Theses on Sexuality and Sense

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.