personality is a result of the effects of speech upon us; not the least of reasons for this would be the complex role the subject-language plays-- how does it avoid the black hole of nothingness upon which it is founded and about which it radiates outwards into infinity? This is already an interrogation; here, we are at the closest and most urgent function of language, as command-to-be-truthful, as fidelity to my interpretation of the event, or more accurately, to that partial-description of a determination of a truth-event which language welcomes even as it attempts to re-integrate the alterity which constitutes the rupture of the event. Even here we must emphasize the hermeneutic, mediatory role the subject-language plays; language calls us to be a third to others as well as to ourselves. The mirror-image is not only a trauma, a horrifying bifurcation of reality which denudes our foundationlessness; we already live in a reflection of life, a non-life which enjoys only ‘speculation,’ embraces normalcy and reproduction. The mirror lies only in its terrifyingly total accuracy...

Against Culture

2007-03-30T01:44:00.000-05:00

The identity of the same is an equivocation, a place without place. The "I am" is an assertion of allegiance before it attains any sort of meaningful substance, and this allegiance to the same name in the face of the other is the second term of meaning, the same/other dyad being exceeded by their connectivity, which erases their separate identity-- and resolves an irreducible separation by re-inscribing this self-difference already in the name of the Other.

Your name declares your genealogy, arrives as the for-what and for-whom you stand; your name stands for you, it already effaces your identification as any separate, autonomous being. A name is a confession to belonging, inclusion into a community of speakers, who at the least acknowledge your awareness. The name is the essence of symbolism. Thus the name presents us with a triple reflection towards/away from/towards the subject: my awareness of the others' consciousness of my presence already convokes the declaration of my name, albeit by the voice, or even the slightest movement of the others' hand, at last, merely her gaze accomplishes the same reflection which is sanctified, or rather purged of sanctity, in a name.

But the name only refers to the break within identity; it is the first material, or rather vocal illusion, which in hiding a deeper separation and mystery from itself, refers back to the ultimate illusion. This being the faith in appearances, images, letters, the religious illusion, if you like-- though this is confounded still more by cross-currents from the premodern, modern and postmodern re-crisises of faith-- but what all of this amounts to a sort of status quo, not progress but exactly a deadlock.

Faithlessness, whether in divinity, in institutions, in religions, in society, or in culture, is here to be read as that symptom of a heartbreaking disappointment, "yet another defective situation." It is a resistance-- to the other in whom trust is not to be placed, leaders who fail at their post and take us not into the promised safety but rather deeper into danger than we were before. The death of God is neither ontological nor religious--it occurs in the loss of faith in the Other, when we observe that justification and responsibility are no longer the criteria of political economy.

Or worse, they never could be: power is not fairly distributed, even so the distribution is irrational, "up for grabs," as it were; the world seems bent on continuing a destructive spiral of violence and war... Even though boredom is counter-revolutionary, it is not hard to see that apathy is intelligent psychological self-defence in the midst of this perfectly reasonable, terrifyingly irrational society we've become. Alienation, disillusionment, disconent--all this speaks to a mass abreaction, to a steadily quickening pace of Events, and to the failure of static institutions to adequately respond, to represent, to keep count, as it were.

The fact is that many if not most of the institutions we are supposed to have faith in have long been exposed as a sham, whose main accomplishment was accomplished at its founding--and it seems as though these institutions have continued existing as if in mourning for the ecstatic heyday of its inauguration. But reactionary behavior patterns, acting only insofar as a spectator, affirms the spectacle of the culture industry, interacting with others through an interference pattern of images.

Belonging to modern society is a non-participation, a relation without relation-- Our identities have only a derivative existence, mediated through the mass market, which was the historical moment in which the production of identical lives was made possible. So there is a sort of inevitable, irreducible gap within identity itself, not just in its relation with the Other; but there is another kind of break with time which currently prevails, a dangerous amnesia or alienation of identity from its own future, which with respect to the individual is equivalent to the void (uncounted) place of the individual in the prevailing political economy, his (social, legal, religious) position of powerlessness and weakness in the face of an absolutely transcendent Other.

This is why much of the discourse on 'respect for the other' is misguided, since it recognizes only an apologetic stance towards the approach of the other. But what if the other comes to me with war and hate in his heart? Should I both to attempt a face to face resolution? Or, rather, should I protect what is mine, protect myself from the machinations of his evil intent? The resistance towards the repressive other is also an unavoidable ethical stance. But a society without peace is a non-society, and mercy towards the other cannot exist without love.

Freedom is not merely our birthright; it must also be excerised, demanded, that is to say, we must produce freedom positively. Negative freedom is slavery; this is the weakness of the doctrines of 'tolerance'. They reflect only the powerlessness of the spectator, or rather the false choice of the spectator (what to watch, not whether to watch,) reducing the gap between cultures to the choice between, say, marlboro and camel lights-- it speaks of the disconnected, unsatisfied lack inherent in the cycle of addiction without truth or completion, in which it becomes easier to accept than challenge, and we resign ourselves as spectators of the tragic dramaturgy opened up by this radical separation, this inversion of life into non-life, and thereby we are convinced into giving away our birthright: finally, we accept the prevailing status quo, quite ready to defend our right to non-freedom at all costs.

Against culture, we must produce freedom constantly if we are to be free; not hectically, at though trying to catch up with it, as though it escaped our grasp: we produce freedom not by exerting our power, but our right to powerlessness-- that is, living without paranoia, without the need to grasp and conquer and destroy, without allergies to the differences of others, without this primitive, aggressive culture of dominance, acquistion and nihilism.

Freedom is the constant demand of this right, the right to peace, without which there can be no society at all. Else we are merely spectators, devourers of the perverse, apathetic images which mediate our entire existence-- without peace, there is only non-life, a closed life without life, as a defective, uncounted, exploited appendage of some incomprehnsibly colossal, terrifying war machine and its endlessly entertaining, fantastically profitable culture industry, which together invade, colonize and dominate our entire existence.

Thus freedom is a wager on peace, on the possibility (however slim) of a non-repressive society which lives and breathes freely, which has maturely accepted a limitation of its spontaneity. Culture as it currently exists is a spectacle of images which interpose and mediate our relation with the Other; it is anti-ethical. Thus culture is the socio-political surgery of separating Being into beings, infinity from itself, a reduction of the subject to the pure form of the void. We belong to a culture to the same degree we are de-formed by it--that is, how deeply we believe in its truth. The "truth" of such a violent, permissive culture is the moment in a falsehood in which it is expressed, for this culture will tell you whatever you want to hear, as long as you're paying up. Thus the political consequence of not resisting such a monological and destructive modality of culture is the revenge of the same violent logic of subtraction: the sudden reduction of every infinite multiplicity-- to the same empty image reproduced forever.

Anaximander and the Infinite

2007-03-20T21:54:00.000-05:00

'The principle and beginning ... of beings is the limitless ... where beings have their beginning, therein also have their end according to necessity; for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice in accordance with the arrangement of time.

[The limitless is] immortal [...] and imperishable.'

ἀρχὴ ... τῶν ὄντων τὸ ἄπειρον ... ἐξ ὧν δὲ ἡ γένεσίς ἐστι τοῖς οὖσι͵ καὶ τὴν φθορὰν εἰς ταῦτα γίνεσθαι κατὰ τὸ χρεών· διδόναι γὰρ αὐτὰ δίκην καὶ τίσιν ἀλλήλοις τῆς ἀδικίας κατὰ τὴν τοῦ χρόνου τάξιν.

Ἀθάνατον [...] καὶ ἀνώλεθρον.

[Fragments of Anaximander]

The idea of the infinite is, perhaps, the oldest philosophical concept in the Western tradition, dating back to the earliest fragment of Anaximander. In the Physics, Aristotle credits Anaximander as the first to name the infinite as the material cause of all things and cites him as asserting that “the first element of things was the Infinite.” What is absolutely spine-tingling about this ascription of generative power to the idea of infinity is the deduction following it: since the other ‘elements’ oppose and balance one another, none of them can equal or surpass the infinite. Thus infinity is both the material cause of all things as well as their ultimate be-ing, since all the other elements which exist are finite, deriving their existence from infinity. And, since it is always within the ‘domain’ (as it were) of the infinite that “things take their rise” and “pass away once more, as is ordained,” these finite creatures, derivative of the infinite but separated from it by their antagonism for one another, must “make reparation and satisfaction to one another for their injustice according to the appointed time.”

From the very beginning of what we think of as philosophy, the infinite has been tied not only to that which floods and exceeds the bounds of all creation, both temporally and materially, but to a fundamental conception of justice and ethical principle. In the idea of the infinite the ethical relation is already asserted. The infinite is not just an illustration of the ethical relation, or the other way around; nor is it a mere similarity in ontological or metaphysical structure which is being played upon; the very transcendence embodied and overflowed in the idea of infinity already ordains respect, as from some ontological height so awesome as so to metaphysically sublime, demands that justice be "paid" or en-acted, not in some afterlife, but "according to necessity," within time itself. That is, justice is not some transcendent figure by which a cosmic judgment is placed; justice must be rendered by “reparation and satisfaction” towards one another within time, “according to the appointed time.” There is no truth without justice and there is no justice without the ethical relation. That is to say that love demands justice, there can be no conception of true justice without invoking an infinite love--that is, there is a radical pre-ontological priority of the relationship to the human face which is the origin of social justice.

The infinite is the meaning of an unencompassable height, radically transcending us, calling our freedom into question by its monstrous presence. This calling into question by that which is limitless, by that which is beyond-being, imperishable and immortal-- is already ethics, for justice is demanded by love, the relation to the other is already transfigured by an ethical relation, by the infinity which the coming of the other into my realm actualizes. The idea of infinity is a sun truly too bright for philosophy to bear without squinting at the truth. Nietzsche's reproach of the philosophers, that they approach it all too directly, is an appreciation of the enigma and wonder of infinity, as well as its (inevitable, we're human, right?) erotic dimension, as Nietzsche puts it: "Truth is like a woman." In other words, philosophers confound themselves with the paradoxes of infinty, whereas there is a completely rational integration with a properly conceived religious perspective. This "trick" is simply an appreciation of the out-of-bounds surplus which the idea of infinity embodies: transcendence, right? In other words, we are situated asymetrically relative to an Otherness which precedes and supercedes us ontologically and metaphysically; the only possible relation is one of submission, i.e., ethics, being a host, welcoming the other, etc. In sociality we are rewarded amply for such a "subjection" to the beyond. We can see the infinite in language. In short, there is a completely valid perspective which integrates (post)-religion and philosophy while retaining political and moral integrity: in other words, a proper conception of the infinite and of the other, that we are always situated in relation to an-other, and that this being another-to-myself constitutes awareness itself, and moreover, is already an ethical relation.

We are close to Hegel when tells us there could be religion without philosophy, but no philosophy without religion; the idea of infinity is not just the pure formal representation of 'endlessness,' but is a thought which overflows itself, already springs into action as of its own accord Even the idea of infinity radically phenomenologically exceeds ourselves: and isn't this Descartes discovery, where he discovers himself and the absolute simultaneously, as it were? But the temporality is actually reversed, for only once the absolutely infinite is glimpsed, must he squint and dilute the purity of the discovery by conceptualizing perfection or purity itself, purged of the violence of the sacred; he discovered the pinpoint self, the Cartesian subject.

Badiou rediscovers the infinite multiplicity at the core of being one-self, and concludes that the One is not (i.e., God is dead); in ontology, the radical encounter with the idea of the infinite is completely purged of the violence of the sacred. However, to reinstitute it, we don't need recourse to religious faith per se; we need to embard upon a re-understanding of religion, as (after Marx, of course) Badiou himself knows, having written a book about St Paul, not to mention he sometimes calls his project a "laicization" of the infinte, which implies an atheist re-interpretation of religious values. Indeed, he has been preceded on this point by Emmanuel Levinas, who also speaks of a "desacralization" of the world, so that ethics could truly take place (i.e., without the totalitarian structures which currently mediate our relation to the other.)

A proper reunderstanding of religion would recognize its function politically and psychologically. Such a revaluation would necessarily involve a reorganization of almost all the academic discourses, a radical re-territorialization of arbitrarily bifurcated and sutured disciplines (ways-of-speaking and ways-of-being.) Honestly, it is about time for another great revolution in even the major categories of human understanding and the way we organize reality. The time is ripe for a concise answer to our epochs' "life persistent questions," some kind of post-religious ethical value-system/life-style which happens to incorporate a convincing rational explanation for our presence and meaning in the universe.

I wonder....

Reality (Emptiness, Humor, Freedom)

2007-03-16T22:07:00.000-05:00

We are all familiar with this comic turnabout in older cartoons: that absurd situation involving, usually, a rampant chase, or sometimes a backwards-treading showdown, which ends with the unfortunate victim running headlong (or deliberately pacing) into frightfully empty space. Suspended oblivious in mid-air off the edge of a cliff, the victim of this joke pantomimes the sprinter’s circular leg motions--and, of course, his forward velocity only stops once he has realized the ground is no longer beneath him, that is, gravity only actually “takes hold” in the moments following the ‘revelation’ wherein the character ‘real’-izes that it should have already taken hold of him.

Why is there humor in this moment? Because we recognize ourselves in it: immersed within a theme of universal separation, i.e., surrounded by "nothing," humor comprehends that the universe is not what we decide it is, but is always only what we real-ize it is. More generally, a joke “cures” us as a vaccine does, by reproducing the disease in an 'innocuous' form; in particular, the joke neuters a radical or contradictory situation, but by exemplifying the inconsistent and exaggerating it. There are at least three reasons for this. First, by impertinently giving voice straightforwardly to an a-sensical disjunction, we disarm the imminent threat of the contradiction, we "open up" a void in the world in order to distract ourselves from the actual void, but only for a time--even though by doing so, we ("inadvertently") introduce further tensions via themes and association, tearing open an infinite number of linked and novel inconsistencies. Which is why, secondly, jokes are a release of unconscious tension: by placing these contradictions into the ("logical") temporal sequence of events, we "master" and therefore obliviate time itself: humor owes its existence entirely to deliberate timing. Third, by encapsulating the paradox, we position the feared object strictly within the horizon of thought; but a joke always wants to say more than it says, and humor lives entirely in the gap between what is and what is said.

By reifying the glitch between language and being, the joke strikes us both as true and absurd simultaneously, and thus offers a glimpse beyond the horizon at an alternate reality, as enjoyment and effulgent feeling which is not a surprised knowing but is precisely laughter. Thus a joke is a narratively structured mis-leading which is just hypnotic enough to cause a momentary “hiccup” in our stream of reality, the improvised incorporation of an alien and unexpected rhythm. This moment is a break that mends us, a tearing open of a wound that heals us, if only for one instant, from the irreducible lack in this defective world, a makeshift vaccine simultaneously made for and from the inevitable brokenness of being (one-self).

Humor is this cure which reifies the terrifying eruption of naked existence itself. Although a humorous euphemism seems only to reiterate the 'feared' or 'broken' object in a clandestine and reconstituted shape, it is really a way of forgetting the thing itself, for within the bounds of this deliberate act of self-deception our abstract fear and tension dissipates, but not by being erased: rather, we express the tension all too directly, we magnify and externalize our unnameable fears, surround ourselves with it until it is colossal, all-consuming, cosmically terrifying, and then, of course, it can no longer hurt us because we realize it has become altogether too much, which is, of course, never enough. A joke is only really funny once. A stale joke reeks of the fears which caused it to be created as an armor piece in the very first place.

What is funny in this delayed falling, in the “hiccup” moment of the cartoon just after the unfortunate victim realizes there is no longer support beneath him? It is because the victim himself thereby brings about the very end he only suspects. We identify with the victim of the joke in this minimal terror of sudden foundationlessness. An unstatable fear because it echoes an ex-centered tension, or threat creeping in from beyond or outside the situation, and this fear which is precisely what-is-stated. Indeed, by stating our unstatable fear, this joke is giving voice to the “wavering” between language and reality which underlies our most strictly held beliefs, indeed, our 'real'-ity itself. A joke, whose superbly joyous and free existence depends almost entirely on its timing, reveals the uncertain temporality of existence itself. The delayed timing upon which this joke depends, the hesitation literalized in this mid-air suspension, reifies the everyday situation where our very fear and ignorance brings about the thing which causes us to be afraid. Perhaps because fear and tension make us distracted and thus vulnerable, allowing us insufficient attention towards ominous constellations of coincidences-- (who knows, perhaps the perverse tendency of dangerous but unlikely scenarios to occur at a rate so frequent it would seem to belie their statistical improbability rather reveals our own unconscious though “deliberate” hand in their occurrence, not only in the paranoid formation of nightmare-fantasy but in this precisely forgotten transference between the semi-bodied half-dreamworld and the all-too-real situation--) such “coincidences” indeed turn out to be anything but, since between our crippling fear and empowering anxiety, we are mired in a generative though aversive amnesia: we ourselves bring about the most feared, least favorable condition by our own hand even as we try to prevent it, because we try to prevent it.

An obsessively-feared ocurrence is so dark we cannot help but clarify it, so unthinkable we cannot stop imagining and re-realizing its occurrence. But it is the same fearful thing against which we would enthusiastically raise our entire being up unless the thing in itself did not already present our own desire so completely and positively that to contradict it would be already to contradict this moment of resistance itself, to contradict our own superimposition. Our existence is itself nothing; our position within reality is arbitrary, random, meaningless; but the sequence of events in a human life is anything but arbitrary, anything but random. Such a suspension in mid-air is the result of a deliberate forgetting, an act of doublethink: a moment is forgotten, but (not) consciously, for we remember to forget (to remember...) The “x” which was to be erased is rather just crossed out with another “x”--but such self-censorship is not yet futility, even though through the act of repression itself we give a priveleged place to the underlying unadulterated truth. Repression admits of multiple possible modalities of enjoyment even as it denies this possibility, and is an erasure of (alleged) "bad" through a violent un-forgetting of the "right" way to do things: a legal limit on infinity is already close to society's definition of 'sanity.'

Self-censorship is an internalization of an entire society into your own mind, and already an expression of loyalty and dependence upon the entire chain of social appearances; thus can we only coherently externalize our “unique” (i.e., apart from “society”) attitude towards life through irreverence and disobedience towards society itself? “Breaking the rules” reformulates the exact structure of repression, though in reverse ("Now, I will impose MY reality upon YOU!") and thus fails completely to liberate: rebellion and discontent and chaos is not the same as completely liberated and uncensored desire-- which means "organized resistance" is already an irony and a contradiction--resistance, ultimately, is banal, about the every day situation, our allotment of time, and what we DO with it--and so "organization" already re-expresses the very repression which justice demands we resist. The problem, of course, is that of replacement: what do we do now that the old organization is out of the way? As Lacan remarks apropos of the events of May 1968, those who look for new masters will surely find them. The question is entirely one of the correct expression of master morality, which is a difficult and obscure question with troubling dimensions. But resistance in slavery is the alternative, and moreover is ludicrous, since we deny and affirm the same state of affairs simultaneously. For between freedom and repression there is a gap, and it is only in between that events take place-- in our following, we cannot move to either side without already becoming both part of the happening and irreversibly excised from it. Thus we are forever completely caught up within the "real" situation, without being able or willing to extricate ourselves--and, we are also wholly engrossed with the situation as an obstacle to be overcome: we prevent ourselves from passing beyond or through by the very fantasy that we are at a crossroads and that we are supposed, somehow, to “choose correctly” (even though we may be in “anguish”) and “move along” as though we could terminate eternally all relation we ever had to this event. But we are afraid to say “yes” and afraid to say “no,” and the truth is that it is only when we are unrecoverably stuck in this gap between absolute planes of existence, we actually have a choice.

Only in this gap between the “so-called” choice, which is so axiomatic, simplistic and pure as to be almost meaningless, do we ever exercise any sort of potentiality which could actually be called a freedom. But this freedom is always and only a freedom to perform a repressed act--(perform what?)--the act of demonstrating the existence of freedom, that is to say, an implication, the presentation of the possibility of a violation, the presentation merely of the possibility of such a performance, though it may ultimately be absurd in the cosmic sense. The possibility of something different than the ways things are, in different way than we are used to considering, is worth something: indeed, it’s worth everything, it’s the underlying rhythm of every joke, and the message of every joke is sympomatic of a pre-existing censorship which declares in almighty absolutes the limits of possibility. Thus humor is a teasing of the limits of the virtual. For example, art is always created in response to a repression, and expresses as always only an enduring, resistant, immanent freedom itself, in defiance of the censor: art is an asymptotic transference (i.e., an emancipatory event, an event at the ‘boundary’ of infinity.)

We are to be free in order to show others that there is repression-- we recognize in the delayed timing of the fall the true reality beneath appearances, that is, that we willingly suspend ourselves in mid-air, in universal doubt and hopelessness, in subjective anxiety and existential straits and spiritual hardship, in thoughtlessness and boredom and hesitation-- not in an attempt to change the ultimate outcome (which is, in any case, known completely in advance,) but simply to escape ourselves--

As in all jokes we learn from these cartoons a truth about freedom, which is only funny because it doesn't help--we already know that we cannot become free just by running away, whether from repression or from the object being repressed. The revelation is incarceration: we're only trapped when we realize we're trapped, left only to perform our meaningless dance in that unnameable intersection between the void and the law (violence/death/universality.) It is not obvious this "metaphysical" situation is not an academic question, or that an agnostic position over this kind of freedom is a contradiction, already choicelessness and pure nihilism, e.g., "supposing such choices are only theoretical, how can they make a universal difference?" It is important that the repressed memory here is humor itself, or more generally, the positivity of the void: running away won’t make us free, because the very force of the desire to escape the threat causes the unwanted event to come about. Pure escape is a paranoid fantasy just as absolute knowledge is a generic paranoid pretension. The difficulty here is that paranoid certainty verges on reality with a cryptic and surreal twist: we are indeed trapped. But then the question for freedom can therefore never be one of pure escape. Rather it is always particularly framed as the problematic of absolute separation, the difficult practical questions of pure revolt, the invocation of thought upon an eminently logical rebellion, a rigorous, a priori militant resistance to injustice. Freedom must be therefore be expressed as simultaneously particular, universal, and transcendending the universal: as resistance in the name of truth, as intolerance in the name of justice, and as courage in the face of annihilation----

Bergson (Attention)

2007-03-12T00:19:00.000-05:00

"Collecting, organizing the totality of its experience in what we call its character, the mind causes it to converge upon actions in which we shall afterwards find, together with the action which is their matter, the unforeseen form which is stamped upon them by personality; but the action is not able to become real unless it succeeds in encasing itself in the actual situation, that is to say, in that particular assemblage of circumstances which is due to the particular position of the body in time and space... Our body, with the sensations which it recieves on the one hand and he movements which it is capable of executing on the other hand, is then, that which fixes our mind, and gives it balance and poise. The activity of the mind goes far beyond the mass of accumulated memories, as this mass of memories itself is infinitely more than the sensations and movements of the present hour; but these sensations and these movements condition what we may call our attention to life, and that is why everything depends on their cohesion in the normal work of the mind, as in a pyramid which should stand on its apex."
(Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory 172-3)

Why does the nervous system, like human societies and organizations, seems to beg for analysis and comprehension through the lens or cipher of a pyramidal geometry? The focal point of Bergson's hierarchical schema of consciousness is focus itself, that is, attention or awareness; we have here a series of superimposed triangles (after Lacan's schema) whose pinpoint alternates between polarized modalities: first, the ocular apparatus (itself a double tripartite structure whose apex is the surface of the cornea, with the visual field on one side and the inverted reflection on the other); then, sensation: the body's inter-face with externality, the focal point again being focus itself; then, the spiritual-social: the subject's inter-transposition with the void and the face on either side, an infinite and unterritorializable relation which cuts jagged gashes across and through the "stuff" and matter of subjectivity.

Indeed, Bergson is absolutely correct--everything depends on the cohesion of these jagged, irregular, mobile structures; their tripartite division (mind, body, soul; idea, image, word; object, eye, gaze) expresses the radical separation between any two layers within any structure, which reveals the radical interconnection between structures of awareness. Balance is inevitable, constantly resurging, self-correcting. We deconstruct the layers of awareness (physical, sensible, spiritual) only to discover their essential identity and contradiction in the same movement; it is this very rupture which is objectified in the cogito; this objectification is of course its downfall, as in fact it makes a much stronger case when inverted: we think because we are-- i.e., pure materialism-- but either way, the identity asserted between mind and body represses the fundamental rupture, the void point between or across both which awareness represents. But why does Bergson stand the pyramid upon its point?

The inversion which Bergson here intends is not between our body and its movements, nor between mind (thought, theory, memory, time) versus body (sensation, matter, movement, space); rather, there is a fundamental paradigm of balance and "poise" under which any awareness "decodes" itself through (e)motion, allows a crack in being so that its essence or "charater" may be exposed, and this rupture is rather the empty core of that helix around which body and mind are braided together--that is, the world is neither a stage upon which awareness and expression are performed are performed any more than awareness can give itself means, substance or inspiration to function.

By connecting awareness to balance, to the apex of an inverted pyramid, does Bergson not represent the weight, the burden of existence upon the singular "point" of the subject whose iceberg of unconsciousness is rather bearing down on his conscious attention rather than supporting? Our awareness is white hot and right here--is it not every engaged in an endless dissolution and triage of the mass of memories--which is itself a dissolution, displacement and metaphor for the mass of movements and sensations? Awareness is not thrown, but surges up from beneath a weight, constituted from the very courage to stand, as well as the steadiness to continue.

Yet, this balance is something like a logical rupture between "bodies" as independent, isolated, separate and mentally supervised "movement" as relationity, synchronicity interconnection. Poise is a kind of improvised synchronization with externality, as between "mind" as memories and "body" as pure sensation. This balance is not a solution; rather it is more like the generations, successive improvisations on similar themes; the uneasy balance of the family is structural (and is this still not the most repressed of Freud's discoveries?) but constantly seeking cohesion of disparate personalities, both antagonism and resolution.

Therefore the balance of Bergson's pyramid is as precarious as our attention span, for it is both (a) pure presentation and cautiously maintained, and (b) chronically absent and desperately sought after. Love, faith, understanding: are these are really enough to pacify and balance memory, to sanctify the present assembly, and transform emptiness into holiness? I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure the answer is "yes"--if only for the briefest of moments...

Levinas

2007-03-09T12:11:00.000-05:00

Levinas addresses a question (or criticism) very similar to Badiou’s in his essay God and Philosophy (published in 1975, the ideas put forth were already put forth in different forms in lectures given from 1973-4). In these writings we find Levinas considering the tenability of the inclusion of God within philosophical discourse. It would seem that as soon as we conceptualize God’s existence, we must also situate God amidst existence, somehow mysteriously within being’s movement. But yet, “in the most unlikely way,” God signifies “the beyond being, transcendence.” (G&P 1, all future quotes ibid.)

Thus, Levinas question is whether we can meaningfully express transcendence: can we “thematize” this radical excess of God’s being, or does transcendence delimit sensibility as such? He implies that part of the meaning of the ontological “height” of God’s existence is the exclusion of the possibility of an automatically meaningful self-revelation of being:

“Does not the modality which this adverb [“height”], borrowed from the dimension of the sky over our heads, expresses modify the verbal meaning of the verb ‘to be’ to the point of excluding it from the thinkable as something inapprehendable, excluding it from the esse showing itself, that is, showing itself meaningfully in a theme?” -God and Philosophy

In other words, since the very conception of God is that of the entity par excellence, the manner of God’s being exceeds the thinkable: God is ontologically out of bounds. Levinas' next move here is worth following closely. He recognizes as a “major tradition of philosophical rationalism” the claim that “the God of the Bible does not have meaning, that is, is not properly speaking thinkable.” He cites Mademoiselle Delhomme: ‘The concept of God is not a problematical concept; it is not a concept at all.’ This, of course, is a very Badiouian sentiment, insofar as it radically separates any conception of God from the philosophical discourse, as inherently and unconditionally irrational.

On the contrary, Levinas argues, without the concept of God we would not have thinking, let alone rationality: this radical ontological surplus we find in the transcendence of God is “among the concepts without which there would be no thought.” But the question still remains of the meaning of the word ‘God’ in the debate. After all, the radical belief implied in religious sentiment still seems to place an almost fascist restriction on critical thought. But, according to Levinas, God exceeds infinitely any possible curtailment of meaning. Indeed, meaning originally founds and manifests itself through a transcendent movement which is the very beginning of signification itself.

Thus Levinas’ aims to determine whether the meaning “first broached in presence,” the meaning which is equivalent to the esse of being, is already a restriction of meaning, “already a derivative or a drifting of meaning.” Levinas harbors an intuition that beyond the intelligibility of immanence (the “rationalism of identity, consciousness, the present, and being,”) that the “signifyingness” of transcendence can be and is understood, and (in a sense) is understanding itself. Transcendence is both “rationality” and “rationalism”, for it precedes and structures both. Indeed, this temporal precedence is critical to Levinas’ understanding of transcendence as a meaning which has priority “over and beyond being,” whose translation into ontological language Levinas names as the “antecedent” to being. In other words, we can still meaningfully speak ontologically of a transcendent being, and we are not necessarily lapsing into blind faith or wild opinion the moment we go beyond rational “terms and beings”:

“In fact, in staying or wanting to be outside of reason, faith and opinion speak the language of being. Nothing is less opposed to ontology than opinion and faith. To ask, as we are trying to do here, if God can be expressed in a rational discourse which would be neither ontology nor faith is implicitly to doubt the formal opposition...between the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, invoked in faith without philosophy, and the god of the philosophers. It is to doubt that this opposition [between the God of Abraham and the god of philosophy] constitutes an alternative.”

This unnecessary alternative has led to a foundational crisis for modern ontology: what has still “not yet reached the threshold of intelligibility” (transcendence) is identical to what appears in the Bible as that which is above and beyond all possible comprehension. Ontology is not necessarily atheistic; in fact, opinion and faith must belong to ontology, if only because they are things that are. Less tautologically, if faith “speaks the language of being” in wanting to stay outside of reason, it must be because being is manifest in opinion and faith: in authentic belief, being is given a voice, a theme, by that ingenious and overflowing thought (the idea of infinity) which, out of rationality, aims at the outside and limit-point of reason.

Thus the very suggestion can only be justified retroactively through an original archaeo-ontological discovery: we can recover a “meaning equivalent to essence” only through the potential of “going back from this allegedly conditioned meaning to a meaning which could no longer be put in terms of being or in terms of beings.” The meaning which is an equivalent to the essence of being cannot be put in terms of many (beings) or one (being); the truth, as for Plato, is suspended in the void between the universal on the one hand and particulars on the other. Meaning is expressed in the participation between the multiple and the singular, enacted in the relationality of existence and existents.

Fantasy and Illumination

2007-03-08T20:59:00.000-05:00

Have we been led into darkness by honeyed words of light and universal acceptance? Are we so entranced by this spectacle of violent love, so subdued by the pure flow of nothing, that when we are left trembling fear before the void--- we no longer know which way to turn? The truth ultimately is that unconsciously we know already we will eventually turn back, that at some point we always betray the unique truth of our discovery, by the very act of its dissemination.

We lose our faith at the very moment we gain the full force of it, in the very act of expressing it. This is the deep reason poets lie: like religion, love is a story, the prototype of the pure narrative, a total and complete fiction and yet, love owes its existence solely to the strictness of our belief.

Likewise, the religious fantasy is claimed to be formally real: whereas and therefore, the responsibility lies entirely upon us for the spontaneous generation of the radical movement of faith. As we are at once subjects of the truth we seek and subjected to this truth, we are absolutely irreplacable and we are thus made innocent of the slightest skepticism of our place in existence.

By allowing ourselves to be made incapable of maintaining even a minimal distance from the "unadulterated truth", to our ruin and to that of the truth itself, we have by now occupied a meta-position outside of self and universe in order to more completely vaingloriously identify with this universal, to become its excess, to exceed this universal in a particular trajectory. We have gone even beyond essence in our presumption that the universal could be given voice.

Indeed, this identification is already death to a separated freedom; the desire to reunite our essence with the universal is against life itself, is the very force of being-towards-death.

Even as we attempt to regain our balance, to recount and give voice to the pure truth, we are actors in a pure surrealistic fantasy of radical lack, speakers of a negativist discourse whose focus is death, non-existence, which thus becomes the rupture around which our "defective" mortal existence radiates-- and thus, in earning the right to speak it, we murder the truth itself!

The Birth of Comedy

2007-02-27T16:13:00.001-05:00

It seems to go without saying these days that every novelty is also a tragedy, that there is no transformation without deformation, that we can't get better without (also) getting worse. Progress, then, and regress, interwoven together in an endless oscillating series. Have our eyes not witnessed the tension of dramatic irony unmasked for the raw, pulsing, naked absurdity of existence? Have our hands not mastered the truncation (and administration) of desire? Have our lips learned naught but sophistry, unabashedly whispering lies in order to evoke the real? Haven't we sold our souls for a truth which thus can't logically exist? "Oh, the tragedy!" But this tragedy is neither the displacement of desire nor the mastery of emotional vitality, but rather the pure pageantry which logically results and thus merely alternates its pretensions: art or life, both and neither, exploitation-spectacle and culture industry --this, then, is why we implicitly sense tragedy in the new, why we feel the abyss gaze back at us, why we tremble before the horror and absence of "modernity".

For do "we moderns" not presume the tragedic to be singular, implosive, immanent and above all, non-cathartic? The epoch is characterized by an erasure which is also a personalization, the reduction of the individual to the blank square, in other words, the total eclipse of the subject--until we cannot separate the playwright from the void itself, or rather the fullness, the surplus, the omnipresence of the void? Our instincts have (perversely) absorbed the "tragedy" of modernity: since we can't believe in transcendence we thus base all our hopes upon it. Thus the tragic is that irresistible moment within dramaturgy in which an irreducible incompleteness in being is radically and unapologetically exposed--and this is why, today, to innovate, to speak the truth, to present a novelty is always also to perform the synoptical tragic act. Indeed, it would seem already that to make explicit the lack exposed by the tragic rupture is already to belabor common sense...

Yet a birth is always a comedy--