Identity and Division

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

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

"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

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

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

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...