Bergson (Theory of Laughter)

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

Henri Bergson (Laughter)

Flusser Studies Call for Papers

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

Call for Papers

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

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

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


Here's the journal description provided on their website.

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

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

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

The Four Freedoms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Artifical Linguistic Competence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One

What is it to say "we are one"?

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

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

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

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

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

New Websites!

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

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

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

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

Autopoesis

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

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

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

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

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

What is a subagent?

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

Converging Debord, Badiou, Deleuze and Guattari

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

Fractal Cognition

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

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

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

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

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

Back to philosophy. In my earlier post on Kant, I tried to make a distinction between intellectual intuiton and empirical sensation. Kant will say something like: we cannot have a pure intellectual intuition of the object because that would give us the thing-in-itself (also known as the transcendental object). What Kant means is something like: the "transcendental" part of the thing-in-itself means that it serves as the grounds for the possibility of experience. So, the thing-in-itself, for Kant, allows for the object to be given to us, but since we participate in space and time (mediative intuitions) we only have representations of the object and never a pure intuition of it. I am trying to stress that Kant sees our spatial-temporal media as being, in a literal sense, that which keeps us from having truly primary a priori knowledge of the object.
However, that's Kant's view of human finitude. Rewind. Kant says "intuition has its seat in the subject only, as the formal character of the subject, in virtue of which, in being affected by objects, it obtains immediate representation, that is, intuition, of them; and only in so far, therefore, as it is merely the form of outer sense in general" (71).
Fastforward. "In natural theology, in thinking an object [God], who not only can never be an object of intuition to us but cannot be an object of sensible intuition even to himself, we are careful to remove the conditions of time and space from his intuition--for all his knowledge must be intuition, and not thought, which always involves limitations" (90).
But then Kant goes on to say that since time and space are conditions of existence, they must also be conditions of the existence of God. Further down though: "This mode of intuiting in space and time need not be limited to human sensibility. It may be that all finite, thinking beings necessarily agree with man in this respect, although we are not in a position to judge whether this is actually so. But however universal this mode of sensibility may be, it does not therefore cease to be sensibility. It is derivative (intuitus derivativus), not original (intuitus originarius), and therfore not intellectual intuition. For the reason stated above, such intellectual intuition seemse to belong solely to the primordial being, and can never be ascribed to a dependent being, dependent in its existence as well as in its intuition, and which through that intuition is conscious of its own existence only in relation to given objects" (90).
Long quote, I know--but the point I'm trying to make is that Kant wavers on a fundamental point: does God partake of the conditions of existence, and thus does he exist in space and time? On the other hand--God cannot exist in space and time because he has direct access to the Thing--or the thing-in-itself--pure noumenon. It is intellectual intuition that is equated with this ability--so God, the primordial being, has intellectual or original intuition. Doesn't this sound like a world in which man is fallen and only perceives so many bad copies of the object?
Anyway--the fundamental point I was trying to make in relation to Spinoza--Spinoza considers substance to be God, and God's substance to consist of an infinity of attributes. The trick is, human subjectivity only works in two dimensions: thought and extension (mind/body--space/time?). However, this does not exclude the very real fact that the true nature of God's substance exists on an infinity of different dimensions (understood as attributes--understood as possible expressions of being--a truly fractal onto-theology in the sense that there exists an infinity of modes of being that exist outside, inside, between, alongside of the realms of thought and extension. Quantum Physics--String Theory--Spinoza? hahaha. nice.