Beyond Ontology

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!

Notes on Natural-Language Artificial Intelligence

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.

Lacan and The Problem of Foundations

“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...