Urbz Mashup Mumbai

Nul Bazaar for Urbz Mashup:

Edward Talkies, Dhobi Talab, Kalbadevi, Mumbai:

Be Like Water / Edward Talkies (Kalbadevi, Mumbai)

This is the simultaneity of a becoming whose characteristic is to elude the present.

Continuing.

The body is a noncoinciding resonant unity. We have only to demarcate its events. The events of the body, becomings immanent to its intensive processes. It continues in the form of the eternal object, those resonances that move with that tendency or this.

Life moves in clades. Shixmatrics.

‘In other words, the event is not an “object” or a “thing”, which can be represented, but rather a force that creates. Examples of this force can be related to “thought” and “sense”, which are not ways of representing but rather active events that create. As Claire Colebrook notes, “sense is not a faithful double of what is (not a representation) but a cut, fissure, fibrillation or ungrounded difference – not a difference from, nor a difference of, but an event of difference”.’
–The Becoming of the “Event”: A Deleuzian Approach to Understanding the Production of Social and Political “Events” Tom Lundborg

Sense is the event of difference, the becoming of sense.

With these words we announce a program of becoming. In modulating, tweaking capacities to affect and be affected we affirm an ethics of joy and passion, where with Whitehead and Shaviro we as well affirm that the subject–continuous with material flows of biomass, information, energy, and minerals (Delanda)–emerges from the world, as an effect of these intensive flows.

….

The semester is once more at a close–Summer 2009. For those who know me it has been one of the most difficult times of my life. But that duration too has come to an end, and certain stable states have returned.

I have tried to continue the line of inquiry really begun in some senses years ago, but seemingly renewed, and mutated over the past two years.

What has it involved? Thinking through the capacities emergent of interpenetrating multiplicities. The rejection of Wiener’s (and by extension classical dynamics’) entropic model of communication, or better a simple redefinition: noise is the ground for self-organization, stability, chaos (it might be said to be chaos), but also a measure of the dynamism of certain spaces, their microsegmentarity, their tendencies to fissure, and fluctuate.

Katie brought up in class how one acknowledges the differences in the kind of blame the victim, pull yourself up by the bootstrap kind of ethics and the ethics of schizoanalysis. First, I thought it worth going into an elaborate example. She recently bought a Mac. What went into this decision? Simply what were the probabilities that led to this event. What were their statistical variance? Their durations? Their capacities, and what capacities emerged from their interactions? What were their dimensions of change, their critical thresholds?

The ethics is not in the analysis it is in the experimentation. We are all riding vectors, cliches. She said what about the single mom living in low-income housing? Are we going to say she didn’t ride her vector hard enough and ended up where she is? Where is she exactly? Who is she?

Dan’s recent post http://www.womeninandbeyond.org/?p=503 is excellent in this regard.

(My comment: “Thank you. What is so wonderful about Dan’s words is the sense of a continuous struggle for (what I would term, I don’t know if this would be his preferred term) justice. In this post there is this tracing of ghosts materializing as the nameless “service staff” who enable dominant subjects and identities. That women in specific sites throughout the world are also at the forefront of such struggle appears repeatedly, each time with renewed force. I find this method of connectivity so compelling. Articulation of resonant sites. A socialism not of the heart (blah Bragg), a socialism of materializations and articulations.

but finally perhaps we don’t need the word socialism anymore for this politics. then again if it bothers Fox network, its a habit worth holding on to.”)

I responded to Katie by saying that simply there is an organization of forces at work in every assemblage. I suppose that by taking assemblages–and not multiplicities–as the unit of analyses what we are brought to think is in fact the nature of continuous multiplicious emergence as a question of method.

But it is late and I must to sleep…

………

Continuing. Today in class although people were missing we had a spirited discussion about Delanda’s “system.” Is there a system in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History? Well yes if you define system as a method of inquiry, and no if you mean system as a deductive, apriori machine. So system here would be a mode of counteractualization–in history this is to release that part of the event which exceeds its actualization. Its plane of immanence, its belonging in becoming.

I was tired from staying up late grading and blogging from the night before. As I will be tomorrow no doubt.

My daughter, finally, is here. I am blessed by her love.

Continuing. The conversation turned once again on the politics of subjectivity. I felt there was almost a complaint in the air: What, finally, does nonlinearity imply about how subjectivity is to be lived?

We are all riding the vectors of our cliche-set. Elements of each of us are moving at different rates and speeds, producing intensive differences, fluctuations, that are both probabilistic and within a range (but also absolutely) stochastic. The mesh of these fluctuations of bodily intensity would be the experience of subjectivity that could launch critical becomings.

I think of Scott’s objections as leading to this last point. Much of what he said seemed problematic to me, and at first I hesitated to respond directly. But Scott is sincere in his objections to Delanda. And yet again Scott is involved in a historiographical conversation and Delanda a philsoophical one–but there is a lot of potential in the cross fertilization.

But the question in which there is the widest divergence is simply in the assertion that history is done and accomplished. What is so refreshing about Delanda’s method (given its stylistic baggage in logocentrism–objectivity, presence) is the experiment of thought that destratifies, deterritorializes, monstrifies, and virtualizes the past.

The criticism that no one raised, and one which I had heard before from New Historicists, Rorty-ites, Conservative Derrideans, and critical race theorists, is that assembalge theory is a naive or romantic presentism. “Writing the history of the present,” as Foucault has it.

But is simultaneity present? Rather if we situate the event of becoming in the experience, perception, and volatility of simultaneous co-functioning (heterochrony), we must understand that this becoming, this simultaneity eludes the present.

This is why the debate on essentialism and antiessentialism is misguided. If the essence of things is defined as sets of events that constitute a stable state of simultaneous co-functioning, essence = probabilistic becoming. Then again where do these terms matter? Entirely in the academy. The entire debate is academic.

The street philosophy of Delanda takes us beyond essentialism, through it, to something exquisitely ontological. This beyond might seem like transcendence but it is a pragmatism instead. An ethical practice of counter-actualization aimed at tweaking capacities to affect and be affected.

…..
Continuing.

On the Event of Difference. Difference has a secret life. One could say that it is the secret itself, but for the danger of a simple kind of deconstruction. The events of difference are both self-differentiating processes immanent to a given field of potentiality, and critical thresholds beyond which one actual bifurcates into at least two with their functionally and intensively (qualitatively) different fields of potentiality.

On the Event of Difference. They must speak in aphorisms to be both understood and untimely. Untimeliness is not a kind of obsolence in presence (it can be that), but rather this fissure of difference as event. The untimely, when it happens (and it is not meaningfully a question of if it happens) is this passive-active connectivity of relation. Statistically variable, probabilistic, stochastic, a realm both of potential and action (because constituted by repetitive processes such as autonomic or kinaesthetic processes), where the actual has reenchanted itself and its diagram (not the real and its representation-in-mimesis, but strata of becoming which have related but different timescales. Flat ontology between words and the actual does not mean that words have more reality than processes, but that language is a different process of a material assemblage that includes biomass flows, energetic and informational flows, bodily intensity, and their morphogenetic history. It is that history that returns us to the untimely, as I mentioned above. Yet language is involved intimately with the production of resonance, though it cannot cause such resonance (it loses its reality-generating capacity, endowed to it by a certain solipsism culminating in deconstruction). But enough parantheticals, return to events of difference.

Is laughter an event of difference? No doubt it is much more than that; does sexual difference, more specifically becoming-woman (yes in the way D/G write of it, yes in the way Grozs writes of it, yes for Cixous and Irigaray) constitutes an event of difference that is inaugurated by the laugh (Medusa). Note that the definition of the event therefore would nonetheless be constituted by a point in time with a definite duration, and a definite space: the start and end of a laugh, this or that gender. But what if laughter actualizes (passes a critical threshold of activity) from a plane of potential? What if what makes a difference in laughter–each time and not in reference to this or that politics–is this burst of joy (hateful, selfish, envy-ridden racism as much as ironic, paradoxical socialism) that is the body’s return to potentiality–each time?

To live this each time as a continuous practice of asymptotic simultaneity–”one continuous mistake”–intuitional reason modulating and intensifying (qualitatively changing) the affordances to affect and be affected. This is an ethics of joy, not of jouissance. Joy (ethics) is better understood not as an emotion but a field of passion, active and passive at once. A vector in a self-organizing basin of attraction. The stupid (or trivial, relatively unimportant, yet nonetheless authorized by the associational play inherent in language) reading of the last sentence would be that self-organizing means that this is a fatalism of change. That is change is inevitable and will result from processes of functional connectivity regardless of human action, so therefore why organize? This would be a semantic slide that would blind us to the difference in context and force of various fields. So that human activity (organizing in the political sense) would be considered one form of repetitive (durational), relatively institutionalized, or relatively deterritorialized (potentialized) forms of process that enter into the ontology of becoming, the event of difference, the Untimely.

….
Continuing. We live in the time of Obama. These days, these years will be known for the name of this singular but deeply troubled man. A post-racial man, some say, but Skip Gates exposed that lie (not only by what he did, but the response his arrest provoked). We will know these years for the weakening of a certain form of capitalism (neoliberalism), a certain form of sociality (white, straight, privileged, male) to have passed through a phase transition. What has happened to counter-terrorism under Obama? A lot and not much. There has been a change in attitude and avowed ethics, but what definitively has changed is the volatilization of Afghanistan and Pakistan (both these places have developed a level of social and economic disaffection over years to the point of violent, sporadic and dispersed breakdown–and Iraq flashes through our corporate media like a guilty trace on a mystic writing pad).

Drones killed this and that Taliban or Al Qaeda leader in Pakistan, this Islamic militant in Indonesia. But somehow robotic assassination as a legitimate strategy of occupation (civilizing) is never questioned. Why? If Barak has shifted the terms of debate for foriegn intervention, his administration has also closed down or dampened the possibility of radically rethinking the occupying mission central to US foreign policy.

Let us be quite clear: Obama’s administration will also be remembered as the occupiers of Afghani-Pakistan. They would do well to be remembered as the new pragmatists of decolonizing America.

Life continues to move in clades.

On Delanda’s Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy

 

Can resonance be something other than new age?

What is Manuel Delanda trying to do in this reconstruction of Gilles Deleuze’s ontology? He is trying to provide an account of the interdisciplinary basis of Deleuzian philosophy, a philosophy that ranges from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland to Henri Poincare’s topological geometry and beyond. Many things get lost along the way, like the problem of paradox and humor which is very important to Deleuze, but something else is gained—a kind of analytical clarity, which is contrary in some sense to Deleuze’s own rhetorical style. Regardless, what Delanda has done in this “already classic” book (back cover blurb) is to develop a notion of individuation, the virtual, and the actual that attempts a thoroughgoing displacement of Platonic and Aristotelian essentialism. Delanda tries to devalue the very idea of truth; importance and relevance are the key criteria for a Deleuzian epistemology; a problem is well-posed if it captures an objective distribution of the important and the unimportant, or more mathematically, of the singular and the ordinary (7).

 

Deleuze has a realist (not an actualist [33]) ontology: philosophers who grant reality full autonomy from the human mind, disregarding the difference between the observable and the unobservable, and the anthropocentrism this distinction implies (4). So one of the first implications of this is that Deleuze’s philosophy is not a story “about us”; it is about the world as assemblages, as nested spaces and times, as mutational transformations across timespace. Through a process ontology, Deleuze replaces the essences of entities with dynamical processes, some of which are material and energetic, but all of which remain immanent to the world of matter and energy (5).

 

Whence ontology?

 

            There is an objective illusion fostered by the concealment of process under product (68-9). Any area of the world which is in thermodynamic equilibrium is an area where intensive differences have cancelled themselves out, and hence an area which conceals the virtual without the need for human intervention. These areas of the world would constitute an objective illusion (74).

            In a Deleuzian ontology one must emphasize that the regularities displayed by the different possible trajectories in a given multiplicity are a consequence of the singularities that shape the vector field. Deleuze makes a sharp distinction between trajectories as they appear in the phase portrait of a system and the vector field (28-9). The vector field is the real source of the regularities or propensities in the population of possible histories (33). Unlike trajectories, a vector field is not composed of individuated states, but of instantaneous values for rates of change. Individually, these instantaneous rates have in fact no reality but collectively they do exhibit topological invariants (singularities). Ontologically, these invariants of a vector field are topological accidents, points in the field which happen to be stationary; Deleuze argues that these topological accidents should be given the ontological status of an event (a perfect storm? a scientific concept for this would be stochastic resonance). A key concept in the definition of a multiplicity is that of invariant, but invariances are always relative to some transformation. In other words, whenever we speak of the invariant properties of an entity we also need to describe an operator or group of operators capable of performing rotations, translations, projections, foldings, and a variety of other transformations on that entity. So the ontological content of the virtual must also be enriched with at least one operator. The quasi-cause is this operator and is defined not by its giving rise to multiplicities but by its capacity to affect them (84). The quasi-causal operator creates among the infinite series springing from each singularity “resonances or echoes”—the least corporeal of relations. A quasi-cause, or a relation of quasi-causality could be thought of in terms of the establishment of a communication channel between divergent trajectories that change the distribution of the singular and ordinary within a trajectory.

 

One of the chief targets of a Deleuzian ontology is essentialism. Essentialism can be understood as a theory of the genesis of form, a theory of morphogenesis, in which physical entities are viewed as more or less faithful realizations of ideal forms; essences act as originary, fully present models, eternally maintaining their identity, while particular entities are conceived as mere copies of these models; the essence of a thing is that which explains its identity, that is, those fundamental traits without which an object would not be what it is. “If such an essence is shared by many objects, then possession of a common essence would also explain the fact that these objects resemble each other and, indeed, that they form a distinct natural kind of things” (6-9).

            In Platonic essentialism or Aristotelian typological thinking, species were examples of “natural kinds”; animal/plant species provided the ideal model of what an abstract general entity was supposed to be. Contemporary evolutionary biologists such as Michael Ghiselin argue in contrast that species are not a higher ontological category. Essentialist and typological thought are rooted in the hierarchy of categories (each level of organism, species, genera representing a different ontological category). By contrast, contemporary science argues that the process of speciation is intensive in the sense that its description involves ideas of population and heterogeneity (in population thinking, using statistical analysis, the average is an abstraction and only the variation is real). For population thinkers genetic variation is the fuel of evolution: without adaptive differences between organisms natural selection would be incapable of yielding any improvements in the population (57-9). More, heterogeneity is the state we should expect to exist spontaneously under most circumstances; while in essentialist or typological thinking uniformity is the natural state and difference is what needs special explanation, for population thinkers it is difference that is unproblematic (71). The norm of reaction replaces the idea of degrees of perfection with relations between rates of change. The forms are thus statistical results of the population individuating itself through differential rates of change: “…the substitution of populations for types, and the substitution of rates or differential relations for degrees” (Deleuze, qtd. in Delanda 59-60). Thus, multiplicities replace essences; a species is defined by the morphogenetic process that gave rise to it; form-generating resources which are immanent to the material world (9). Unlike the a priori grasp of essences in human thought postulated by those who believe in such entities, there would be an empiricism of the virtual (85-6).

 

Emergent Intensity

 

Deleuze replaces an essentialist morphogenesis with one based on the notion of intensive difference, which he differentiates from both qualitative difference and extensive difference. He conceives intensive difference not negatively, as lack of resemblance, but positively or productively, as that which drives a dynamical process. The best examples of intensive differences are the differences in temperature, pressure, speed, chemical concentration, color… (6).

            Intensive properties cannot be divided without involving a change in kind, a qualitative change (25). If a quantity of matter in a given state is divided into two equal parts, each part will have the same value of intensive properties as the original and half the value of the extensive properties (69). Intensive properties do not add up but rather average. This averaging operation is an objective operation, in the sense that placing into contact two bodies with different temperatures will trigger a spontaneous diffusion process equalizing the two intermediate values. Thus differences in thermodynamic intensities such as temperature are capable of driving an averaging process of equilibrium in a population of molecules. Unlike qualitative differences, differences in intensity can drive fluxes of matter or energy (69-70). Intensive differences such as temperature or pressure gradients within one body are productive, forming the basis of simple processes of individuation. Soap bubbles and salt crystals emerge from the spontaneous tendency of the molecular components to minimize a potential or intensive difference (70).

 

There are a large number of physical structures that form spontaneously as their components try to meet energetic requirements. These components may be constrained to seek a point of minimal free energy, like a soap bubble that acquires its spherical shape by minimizing surface tension, or a common salt crystal adopting the cube form by minimizing bonding energy. The point of minimal energy functions as a single point attractor (a singularity). Thus a topological form (a singular point [eg minimal energy] in a manifold) guides a process which results in many different physical forms. This is in contrast to a form of thought that posits the essence of sphericity (circle-ness) which then is realized in the world by soap bubbles. The topological form of singularities is mechanism independent, independent of their physical mechanisms (15).

            Mechanism independence (19-20) is a concrete universality, a concrete set of attractors-singularities (realized as tendencies in physical processes) linked together by bifurcations (realized as abrupt transitions in the tendencies of physical processes). Following Deleuze, Delanda also defines concrete universals as preindividual (before the individuated product) singularities and affects (74). The tetrapod limb would be a concrete universal: asymptotic singularity (a basin of attraction that is never fully actualized because of so many divergent final forms of it) and unactualized capacity (blocked or divergent series of bifurcations; an open set of potential combinations constantly mutating [79]) (77). The universality of a multiplicity is typically divergent: the different realizations of a multiplicity bear no resemblance whatsoever to it and there is in principle no end to the set of potential divergent forms it may adopt. Multiplicities give form to processes, not to products. This distinguishes the obscure yet distinct nature of multiplicities from the clear and distinct identity of essences. Finally, concrete universals are meshed together into a continuum often through feedback loop relations that resonate (the communication channel of a quasi-cause). (21). A continuous space progressively differentiates itself giving rise to discontinuous spaces.  The continuity of a multiplicity is not defined primarily by metric spaces, but by non-metric spaces (e.g. asymptotic closeness; asymptotic stability: small shocks may dislodge a trajectory from its attractor but as long as the shock is not too large to push it out of the basin of attraction the trajectory will return to the stable state defined by the attractor [29]) (22). The example of geometry (23-4): the metric space which we inhabit and that physicists study and measure was born from a nonmetric, topological continuum as the latter differentiated and acquired structure following a series of symmetry-breaking transitions (24).  

            Given a cell with a specific history, and a certain inductive signal which can change its fate, the outcome of their interaction will depend on how many other attractors exist nearby in the state space of the network of genes within the cell. Far from directly determining the qualities of a differentiated cell, inductive signals trigger cells to switch from one attractor to another nearby one, guiding a process of qualitative differentiation which follows attractors as so many stepping-stones. This process of stimulus-independence is what defines the signature of the virtual: the traces which the virtual leaves in the intensive. 65

            The three ontological dimensions constituting Deleuzian thought—the virtual, the intensive, and the actual—can be understood in terms of individuals at different spatial scales populating the actual world embodied in discontinuous spatial or metric structures condensing out of a nonmetric, virtual continuum (61). As migration and folding (invagination) begin to yield finished anatomical structures nonmetric relations become progressively replaced by a less flexible set of metric ones (64). Thus, a relatively undifferentiated intensive space (defined by continuous intensive properties) progressively differentiates eventually giving rise to extensive structures (with definite metric properties) (25).

 

Tetrapod Limbs

 

Multiplicities are obscure and distinct; the singularities that define a multiplicity come in sets, and they are structured through progressive differentiation (16). Singularities lead to an entirely different way of viewing the genesis of form (15). Singularities function as never-actualized (35) attractors for trajectories: a large number of different trajectories starting their evolution at very different places in the manifold may end up in the same final state (the attractor), as long as they all begin somewhere within the sphere of influence of the attractor (basin of attraction); singularities represent long-term tendencies of the system (14).

            A multiplicity is a nested set of vector fields related to each other by symmetry-breaking bifurcations (phase transitions), together with the distributions of attractors which define each of its embedded levels. Phase transitions are events which take place at critical values of some parameter switching a physical system from one state to another, like critical points of temp. at which water changes from ice to liquid, or from liquid to steam…the progressive differentiation of the spherical egg is achieved through a complex cascade of symmetry breaking phase transitions. Control parameters in a state space determine the strength of external perturbations to which the system may be subject. These control parameters display critical values, thresholds of intensity at which a bifurcation takes place, breaking the prior symmetry of the system (18-19).

 

Phase Transition

 

This separates out the part of the model which carries info about the actual world (trajectories as series of possible states) from that part which is never actualized. What ontological status do such partially never actualized multiplicities have? Multiplicities have a real virtuality which forms a vital component of the objective world, virtuality is their mode of becoming. The virtual must be defined as strictly part of the real object (30). A space with multiple attractors breaks the links between necessity and determinism, giving a system a “choice” between different destinies and making the particular end state a system occupies a combination of determination and chance (35). The four elements of essentialist classificatory practices—resemblance, identity, analogy, and opposition—are displaced by real virtuality. 38 A nonlinear system with multiple attractors continues to display its virtuality even once the system has settled into one of its alternative stable states, because the other alternatives are there all the time, coexisting with the one that happens to be actualized. All one has to do to reveal their virtual presence is to give a large enough shock to the system to push it out of one basin of attraction and into another (75).  

            In populations, the coupled rates of births, death, migration and resource availability correspond without resemblance to the differential relations that characterize a multiplicity. A given intensive process of individuation embodies a multiplicity, and the lack of similarity between the virtual and the intensive is explained in terms of the divergent character of this embodiment, that is, by the fact that several different processes may embody the same multiplicity (61).

            The assembly of multiplicities must yield individuals with the capacity to evolve; this process is characterized by intensive properties articulating heterogeneous elements, relating difference to difference (73). Contrast an assembly-line factory with the process taking place within and among living cells which results in the assembly of tissues and organs. The parts of an object put together in an assembly line are fully Euclidean, with rigid metric properties such as sizes, shapes and positions. This limits the kind of procedures possible for their assembly: rigidly channeled transport system, rigid motions to correctly position parts relative to one another. This rigidity also limits their capacity to affect and be affected and thus to mutate. Component parts used in biological assembly are defined less by rigid metric properties than by topological connectivity: the specific shape of a cell’s membrane is less important than its continuity and closure, and the specific lengths of a muscle less important that its attachment points. (Delanda uses topological resources to analyze certain recurrent or typical features of state spaces [14].) This allows component parts to be adaptive (to fold, stretch, or bend: topological connectivity). Components may float around and randomly collide, using a lock-and-key mechanism to find matching patterns without the need for exact positioning. All of this has consequences for the capacity to evolve through mutation and selection, the capacity to differentiate differences (73). In biological assembly mutations do not have to occur simultaneously in matching parts, channels, and procedures in order to yield a viable entity for natural selection. Thanks to diffusive transport, lock-and-key matching assembly, topological and adaptive parts, as well as stimulus independence, evolution has an open space in which to carry out its blind search for new forms (67). The finished product has some geometric properties and some intensive such as entropy or amount of energy; metric properties which expand the concept from structure to function; is characterized by qualities which are metrically indivisible like intensities (68).

 

Media Assemblages

 

             A multiplicity may be characterized by a fixed number of definite properties (extensive and qualitative) and yet possess an indefinite number of capacities (affordances) to affect and be affected by other multiplicities (71). Deleuze gives a two-fold definition of the virtual in terms of unactualized tendencies or singularities and unactualized capacities or affects (72). A multiplicity will exhibit a variety of capabilities to form assemblages with other individuals, organic and inorganic. The example that Delanda uses is the assemblage which a walking animal forms with a piece of solid ground (surface to walk on) and a gravitational field (endowing it with a given weight). The capacity to form an assemblage depends in part on the emergent properties of the interacting individuals (animal, ground, gravitational field), but is not reducible to them (72). Affects (capacities, affordances) are relational; what an individual affords another may depend on factors such as relative spatial scales; affordances are also symmetric involving both capacities to affect and be affected. (Keep in mind that classifying geometrical objects by their degrees of symmetry is a sharp departure from the traditional classification of geometrical figures by their essences. Groups are not classified by static properties but in terms of how they are affected (or not affected) by active transformations, by their response to events that occur to them. Degree of symmetry is not an intrinsic property of the entity being classified but always relative to a specific (group of) transformation(s) [17].) The interactions which organisms have with the organic and inorganic components of an ecosystem are typically of the intensive kind, an ecosystem being a complex assemblage of a large number of heterogeneous components: diverse reproductive communities of animals, plants and micro-organisms, a geographical site characterized by diverse topographical and geological features, and the ever diverse and changing weather patterns (73).

            One task of virtual  philosophy is to locate those areas of the world where the virtual is still expressed, and use the unactualized tendencies and capacities one discovers there as sources of insight into the nature of virtual multiplicities (returning to the interior of the tetrapod limb) (76-7). 

We leave to another post the connection between this intensive ontology and a nonlinear history of institutions. Delanda takes this later question up in the conclusion to A Thousand Year of Nonlinear History. There he writes brilliantly of the BwO (body without organs, plane of consistency, qualitative multiplicity) through which intensive processes actualize various forms.

“Moreover, not only were there several particle accelerators mobilizing trigger flows of different kinds, there were coexisting motion of destratification of intermediate intensity which connected these flows, generating meshworks of different kinds: peasant and small-town markets; symbiotic nets of small producers engaged in volatile trade and import substitution; large cities and industrial hinterlands operating via economies of agglomeration; alpine regions elaborating industrial paradigms different from those of the coal conurbations, in which skills and crafts were meshed together instead of being replaced by routines and centralized machinery. What use is there in moving our level of description to the BwO if we are not going to take advantage of the heterogeneous mixtures of energy and genes, germs and words, which it allows us to conceive, a world in which geology, biology, and linguistics are not seen as three separate spheres, each more advanced or progressive than the previous one, but as three perfectly coexisting and interacting flows of energetic, replicative, and catalytic materials?” (267)

The Production of Habit: On Two Conceptions of Difference in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish

Getting a hold of Foucault

What happens to the body in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (hereafter DP)? Let us specify what body we are speaking of here, because after all it is still such a vague term. The body of docility, but also the productive nexus between capitalism and discipline. The body of the norm, but also the body incited to a microphysics of activity and expression. So already we are speaking of at least two bodies in Foucault: that palimpsest in perpetual dissolution invoked in “Nietzsche Genealogy History,” and the more mundane body of habit, of exercise, of experimentation, and regulation. (I should mention in passing how surprised I was to find that Deleuze had organized a conference on Nietzsche–the only one he ever organized in his career–in the early 60s, and that Foucault had taken an active part in the proceedings; and that together they had been involved in the French publication of Nietzsche’s works–all this in Desert Islands. I suppose my surprise was that Foucault had such an early and long lasting engagement with Nietzsche–it always seemed to me that he became more Nietzschean after The Archaeology of Knowledge, but that is clearly mistaken. So then it is through the laughter of the Nietzschean aphorism–its specific intensities, as Deleuze reminds us–that I re-read these crucial sections of DP). 

The first body, the body of discourse, the body that is produced by a power that “writes” it, has been the dominant figure of the body in cultural(ist) criticism for the past twenty years. It is the body of performativity, of the mark, piercing, and the tatoo, it is the queered body of drag and camp. It is the body of a curious productive repression, whose productivity takes only the form of a narrow linguistico-psychic expressivity. What does that mean exactly? The body is thought as something that means, that displaces meaning, that figures linguistic traces, and that dynamizes the psyche with its little traumas-turned-to-discouse (psychotherapy). But what of that other transformation, meaningless on a certain level, but nonetheless forceful and historically decisive, because irreversible: the transformation of the body of the soldier into a docile body through constant practice and the inculcation of the automatism of habit. 

The classic representation of such automatism in industrial production is Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. The first few minutes of this classic is worth watching carefully.

The meanies of correct training

The problem here is that Foucault straddles both conceptions of the body. In other words, there are two notions of difference tied to embodiment that pervade Foucault’s text: difference as opposition, contradiction, binary structure, dialectic, and sign; and difference as intensive, affective, immanent, indexical, and qualitative. According to Deleuze, much of contemporary thought is in thrall to Hegel’s commitment to contradiction as the highest form of difference. “Only when difference is ‘carried up’ to contradiction is the absolute reached. Being must not only differ from itself; it must contradict tself. Internal difference must be realized as internal contradiction. Deleuze’s anti-Hegelian project is then succinctly announced in one compact question: ‘can we not construct an ontology of difference which would not have to go up to contradiction, because contradiction would be less than difference and not more?’” (Linck, Matthew S.(2008) “Deleuze’s Difference.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 16:4, 509-532, 513)

The first conception of difference has ordered the thought of the “socially constructed body.” Indeed, wasn’t it the fateful confrontation between Judith Butler and Foucault that largely gave us this body of linguistico-psychic expressivity? But if the classical age discovered the body as object and target of power (DP 136), have we not discovered an ontogenetic body through biocybernetic reproduction, a body whose affectivity opens it to assemblages of matter, information, flesh, sensation through patterns of self-organization and across critical ridges of mutation? That’s my contention. 

Worker Robot

Through this obsessive and meticulous observation of detail (141) was born the being of modern humanism. What is crucial here? The exact relation between obedience and utility: this is the realm–broad, stratified, mutational, repetitive, synaesthetic, and mundane–of habit. How is a more useful body habituated? Through exercise, examination, machinic assembling Foucault tells us. Excerise was the technique by which one imposed on the body tasks both repetitive and different, always graduated, bending behaviour toward a terminal state: “a subjection that has never reached its limit” (161). More, through the regulated distribution of individuals in space: enclosures; partitionings of space (anti-desertion, anti-vagabondage, anti-concentration); and the rule of functional sites (141-43). Equally important, and this needs more elaboration, disciplinary habituations emerge from the confluence of experimentations on the body: out of discipline, a medically useful space was born (144).

Distributing individuals in the medically useful spaces of discipline was correlated to strategies of normalization. Rank—the place one occupies in a classification, the interval in a series of intervals; and so cells, places, ranks: disciplines create complex spaces that are architectural, functional, hierarchical (148). Control of activity: time-table (monastic orders): establish rhythms, impose occupations, regulate repetition (149). 

 

Probably Normal

For centuries, the religious orders were the masters of discipline (150), which the 18th cent. refines by monitoring smaller durations toward a more detailed partitioning of time; by assuring the quality of the time used; by breaking down and correlating gestures and movements, by adjusting the body to temporal imperatives. Thus, an obligatory rhythm is imposed from the outside (and let us keep in mind that the “outside” is one of Foucault’s great concepts, according to Deleuze. We will return to this). The body assembles continuously (not prosthetocally) with technology through the instrumental coding of the body: a breakdown of the total gesture into two series, parts of the body used and parts of the object manipulated (153). 

Power is articulated directly onto time (160) through ordering the time of individual existences. There is a capitalist and disciplinary accumulation of duration that turns to ever-increased profit or use the movement of passing time: How can one organize profitable durations? The disciplines are a meticulous machinery for adding up and capitalizing time (these strategies first emerge in the military). The aim is to divide duration into successive or parallel segments, ending at a specific time; break time down into separate and adjusted threads; organize the threads of time; finalize threads through specific durations, punctuating them with exams; draw up series of series, and at the end of each series, others begin, branch off, and subdivide in turn (159). Like the ontology of contemporary digital media, disciplinary temporal threads are organized through a “branching-type interactivity” (Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media 38; I return to this connection below).

 

The body as object and instrument

But then Foucault concludes from this that the disciplinary methods reveal a linear time whose moments are integrated, one upon another, and which is orientated towards a terminal, stable point; in short, an “evolutive” time (160). Now this is a quantitative time, and it is molar; but the durations of exercise, their lived intensity in each repetition are always also qualitative, irreducible, continuous, preindividual, proprioceptive. So that evolution in terms of progress might have been the discursive self-representation of the disciplines (Foucault shows as much in his many quotes of self-congratulatory petty bureaucrats), but the exercise-repetition of discipline was based in the time of microdurations in terms of genesis: the narrative of the progress of societies and the habituated geneses of individuals. As a side note we see that this is also why the signal-index displaces the sign-representation. Exercise works through the trigger-command: a given command must focus the attention and trigger off the required behavior and that is enough; it is a power based in signalization: perceiving the index-signal and reacting to it immediately, autonomically, proprioceptively (cf. Charles Sanders Pierce, “What is a Sign?” 7-8).

But back to the issue at hand: According to Foucault, the disciplines create four characteristics of individuality: 1. Cellular (play of spatical distribution); 2. organic (coding of activities); 3. Genetic (accumulation of time); 4. Combinatory (composition of forces). The modalities are tables, prescribed movements, exercises, tactics. The chief function of disciplinary power is to train individuals, to link forces together in order to multiply and use them (170-71); individuals are both objects and instruments of disciplinary power. Through the disciplines, and in the panoptic network of gazes, supervision becomes a special function that is also integral to the production process; a specialized personnel for management is born; surveillance becomes a decisive economic operator making the disciplines an integrated system (175-76). 

And so gradually a new object is born: The Natural Body, the bearer of forces and the seat of duration, the body susceptible to specified operations; the body offered up to new forms of knowledge. Body of exercise, manipulated by authority, a machine of useful training; through its use the body brings out its correlations and spontaneously rejects the incompatible. Thus disciplinary power has as its correlative an individuality that is not only analytical and ‘cellular’, but also natural and ‘organic’ (156). But we must amend Foucault here. What is “natural” about this body? It would be better to speak rigorously of affect. This is Patricia Clough elaborating Brian Massumi on affect: 

Critical theorists, especially those drawing on the thought of Spinoza, Bergson and Deleuze, have defined affect as a body’s capacity to affect and its susceptibility to be affected. Affect is a prelinguistic, preconscious and preindividual capacity, an irreducible and an inexhaustible potential for activation. Drawing on the works of Gilbert Simondon and David Bohm, Brain Massumi addresses the inexhaustible potentiality of affect in terms of the ongoing becoming or individuating of bodily matter, its ongoing ability to inform or to self form: that is, its aliveness (2002).  But it is in his treatment of affect in terms of proprioception, interoception and exteroception that Massumi’s employmnent of the works of Simondon and Bohm proposes ways to think the relation of trauma and bodily affect. Defining proprioception as “the sensibility proper to the muscles and ligaments,”  Massumi proposes that proprioception “folds  tactility into the body, enveloping the skins contact with the external world in a dimension of medium depth: between epidermis and viscera” (58). At this medium depth, proprioception is asubjective and nonobjective. It is a “dimension of the flesh,” that might be “diagrammed as a superposition of vectorial fields composed of multiple points in varying relations of movement and rest, pressure and resistance, each field corresponding to an action” (59).  (Clough, “Reflections on Sessions Early in an Analysis: Trauma, Affect and ‘Enactive Witnessing’” 10). 

 

Digital Automatism

 

So it is this superimposed dimension of affectivity that refunctions the natural body in the disciplines; it is a body mutating through new habituations, shifting its capacities, its very sensorium. This is why the thought of affect and the procedures of discipline must be situated together.  

So let us pause here. If the two conceptions of the body we are extracting from Foucault correlate with two figures of difference, we might draw specific conclusions. 

What does Foucault show through this analysis?

1. That despite the relegation of the body to a supplement of the mind in Western metaphysics (Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, etc.), the body historically has been an obsession of various forms of power (monastic-pastoral, disciplinary-productive, military-capitalist). The body has been the central modality or instrument for the elaboration of tactics of normalization, control, and distribution. Foucault is actually doing an ontology of becoming, he is diagramming a system of transformation of the human body.  

2. That this becoming happens through language, discourse, visibility, and habit. That the body is both the target of discourses of normalization, and an instrument of habituation (but for that very reason also of mutation). 

Let us trace these two insights further into Panopticism. Panopticism is an abstract machine, the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form: it is a figure of a political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use (205). For instance, Foucault notes that the military camp is constituted through a network of gazes; it forms a diagram of a power that acts by means of general visibility. The aim is to increase the possible utility of individuals; to produce cohesion in a human multiplicity by making useful individuals (210-11). At first, this human multiplicity presents the disciplines with an architectural problem: how to maximize visibility of the observed, while minimizing the observer’s visibility: the perfect eye (172-73). The disciplines as techniques for ordering human multiplicities gradually transform society with a new rationality through the low “cost” of the exercise of power; by bringing the effects of this social power to maximum intensity and extension; by correlating power with the output of a given apparatus (educational, military, industrial, medical). Thus discipline fixes, it arrests or regulates movement; it clears up confusion; it dissipates compact groupings of individuals wandering about the country in unpredictable ways; it establishes distributions to neutralize resistances (219): oppose to the intrinsic, adverse force of multiplicity the technique of the continuous individualizing pyramid (220).

(The “perfect” cinematic representation of this in recent times is Barad-dur and the Eye of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings–well almost: Tolkein makes it clear throughout the trilogy that Sauron at times wants to be seen and worshipped–he is then an image of the pre-disciplinary sovereign–and at other times wants to remain anonymous not unlike the disciplines).

Barad-Dur and the Eye of Sauron

The circular architecture of panopticism expresses a political utopia (174) that never dispenses with the pyramid-structure of the norm. Indeed, the disciplinary mechanism secretes a penalty of the norm (183-84). For at the heart of all disciplinary systems functions a small penal mechanism (177). Tied directly to the process of normalization is a whole micro-penalty of time, activity, behavior, speech, body, sexuality (178). Disciplinary punishment must be corrective, and so punishment is accomplished through repetitive, habituated exercise (179). The rule will function as a minimal threshold, as an average to be respected or as an optimum towards which one must move (183); homogeneity and individuality go hand in hand in the society of the norm (184): it individualizes by measuring gaps, determining levels, fix specialties, correlating differences. The norm is a value-giving measure (183): It measures in quantitative terms and hierarchizes in terms of value the abilities, the level, and the nature of the individuals. This value traces out the external frontier of the abnormal. In short it normalizes.

Foucault argues that Panopticism, as visible and unverifiable (201), is a power that is less corporal (in terms of violence on the body) and more subtly physical (in operating through the object-instrument of the body, in its organization of space and vision) (177). But is this what Foucault means? If visibility is the great trap of panopticism, if panopticism made it possible to avoid those compact, swarming, howling masses that were to be found in places of confinement (200), and replaced them with a multiplicity that could be numbered and supervised (201), how is it that the major effect of the Panopticon is to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power? (201) My question is aimed at drawing attention to how habit, habituation, affect, bodily capacity, sensation falls out of the picture–literally–as vision becomes thaumaturgical in the perverse shadow play of the inmates cell. Suddenly, exercise, repetition, duration and its catalysis of/in the body are reduced to the conscious state of exhibitionism. The inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers (201). “A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation” (202). He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection (202-03). 

But this is not only a matter of being conscious of a fictitious relation because the principle of one’s own subjection is in fact the body. Hence, the body comes back: “The discipline of the workshop, while remaining a way of enforcing respect for the regulations and authorities, of preventing thefts or losses, tends to increase aptitudes, speeds, output and therefore profits; it still exerts a moral influence over behavior, but more and more it treats actions in terms of their results, introduces bodies into a machinery, forces into an economy” (210). (We should note that in Foucault’s summary of his own analysis of the disciplines in The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, it is precisely the body that is foregrounded: “One of these poles [of the power over life]…centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body” [139]). It is this ongoing, meticulous, concrete training of useful forces through bodily durations that enables panopticism to achieve the status of abstract machine, which “may and must be detached from any specific use.” In short, it is the analytical partitioning of time, gestures, and bodily forces that constituted an operational schema that could easily be transferred to other realms of disciplining (219). 

In short, the body is normed through habit. But habituation is also the site of preindividual (where the subject and population meet–Simondon) mutation. In our next post we will engage with Deleuze’s treatment of Foucault, in which he stresses precisely this mutational interstice in his friend’s thought. It is to mutation we must turn next. 

 

the effects of mutations that will change the identity of amino acids

 

In this sense, Foucault can say, or at least he does so once in a crucial passage of Discipline and Punish, that a “diagram” expresses a relation of force or power: “a functioning abstracted from any obstacle, resistance, or friction…and which should be detached from any specific use.” For example, a disciplinary diagram that defines modern societies. But other diagrams act on societies with other stratifications…One of the more original aspects of the diagram is its being a  place of mutations. The diagram is not exactly outside the strata, but it is the outside of the strata. It is between two strata as the place of mutations which enables the passage from one stratum to the other. (G. Deleuze, “Foucault’s Main Concepts” 251).  

We will comment on Deleuze’s Foucault in subsequent posts, but for now let us make another kind of connection. We have seen how the disciplines ramify capitalist production in the nineteenth century through the cellular (play of spatical distribution), organic (coding of activities), genetic (accumulation of time), and combinatory (composition of forces) strategies of normalization (homogeneous and individualizing), and whose modalities are tables, prescribed movements, exercises, tactics, whose chief function is to train individuals, to link forces together in order to multiply and use them. How does this relate to the birth of modern mass media? Lev Manovich in The Language of the New Media correlates the material organization of media, not merely its division of labor (the studio system, for example), to the standardization of factory production and to its demand for simple repetitive and sequential activities, a new modular activity (what we have been calling disciplinary habituation). Thus the habituations of discipline is also the place for a discontinuous sampling of reality in emergent media. “The invention of typesetting machines in the 1880s industrialized publishing while leading to a standardization of both type design and fonts (number and types). In the 1890s cinema combined automatically produced images (via photography) with a mechanical projector. This required standardization of both image dimensions (size, frame ratio, contrast) and temporal sampling rate. Even earlier, in the 1880s, the first television systems already involved standardization of sampling both in time and space” (30). What does this suggest for our understanding of panopticism? That the procedures of surveillance developed through the material organization of a technologized perception (machinic perception) that was a discontinuous, quanticized sampling of both time and space. That the interstice of mutation (diagram) of capital and discipline destratifies not only through the serial visibility of the panopticon, but through a newly technologized sensorium discontinuously sampling spacetime. Isn’t it here in this mutational realm, that is in history but not of history, that is untimely, where discipline becomes control? (This is to contest the historicism that structures Manovich’s analysis of new media–cf. bottom of 41.)

Coming back to Foucault, we can see from his lectures on Biopolitics that a method takes shape incorporating these two conceptions of difference in a logic of strategy. “For what is dialectical logic? Dialectical logic puts to work contradictory terms within the homogeneous. I suggest replacing this dialectical logic with what I would call a strategic logic. A logic of strategy does not stress contradictory terms within a homogeneity that promises their resolution in a unity. The function of strategic logic is to establish the possible connections between disparate terms which remain disparate. The logic of strategy is the logic of connections between the heterogeneous and not the logic of the homogenization of the contradictory. So let’s reject the logic of the dialectic and try to see-this is what I will try to show in these lectures-the connections which succeeded in holding together and conjoining the fundamental axiomatic of the rights of man and the utilitarian calculus of the independence of the governed” (Birth of Biopolitics 42-43).

On the Work of Art Today: Benjamin and the Machinic Phylum

We will begin here with Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (Second Version of 1936). (I’m not going to justify using this version except to say that there are aspects to it that exceed Adorno’s policing of Walter!)

W.J.T. Mitchell has clarified the genealogy that ties Benjamin’s “Artwork” essay to an effective diagramming of our present. “I will state it as a bald proposition, then, that biocybernetic reproduction has replaced Walter Benjamin’s mechanical reproduction as the fundamental technical determinant of our age. If mechanical reproducibility (photography, cinema, and associated industrial processes like the assembly line) dominated the era of modernism, biocybernetic reproduction (high-speed computing, video, digital imaging, virtual reality, the internet, and the industrialization of genetic engineering) dominates the age that we have called ‘postmodern.’ This term, which played its role as a place-holder in the 1970s and 80s, now seems to have outlived its usefulness, and is ready to be replaced by more descriptive notions such as biocybernetics” (W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction” 486-87).  

One of the first things that strikes me in Benjamin’s oft-cited essay is the notion that concepts must be created that can track, or account for the tendencies of capitalist cultural production–or rather cultural production under capitalism, and that these concepts aspire to the status of being completely useless for fascism. So Benjamin poses to us a question that, while having lost none of its pertinence, seems nonetheless so distant today, to us doubly ironic, postcolonial postmoderns. And that is can concepts–in their form and function–exceed Potestas-Power-Domination-Capital-Fascism? These are by no means all the same thing, but certainly there is a sense that Benjamin wanted to develop a kind of critique that would reject and dismantle the foundations of thought under fascism-capitalism. 

It reminds me of Michel Foucault’s celebration of Anti-Oedipus as a handbook for an anti-fascist life (cf. the Foreword); it reminds me as well of Negri’s repeated assertion that today there is nothing outside of Power, and all nodes of resistance (through potentia) are produced as part of its very functioning. 

But let us return to Benjamin. What again strikes me reading further is that Benjamin insists on the phase transitions inaugurated by new technologies. What for instance does the lithograph do in modern society? First, the technique of tracing on a stone (rather than incisions on wood or copper plate) made it possible for graphic art to extend its market (already a tendency of previous techniques) but “in daily changing variations” (102). So then note the method: consider the scale of consumption and the durations of production. These shifts in technique and technology are tied fundamentally to the body for Benjamin. He notes immediately after his discussion of lithography that it was photography that freed the hand from the most important artistic tasks in the process of pictorial reproduction–”tasks that devolved upon the eye alone” (102). 

But then Benjamin has recourse to what might be characterized as a linear-tendency argument which seems suspect to me for several reasons. The argument goes something like: just “as the illustrated newspaper virtually lay hidden within lithography, so the sound film was latent in photography.” Now this notion of latency in technology reduced machinic evolution to a linearity which could be empirically and conceptually contested. I sense that a non-linear approach to technological change would be far more effective in understanding virtuality not in the terms that Benjamin means it here (as latent, genetic, originary), but in the sense of Deleuze: as that which exceeds its actualization, as a purely morphogenetic multiplicity that actualizes fields of force (which are then captured and gridded by Power-Language-Culture).

And yet Benjamin is right to trace these emergences at the interfaces between bodily habituation and technological innovation. It is the linearity that we are taking exception to!

Let’s read on!

In the Third Movement, we get the argument around the Lack: the reproduction lacks the here and now–”its unique existence in a particular place.” This here and now underlies the concept of the artwork’s authenticity. But it is precisely the authenticity of an artwork that becomes non-pertinent in the regime of its technological reproducibility (we will call this TRA–technologically reproducible art). Why? The TRA is more independent of the original that its manual copy: the capacities of the specific technology re-works the original as part of its very functioning (the photograph brings out aspects of the original through the capacities of the lens or through techniques of developing). Also, the TRA can place the copy where the original cannot go: through scale of re-sizing (cathedral goes to studio), and the movement of recordings (live performance goes to the private room).

What do we make of Benjamin’s argument on authenticity? “The authenticity of a thing is the quintessence of all that is transmissible in it from its origin on, ranging from its physical duration to the historical testimony relating to it” (103). Now, Derrida’s critique of presence has bequeathed us a permanent allergy of the concept of authenticity. But is Benjamin merely opposing the authentic to the inauthentic? Is the binary a simple, or clear hierarchy in the sense that writing is for speech in Plato’s Phaedrus? This is the question, and one which demands an answer that perhaps cannot simply be given in the form of an answer, paradoxical (or stupid) as that might sound. 

Let’s continue: “what withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of the work of art is the latter’s aura” (104). Benjamin does not seem to be lamenting this withering by any means. His language is charged with the utopian humanism of a certain Marxist tradition, but beyond that a kind of mystical eschatology seems to take over the text: present crisis, renewal of humanity, mass movements of our day, destructive catharsis, liquidation of the value of tradition, etc.

To say that Benjamin was premature in his prophecies is to miss the point. The problem of the aura could be correlated to a number of specific effects of capitalist exchange of commodities: the fetishism that results from capitalist circulation and valorization could be seen to be the historical heir of the aura of the artwork (many others have made this argument); the dissolution of the original in the kinesis (movements) of TRA is about the emergent dominance of exhibition value, the refunctioning of representation and media itself in the advent of popular art practices. What Benjamin calls us to attend to is precisely what happens to perception in the era of popular culture.

“Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is organized–the medium in which it occurs–is conditioned not only by nature but by history. The era of the migration of peoples, an era which saw the rise of the late-Roman art industry and the Vienna Genesis, developed not only an art different from that of antiquity but also a different perception” (103). We must attain to a form of media diagrammatics commensurate with this revolutionary insight! In other words, Benjamin here marks the fundamental method of a materialist analysis of machinic evolution. 

The unique apparition of a distance? What are we to make of this mystical description? How can we make sense of the aura through the figure of an eye following a mountain range or the shadow of a branch? How does one breathe the aura of those mountains, of that branch? (105) I don’t claim to know here, I am trying to feel myself along Benjamin’s text…To possess a thing, to desolve its uniqueness in reproduction: this is the “desire” of the masses. The photographic/filmic reproduction enables this possessive dissolution.

Benjamin shows us that contemporary culture is founded on the shock value of exhibition (Baudrillard’s simulacrum); but that what is at stake in looking at contemporary cultural production from film to literature is the way in which perception is mobilized, restructured, habituated sometimes in the service of the status quo, sometimes in the service of political critique and resistance (thus film is a way simultaneously of thinking the new [forms of perception], thinking anew [new relationship to reality and time], and a new habituation [attention span]). But always what we assume is human nature is neither natural nor strictly human: at the interface of technologies, human perception has been formed in particular ways throughout history, and it is still evolving. The shock is neurological and machinic as once (cf my discussion of Buck-Morss below). 

Benjamin rejects with panache the l’art pour l’art legacy of Kant-Mallarme (a critique which Bourdieu would take up so ably in Distinctions). The end of the cult of beauty for Benjamin meant that the basis of art would henceforth be politics itself. He was without question wrong about that. But the intuition was right: the dissolution of the high art/ low art distinction in the 20th century meant that the basis of aesthetic judgement could not refer to the inviolable aura of the origins, but that some other criteria had to be found. As far as I can tell people are still trying to find that new foundational criteria–that it has taken so long suggests to me that it does not exist.

This is an excellent, thoughtful and thought provoking lecture. Thank you Prof. Gelley.

In the Seventh Movement of the essay, Benjamin lays out a really expansive notion of exhibition value and we see the potential of such a method take shape. First, Benjamin does something here that Deleuze and Guattari claim is specific to the sciences: correlate functions (philosophy creates concepts, art affects). But Benjamin is theorizing from the correlated functions of the photographic image a new perceptual and signifying apparatus which is epochal to the TRA. The move is brilliant: he asks what are the new functionalities of photography and how are they distributed and operationalized across a variety of contexts and modes of perception?

One of these new modes of perception is the renunciation of eternal value for improvability. This is a function of modern TRA that remains of central importance due to the rise of evolutionary learning algorithms (self-organizing and self-sensing, feedbacked, distributed, networked) in digital computers. Just think Photoshop for a starter.

Benjamin has an assemblage theory of TRA. But it is the assemblage of a piecemeal mode of production (capitalism, d’uh), the modular commodification of cultural production, by which I mean that every aspect of production (say of film, Benjamin’s privileged example) is assembled from specialized labor and technical objects. And so while painting can claim the status as a whole piece of art, film-art is “piecemeal, its manifold parts being assembled according to a new law” (116). I wonder what a productive slashing of Benjamin’s assemblage and Deleuze’s assemblage would yield? This is a methodological inquiry yet to come.

One of the most influential concepts that came out of this essay is “shock” (Buck-Morss notes the Freudian resonances here for Benjamin; cf. W. Benjamin, “Charles Baudelaire”; for the psychoanalytic treatment of war-neurosis and “shell shock” cf. S. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle). Benjamin’s notion here is that phase transitions in media assemblages (technological-perceptual circuits) are actualized in “physical shock effects” (119), and these are to be differentiated from “moral shock effects” (Dada). There is nothing less than a thoroughgoing and radically politicized “synaestheticism” that marks Benjamin’s thought here: 

From an alluring visual composition of an enchanting fabric of sound, the Dadaists turned the artwork into a missile. It jolted the viewer, taking on a tactile [taktisch] quality. It thereby fostered the demand for film, since the distracting element iin film is also primarily tactile, being based on successive changes of scene and focus which have a percussive effect on the spectator. Film has freed the physical shock effect–which Dadaism had kept wrapped, as it were, inside the moral shock effect–from this wrapping. (119)

This tactility forms the basis of Benjamin’s celebration of mass distraction: “the distracted masses absorb the work of art into themselves” (119). This brings to mind a recent argument Jordan Crandall made at the UC Berkeley “Militarism and Everyday Life” Workshop. In a wide-ranging presentation on a fascinating project on the affective disposition of “readiness,” Crandall noted that the form of the scopic regime has become immersive in digital technologies (recalling Deleuze’s elaboration of haptic vision in The Logic of Sensation; recalling as well Mark Hansen’s notion of affectivity in New Philosophy for New Media). What Benjamin pushes us to, and which resonates well with Crandall’s notion of digital immersion, is precisely the synaesthetic history of such shifts in perception, and their political implications across class, race, gender, sexuality. If from Kant onward the notion of taste itself was centered on an idealized vision of concentration and part of a broader biopolitics of population which separated out forms of intellectual labor from manual labor, distraction through percussive effects is part of the revaluation of affectivity under capitalism. Bringing this analysis of cinema’s scopophilia into the era of TV (where sound and the glance, rather than the image and the gaze, dominate), John Ellis in Visible Fictions notes that “TV’s low emphasis on the construction of the voyeuristic position” displaces attention away from the female body and of female sexuality characteristic of classical Hollywood. 

Broadcast TV’s lack of an intense voyeristic appeal produces a lack of the strong investigatory drive that is needed alike for tightly organised narration and for intense concern with the ‘problem’ of the female. Similarly, the regime of broadcast TV does not demonstrate a particular drift towards a fetishistic manner of obsessive replaying of events. The series and the segmental form construct a different pattern of repetition that has much more to do with constructing a pattern of familiarity. 

Writing in early 1980s, Ellis notes that the one exception to this is the fetishistic presentation of the female face on broadcast TV. Now much of this has been utterly transformed with the advent of the home theatre system, large screen TVs, and other technologies. Mark Pesce’s presentation on BitTorrent and piracy is a good example of the new business model of hyperdistribution and the phase transition in habits of consumption catalyzed by broadband technologies. 

Benjamin’s analysis has far reaching implications for both methodology and media history, but his arguments beg many questions as well. For instance, Benjamin differentiates use from perception through the respective senses of tactility and vision. “Tactile reception comes about not so much by way of attention as by way of habit” (120). One could contest this, of course, but what seems relevant here is the relation between habituation, attention, and tactility. The gradual competence in new forms of perception happens on the terrain of habit suggests Benjamin, and this leads to important insights in thinking of the nested timescales (both evolutionary and cognitive) of forms of perception, proprioception, and apperception (awareness, consciousness) in an overall sensorium. 

We would be remiss, especially today, not to highlight one key aspect of Benjamin’s essay: war and property. Benjamin notes that the culmination of the aestheticization of politics (“let art flourish and the world pass away”) is war. War sets goals for mass movements “on the grandest scale while preserving traditional property relations” (121). What better commentary on our times, on Iraq and Afghanistan, on Counter-Terrorism, and Departments of Homeland Security-Abu Ghraib, could there be than this: to affirm the embodiment of capitalist media is to affirm the set of temporal relations that habituate a distributed and differentiated sensorium for, precisely, war and the commodity. We respond by jamming, tweaking, displacing, breaking, and generally fucking with this sensory motor assemblage.

This is precisely what is at stake in critical video games studies. In “Have You Played the War on Terror?” (Critical Studies in Media Communication, Vol. 23, No. 2, June 2006, pp. 112 130), Roger Stahl marks the phase transition in contemporary control societies from commoditized spectacle to virtual Netwar:

Instead the game represents what has come to be known as ‘‘lifestyle marketing,’’ the creation of an immersive cultural universe that surrounds a brand name. The use of interactive technologies to craft and market this universe*the video game as advertisement or ‘‘adver-game’’*can be counted among the military’s many firsts. In fact, the success of America’s Army has been noticed by corporations such as Coca Cola and Daimler-Chrysler, who hope to promote their brands in a similar way (Oser, 2005). America’s Army has transformed the rhetoric of ‘‘recruitment’’ as well, initiating a new language that has been adopted in the realm of commercial war games. A television ad for Conflict: Desert Storm tells us, ‘‘All Americans Pledge Allegiance. A Select Few Show It.’’ A print advertisement for the WWII game Medal of Honor: Rising Sun features an enlistment card and the slogan, ‘‘You don’t play. You volunteer.’’ In this new war gaming environment, recruitment has taken on a logic that is entirely harmonious with the brand, a kind of brand loyalty. America’s Army, far from being a cultural anomaly, has become one brand among many. Col. Wardynski brags that the game has “achieved the objective of putting the Army in pop culture.” (125)

For her part, Susan Buck-Morss begins her brilliant consideration of the “Artwork” essay with precisely this point: “Benjamin is saying that sensory alienation lies at the source of the aestheticization of politics, which fascism does not create, but merely ‘manages.’ We are to assume that both aliencation and aestheticized politics as the sensual conditions of modernity outlive fascism–and thus so does the enjoyment taken in viewing our own destruction” (Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October, Vol 62 (Autumn, 1992), 3-41, 4). For Buck-Morss, Benjamin’s demand to politicize art amounts to a heterogeneous practice of undoing the “alienation of the corporeal sensorium, to restore the instinctual power of the human bodily senses for the sake of humanity’s self preservation, and to do this, not by avoiding the new technologies, but by passing through them” (5). There is a lot here: undoing alienation (which does not seem to me to be Benjamin’s aim at all) implies an outside, or a pre- to power and capital that seems utopic at best (Negri, Hardt, Marazzi and Autonomia make this clear); but does the body pass through technology or is it always already technological, already part of machinic assemblages that form a continuous multiplicity of sense, sensation, and capacities? Nonetheless, Buck-Morss’s thesis–that Benjamin’s critical understanding of mass society disrupts the tradition of modernism by exploding the constellation of art, politics, and aesthetics, and that our focus needs to be the development of the human sensorium itself–is essential for how we understand embodied perception in media assemblages.

She writes at a time when Western academic discourse in the humanities was just on the cusp of this great empirical discovery: we do not yet know what a body can do (Spinoza, Ethics, Deleuze, Logic of Sense, and Massumi, Parables for the Virtual). So her language is marked by that moment; hence her assertion that the “senses maintain an uncivilized and uncivilizable trace, a core of resistance to cultural domestication” (6). Here we see the long shadow of “resistance thinking” (the dialecticism of cultural studies) that inflects all thought of the body in postmodern discourse. For Buck-Morss the senses serve instinctual needs–for warmth, nourishment, safety, sociability–and are part of the biological apparatus. But in fact it seems to me that what remains provocative in Benjamin is to refuse this notion of the senses as outside of power (cultural domestication), and to show the senses in phase transitions of habituation. (Granted this might be to Spinozify Walter, but his own anomalous relationship to dialectics opens that approach.)

Buck-Morss acknowledges this when she notes that the nervous system is not contained within the body’s limits.

The circuit from sense-perception to motor response begins and ends in the world. The brain is thus not an isolable anatomical body, but part of a system that passes through the person and her or his (culturally specific, historically transient) environment. As the source of stimuli and the arena for motor response, the external world must be included to complete the sensory circuit. (Sensory decripvation causes the system’s internal components to degenerate.) (12) 

Does Buck-Morss circumvent that fatal move in post-marxist cultural criticism, that move which brings back all the dialecticism of representational thought, and that mires sense perception in the Platonism of mediation? “The field of the sensory circuit thus corresponds to that of ‘experience,’ in the classical philosophical sense of a mediation of subject and object, and yet its very composition makes the so-called split between subject and object (which was the constant plague of classical philosophy) simply irrelevant. In order to differentiate our description from the more limited, traditional conception of the human nervous system which artificially isolates human biology from its environment, we will call this aesthetic system of sense-consciousness…the ’synaesthetic system’” (12-13). Clearly Buck-Morss wants a thoroughgoing revision of the subject-object split that informs theories of mimesis-mediation, but, in this essay at least, she is never able to make break from it. Why? The ghost of Hegel continues to haunt this thought!

The properties, or better, emergent capacities of this system are what call into question all theories of the primacy of mediation-culture in the phenomenology of experience: it is open in the extreme; open to the world both through sensory organs, and nerve cells that form the sensory networks, reaching out toward other nerve cells at synaptic points where electrical charges pass through the space between them. In the networks between nerve bundles everything “leaks” (13).

Repeatedly, Buck-Morss returns this synesthetic dynamism to a “mimetic language,” only to insist that what this language speaks is anything but the concept! (14) But “sensory mimesis” is precisely a concept, in the sense of a capture or gridding of the non-mimetic dynamism of an open system far-from-equilibrium: the synesthetic perceptual apparatus is immediately a non-coinciding dynamic unity. Pure resonance. (Cf Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual.)

Instead of taking recourse to the protective shield of the Freudian psyche, we should return to the machinic phylum in understanding the confrontation of the body to shock. Isn’t it in fact swarming technologies that provide protection against the unmediated stimuli of the world? Not because they are the new mediation, but because they install a patterned set of probabilistic interactions that both catalyze and grid these very stimuli. 

Recently, a great deal has been written about smart mobs, political (h)activism, evolutionary and nature-based algorithms, video game interfaces, musical improvisation, warfare, and robotics all developed through the engineering diagram of swarming. My sense is that swarming is the abstract diagram of postmodern control societies in that it literally incorporates forms of stochastic creativity (what Bergson called the creative indetermination of the body) with populations of events, forces, and processes. In the joint State Department and RAND publication Swarming and the Future of Conflict (Santa Monica, 2000), John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt depict six basic characteristics of swarming warfare: 1. Autonomous or semi-autonomous units engaging in convergent (or resonant) assault on a common target; 2. Amorphous but coordinated way to strike from all directions, exercising a “sustainable pulsing” of force or fire; 3. Many small, dispersed, internetted maneuver units; 4. Integrated surveillance, sensors, C4I (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence); 5. Stand-off and close-in capabilities; 6. Attacks designed to disrupt cohesion or adversary. For the authors, the key active process of the military swarm is “sustainable pulsing” of either force or fire. Crucially, this “should not be thought of as a strictly military phenomenon. Sustainable pulsing can be undertaken in social action as well. As seen from time to time in Serbia, those protesting the Milosevic regime’s nullification of local elections a few years ago, for example, were able to assemble in very large numbers on many occasions” (21-22). For swarming to work two fundamental requirements must be met. First, in order to strike at a target from multiple directions, there must be large numbers of small units of maneuver that are tightly intenetted—i.e. that can communicate and coordinate with each other at will and are expected to do so. The second requirement is that the “swarm force” must form part of a “sensory organization,” providing the surveillance and synoptic-level observations necessary to the creation and maintenance of “topsight” (22). The aim here is not to necessarily destroy the object, although the authors note that significant destruction can be wrought. Rather, the aim is to disrupt the organizational cohesion of the target. Drawing on both Benjamin and Buck-Morss, then, I would suggest an ontogenetic diagram of contemporary cyborg society: swarms have emergent properties (so-called intelligence) that have both an ethics (specific capacities to affect and be affected) and a “hauntology” (the network of relations, patterns of information, and sets of events that have constituted its very emergence).

 

Another example of such an ethical hauntology of swarming technologies is the work being done on the interface between commercial video games and the military. Again, Roger Stahl’s argument is exemplary here: 

New technologies of interactivity also challenge the primacy of the spectacle as the mode by which critical citizenship is defused. The spectacle is the offspring of broadcast technologies, of television and film, and tends toward the deactivation of the citizen. In contrast, the new paradigm of the video game is interactive and engaging, channeling one’s desires through its architectures. The new generation of war-themed games thus provides a particular way of habitating the political world dissolved in the aesthetic of ‘‘gametime.’’ Gametime moves quickly, subordinating critical and ethical questions to movement and action. Historically, the spectacle of war emerged to shift emphasis from the rational question of ‘‘why we fight’’ to the dazzling display of ‘‘that we fight.’’ Gametime integrates the citizen, however virtually, into the mechanics and pleasures of ‘‘how we fight.’’ (126)

Swarming works through the clinamen. See: http://mediaecologiesresonate.wordpress.com/2008/04/23/on-the-clinamen-in-deleuze 

But can the clinamen in swarming technologies be translated into resistance as Negri would have it? After having just linked the clinamen to difference and creativity through an ontology of resistance (I quote the passage at length in the above mentioned blog entry “On the Clinamen in Deleuze”), Negri goes on to say: “When we speak of difference, we are therefore speaking of resistance. Difference cannot be recognized within the homologization that biopower imposes on society. When we speak of difference, we mean the way resistance emerges against the compact mass of biopower in order to affirm the common consistency of the biopolitical fabric. It is only through the continuous renewal of this fabric, through creativity, life styles, and the destruction of all forms of essence or identity that difference can be affirmed, and the common constructed. The common is nothing but all these movements conjoined” (Negri, The Porcelain Workshop 98). 

If we can say that such resistance is necessary to think concretely, should we not also take heed of what Neitzsche referred to as the very problem of language in relation to sense perception? 

In particular, let us further consider the formation of concepts. Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases—which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept “leaf” is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exists in nature the “leaf”: the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted—but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original model. We call a person “honest,” and then we ask “why has he behaved so honestly today?” Our usual answer is, “on account of his honesty.” Honesty! This in turn means that the leaf is the cause of the leaves. We know nothing whatsoever about an essential quality called “honesty”; but we do know of countless individualized and consequently unequal actions which we equate by omitting the aspects in which they are unequal and which we now designate as “honest” actions. Finally we formulate from them a qualities occulta which has the name “honesty.” We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us. For even our contrast between individual and species is something anthropomorphic and does not originate in the essence of things; although we should not presume to claim that this contrast does not correspond to the essence of things: that would of course be a dogmatic assertion and, as such, would be just as indemonstrable as its opposite. (see http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/nietzsche/nietzsche.php?name=nietzsche.1873.ontruthandliesinanonmoralsense)

So we should be careful of all these words, and try to approach the relation between politics and ontology as clearly as language will let us–and we should never forget that part of what is at stake is developing a new relationship between language, diagramming, becoming, and politics. An untimely relationship, as Deleuze reminds us. 

…”new” values are precisely those superior forms of everything that is. Some values, then, are born current and only appear soliciting an order of recognition, even if they must await favorable historical conditions to be, in effect, recognized. On the other hand, some values are eternally new forever untimely, always contemporary with their creation, and these, even when they seem established, apparently assimilated by society, in fact address themselves to other forces, soliciting from within that society anarchic forces of another nature. Such values are transhistorical, suprahistorical, and bear witness to a congenial chaos, a creative disorder that is irreducible to any order whatsoever. It is this chaos of which Nietzsche spoke when he said it was not the contrary of the eternal return, but the eternal return in person. The great creations depart from this supra-historical stratum, this “untimely” chaos, at the extreme limit of what is livable. (G. Deleuze, “On The Will to Power and the Eternal Return,” in Desert Islands 126). 

And: 

The ultimate authority is creation, it is art: or rather, art represents the absence and the impossibility of an ultimate authority…Nietzsche posits that there exists ends “just a little higher” than those of the State, than those of society. He inserts his entire corpus in dimension which is neither historical, even understood dialectically, nor eternal. What he calls this new dimension which operates both in time and against time is the untimely. It is in this that life as interpretation finds its source. (G. Deleuze, “Nietzsche’s Burst of Laughter,” in Desert Islands 129). 

The fantasy swarms of RFID:

See also Wax Web: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/wax/english/1movie/1all/F/1/1a1a2a1.html. 

Another kind of example of clinamediated swarms: (from: John Shiga, “Copy-and-Persist: The Logic of

Mash-Up Culture,” Critical Studies in Media Communication Vol. 24, No. 2, June 2007, pp. 93-114)

While a few mash-ups have been officially released by record companies, the vast majority are posted online in order to acquire feedback, recognition, and prestige within the mash-up community. Mash-ups that are posted on message boards are also opportunities for other members to reassemble the mash-up from its components or display their listening skills through commentary about a particular mash-up. A member of another mash-up message board, acapellas4u.co.uk, posted a mash-up which he claimed received radio airplay and asked for feedback (Johnnybaby, 2006). The feedback suggests that the validation of remixes/remixers does not necessarily lead to a sense of the ‘‘work’’ as the remixer’s private acoustic space or property. RobertP wrote, ‘‘This is a really tight, fun mix*excellent work* it is the only version of eminem that I think I have wanted to play again. In fact I think I’ll burn it to CD to play in the car*thank you!!!’’ The producer of the mashup, johnnybaby, replied: ‘‘Cheers Robert! . . . Have fun when you’re driving around with it blastin’ out of your motor!’’ Another member asked for permission to air the mash-up on their homemade radio station, which johnnybaby gave without hesitation. This thread suggests that listening in mash-up culture is guided by a ‘‘filesharing’’ sensibility, a disposition towards sound as infinitely replicable. The conventions of validation and techniques of listening do not translate directly into commodifiable works, but they open the possibility of developing a ‘‘trademark’’ style of listening, remixing, and commenting, or a ‘‘brand name’’ that links different artifacts. As Lury (2006) observes, the emergence of the artist as a brand name is part of broader shift in the author-function of the art-culture system: ‘‘Increasingly the brand name is not the mark of an originary relationship between producer and products but is rather the mark of the organization of a set of relations between products in time’’ (p. 95). However, the attempt to promote oneself as a stylized link between multiple works produced by other people exists in tension with the broader corporate and legal scrutiny of unauthorized copying on the web. Pseudonymous identities have thus become the norm in mash-up culture, which makes it difficult to pinpoint legal persons responsible for copyright infringement while at the same time enabling subcultural capital to be accumulated through a name that persists over time in the filenames of mash-ups and in the comments posted on message boards. (101)

NOTES            

 

---

 From a recent call for papers on the Artificial Life listserv (alife-announce@lists.idyll.org, October 16, 2008): “The World Congress on Nature and Biologically Inspired Computing (NABIC’09) brings together international researchers, developers, practitioners, and users. The aim is to build a 3 day platform where the concerned researchers /academicians /engineers from diverse regions of the world would converge to share their excitement and paradoxically, frustration towards the pursuit of building up of machines that would not be strictly algorithmic in nature and are capable of handling ambiguity, uncertainty etc. by applying common sense. The theme for this symposium is ‘Nurturing Intelligent Computing Towards Advancement of Machine Intelligence.’” On experimental music and swarming diagrams see David Borgo, Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age (New York: Continuum, 2006); Borgo’s analysis of complexity theory and its relation to popular, improvisational musical forms seems particularly open to what I am calling clinamedia.

 “If you have ever been to a picnic, you have undoubtedly encountered ants.  It is not the individual ant that draws your attention, but the collective behavior of the line of ants, as they walk off with your food that is impressive.  Ants are considered a social insect, a group that contains other insects such as bees, and some caterpillars.  It is their social structure and how ants make use of it that peaks the scientists’ interests.  An individual ant is relatively unintelligent, but when they are part of a colony, “complex group behavior emerges from the interactions of individuals who exhibit simple behaviors by themselves.” This phenomenon is indicative of all swarm intelligences such as bees, birds, fish, and the economy, which is another example of swarm intelligence, where something is created that is greater than the sum of its parts.  One of the complex behaviors that naturally emerges from individual ant behavior is the ability to determine the shortest path between two points.” Glen Upton, “Swarm Intelligence,” http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~uptongl/project/Swarm_Intelligence.html, accessed October 13, 2008. 

urbz site: check it out!

http://urbz.net/

Burn Completely

The semester is over. I’m burnt out, but not completely. I’ve tried to present to my students this semester a pragmatics of media assemblages (in an undergrad and grad course called Introduction to Media Assemblage Theory). Not what it means, but what one can do in and through media. What we are becoming through media, what we could become. This is both scary and full of potential. This is also not a dialectic, nor a metaphor for something else.

Such a pedagogy necessitates that both student and teacher enter into a process of ontologizing media flows. This focus on processes--pedagogical, methodological, intensive, affective, diagrammatic--has been the aim of the course. To think the movement and duration specific to sets of singularities. Resonant non-coinciding unicities, oscillating around basins of attraction on a plane of consistency. Coded and overcoded, regimes of passage are institutional capture machines for these processes, they feedback into them and also potentialize connectivities. Value is generating through these feedbacks, and itself becomes a material vector, self-organizing and over-coded. A moving bedrock of valuation. 

 

The aim was to get at these processes through the production of sensation. I argued—in my reading of Sterne and Crary—that the senses are organized hierarchically and each sense is habituated through specific sensory grids. Cartesian perspectivalism vs. haptic, synaesthetic vision; tactility as visual vs. tactility as amodal, multimodal sensation.

 

We looked closely at the definition of neoliberalism in Foucault, and its connection to Deleuzian control societies. We brought the theory of entropy into relations of deterritorialization by historicizing and refunctioning its concept and diagram. But we have not been obsessed about words. They are important, but they should find their assemblage, their media assemblage.

 

I have created a set of media, that discursively does not share the same plane, and yet they can also be grasped by a discourse that traverses them. Nonlinear dynamics and affective capital.

 

We have attempted to think pure duration. Yes duration before the grid of intelligibility that accompanies the spatialization of representation. I’m sitting in a dentist’s office. CNN is on. There is no internet. There is no internet.

 

So we have tried to deploy a method of morphogenesis in media. How do perceptual forms emerge in media assemblages? Through ecologies of sensation. What are ecologies of sensation? Noncoinciding resonant unicities. We should pause for a moment and consider what the nature of this unity is. Deleuze and Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus,

To begin with, a stratum does indeed have a unity of composition, which is what allows it to be called a stratum: molecular materials, substantial elements, and formal relations or traits. Materials are not the same as the unformed matter of the plane of consistency; they are already stratified, and come from "substrata." But of course substrata should not be thought of only as substrata: in particular, their organization is no less complex than, nor is it inferior to, that of the strata; we should be on our guard against any kind of ridiculous cosmic evolutionism. The materials furnished by a substratum are no doubt simpler than the compounds of a stratum, but their level of organization in the substratum is no lower than that of the stratum itself. The difference between materials and substantial elements is one of organization; there is a change in organization, not an augmentation. The materials furnished by the substratum constitute an exterior milieu for the elements and compounds of the stratum under consideration, but they are not exterior to the stratum. The elements and compounds constitute an interior of the stratum, just as the materials constitute an exterior of the stratum; both belong to the stratum, the latter because they are materials that have been furnished to the stratum and selected for it, the former because they are formed from the materials. Once again, this exterior and interior are relative; they exist only through their exchanges and therefore only by virtue of the stratum responsible for the relation between them. For example, on a crystalline stratum, the amorphous milieu, or medium, is exterior to the seed before the crystal has formed; the crystal forms by interiorizing and incorporating masses of amorphous material. Conversely, the interiority of the seed of the crystal must move out to the system's exterior, where the amorphous medium can crystallize (the aptitude to switch over to the other form of organization). To the point that the seed itself comes from the outside. In short, both exterior and interior are interior to the stratum.

 

What then is a unity? A machine for folding inside and outside topologically. Outside forces of futurity are active potentially, nascent, producing patterns of morphogenetic mutation. 

Then there was the system of the strata. On the intensive continuum, the strata fashion forms and form matters into substances. In combined emissions, they make the distinction between expressions and contents, units of expression and units of content, for example, signs and particles. In conjunctions they separate flows, assigning them relative movements and diverse territorialities, relative deterritorializations and complementary reterritorializations. Thus the strata set up everywhere double articulations animated by movements: forms and substances of content and forms and substances of expression constituting segmentary multiplicities with relations that are determinable in every case. Such are thestrata. Each stratum is a double articulation of content and expression, both of which are really distinct and in a state of reciprocal presupposition. Content and expression intermingle, and it is two-headed machinic assemblages that place their segments in relation. What varies from stratum to stratum is the nature ofthe real distinction between content and expression, the nature of the substances as formed matters, and the nature of the relative movements. We may make a summary distinction between three major types of real distinction: the real-formal distinction between orders of magnitude, with the establishment of a resonance of expression (induction); the realreal distinction between different subjects, with the establishment of a linearity of expression (transduction); and the real-essential distinction between different attributes or categories, with the establishment of a superlinearity of expression (translation)..Each stratum serves as the substratum for another stratum. Each stratum has a unity of composition defined by its milieu, substantial elements, and formal traits (Ecumenon). (A Thousand Plateaus, 72)

Consider this passage from Whitehead's Process and Reality:

That whatever is a datum for a feeling has a unity as felt. Thus the many components of a complex datum have a unity: this unity is a 'contrast' of entities. In a sense this means that there are an endless number of categories of existence, since the synthesis of entities into a contrast in general produces a new existential type. For example, a proposition is, in a sense, a 'contrast.' For the practical purposes of 'human understanding,' it is sufficient to consider a few basic types of existence, and to lump the more derivative types together under the heading of 'contrasts.' The most important of such 'contrasts' is the 'affirmation-negation' contrast in which a proposition and a nexus obtain synthesis in one datum, the members of the nexus being the 'logical subjects' of the proposition. (24)

         

As David Hall put it in "Process and Anarchy," 

The process of self-creativity involves the coming together of all available things into a felt synthesis constituting the aesthetic unity of a drop of ex- perience: The many become one. The act of creativity is an act of concrescence, an act of becoming one...Being is characterized in terms of its potentiality for novel synthesis. The "many things" of the world, in accordance with which the growing together of experience (the aesthetic event) becomes, constitute beings. The aesthetic event itself is becoming. This view of existence, therefore, requires two kinds of process: the process of self-creativity, which is concrescence, and the transi- tion of being into data for acts of concrescence. Creativity explains both con- crescence and transition. "Creativity" and "process" as general concepts are the primary terms which interpret the reality of things as creative passage. The reality of things is comprised by aesthetic events. These events are free, novel, and transitory. Creativity, as the spontaneous realization of novelty, requires that there be freedom to produce the novel. 
 (272-73)

Hall goes onto argue that  "For the locus of freedom is the self. But, as nature is basically incomplete and as acts of creativity require some form of organic wholeness or completion to qualify as aesthetic, self-actualization, which is the paradigm of creation, must entail the consequence that the self is momentary, transitory, and in process. Aesthetic events are momentary acts of creativity which come into being and at the point of full actualization cease to be in the fullest sense. Process, therefore, is atomic in character. Otherwise there could be no full realization of novelty through aesthetic action. Creativity is the self-creative activity of finite events in process of becoming. Each such event, at full realization, loses its uniqueness. Reality, as an interweaving of freedom and novelty, therefore, must be seen as process. (273) Hall notes that Tao is said to be an "Uncarved Block," meaning that it is capable of infinite characterization. It is the source from which all things come, though it is in no way separate from that of which it is the source. One cannot avoid a kind of deism here, but one that is not transcendent but immanent to matter. (274). 
         

What is the relation between sense perception and intuition? For an event-particle to have a unity as felt there is an irreducible element of intuition involved. We are considering here affect as a felt or effective unity. There is a suspension of time-space concepts that is necessary in order to occupy your very own body without organs, it is not only space that must be thought topologically, but time durationally in a pragmatics of relationality, action, change, and function: "anarchy and unity are one and the same thing, not the unity of the One, but a much stranger unity that applies only to the multiple" (TP 158). The duration of things create a variety of flows, which sometimes finds strange resonances. Examples of hybridity are not what I mean here. Rather, these flows are material and representational at once, as long as we understand by the word "representation" a disposition constituted by a subtractive perception oscillating between action and dream (Bergson, Massumi, Deleuze). So let us return to a diagram of this morphogensis as a unity. We should take D/G's mention of yoga very seriously. Beyond merely the representational verisimilitude, or death sentence of Orientalism. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I aim to provide a reading of B. K. S. Iyengar's Light on Yoga in the time ahead. I want to consider yoga as a way of creating your own BwO as an experience of love and change immanent to each body, below the family but feedbacked into it, an ecology of sensation that is preindividual in the sense Simondon, Masumi, and Hansen describe it. 

So heterochronic evolution--we will define this again using Deleuze and Delanda--will give us patterns of morphogenesis. How? Consider an argument made some time ago in the Journal of Anthropological Research:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That is, morphogenetic rules…are inherited properties of lineages that determine limits on how ontogenies can respond to gene mutations in a given environment. While the mutations, and the repeated morphogenetic tendencies expressed as parallel phenotypic novelties in a given clade, are random in the sense that they are independent of what natural selection might prefer, they can nevertheless impart a coherent pattern to what can and does evolve in that clade. I argue below that particular kinds of heterochrony that appear repeatedly in parallel in particular clades reflect shared, inherited morphogenetic responses to common environmental causes. Third, there are limits on the ways in which speciation can occur in general and even narrower limits in the case of any particular monophyletic group of species that share aspects of population structure and ecology and that evolved under the same basic conditions of physical change. Finally, natural selection can act in similar ways across species faced by similar climatic changes, especially when those species share commonly inherited aspects of genomes, morphogenetic rules, and population structure.

Climate, Heterochrony, and Human Evolution Author(s): Elisabeth S. Vrba Source: Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), pp. 1-28; Accessed: 21/02/2009 17:21.

 

Life moves in clades, as Bruce Sterling has it in Schixmatrix. Vrba defines “Heterochrony” as including “all evolutionary changes in the timing of appearance of characters during ontogeny and in the rates of shape and size development. From one to most descendant characters may be affected.”

 

We know that heterochrony is important to Deleuze for reasons that help us to grasp what kinds of modalities we need to give materiality to a definition of ecologies of sensation. Heterochrony is a theory of “vacuoles of noncommunication.”

 

“You ask whether control or communication societies will lead to forms of resistance that might reopen the way for a communism understood as the "transversal organization of free individuals." Maybe, I don't know. But it would be nothing to do with minorities speaking out. Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They're thoroughly permeated by money--and not by accident but by their very nature. We've got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.”

            --G. Deleuze to A. Negri, “Control and Becoming”

(Jonathan at Cultural Studies took exception to my quoting this, because of what he felt to be a kind of silly opposition between money and noncommunication. I don't really see these things in opposition as much as in mutual determination given a field of intensitiies, with their own durations and force. But the key here is that there is something "before" and "after" money: and that substance is pure relation or pure immanence. The purity here is like the unity in the above definition. We are back at the same problem because the aim in this is to break with concepts of timespace, to break with conceptualization as such and enter bodily into the flow of durations. Becoming as continuous variation. To take a song as a field of potentiality. Consider this song:

It's gonna rain. It's by Steven Riech, and you can listen to it and hear Reich's brilliant commentary on it here:

I've remixed some of the audio on Garage Band a number of times:

It\'s gonna rain again and again

  

The method of diagramming duration ontologically is to follow the relations it enters into.

Deleuze suggested that there are definite properties of duration. “Pulsed time and non-pulsed time are completely musical, but they are something else as well. The question would be to know what makes up this non-pulsed time. This kind of floating time that more or less corresponds to what Proust called “a bit of pure time.” The most obvious, the most immediate feature of…non-pulsed time is duration, time freed from measure, be it a regular or irregular, simple or complex measure. Non-pulsed time puts us first and foremost in the presence of a multiplicity of heterochronous, qualitative, non-coincident, non-communicating durations. The problem therefore is clear: how will these heterochronous, heterogeneous, multiple, non-coincident durations join together…”

             --G. Deleuze, “Making Inaudible Forces Audible”  

 

Thinking about the temporality involved in individuation processes as embodying the parallel operation of many different sequential processes throws new light on the question of the emergence of novelty. If embryological processes followed a strictly sequential order, that is, if a unique linear sequence of events defined the production of an organism, then any novel structures would be constrained to be added at the end of the sequence….On the contrary, if embryonic development occurs in parallel, if bundles of relatively independent processes occur simultaneously, then new designs may arise from disengaging bundles, or more precisely, from altering the duration of one process relative to another, or the relative timing of the start or end of a process. This evolutionary design strategy is known as heterochrony…

             --M. Delanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy

 

And I submit this to write a paper on duration and becoming: For some time the association of the animal with the savage defined the ideology of colonialism. A system of finance and affective labor were deployed and potentialized by the flows that gave movement and becoming to eugenic racism and territorial expansion. The change in the ratios of perception brought on by new media (the hand and the lithograph) and communication technologies (the ear and the phone) helped to monumentalize and quotidianize the ideology. This paper is interested in diagramming this latter process as a continuous multiplicity of flows, each having gradients of intensities, each having a pattern of interactions (functional capacities, capacious functions), each with strata and becoming. Correlated processes with specific “speeds, rates, coefficients, and differential relations.” How have contagions of race, perception, matter, and sensation contributed to a new understanding of the human as human? At what point does such an analysis become a conduit for proliferating ecologies of sensation? Durations organize themselves along functional connectivities, noncommunicating differential relations, where all becoming is in the middle of things. We will consider an array of morphogenetic processes—new habituations, new contagions, new becomings—across the remains and mutations of empire.

 Songs:

songs

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Arco Madrid

It was my first, and I hope not last, visit to ARCO, an international arts market. It was interesting, if only because of the anxiety of being a part of an institutional machinery for assigning an exchange value to what should have no fixed exchange or use value.

The discursive context fed into my project of trying to engage Negri, Deleuze, Bergson, and Massumi on value and affect.

This is what I said:

What is the relation of Value to Affect?
“Pagar mas o menos es una cuestion que cada uno debe sopesar. El valor del arte no esta vinculado al dinero, sino al amor que uno siente por una obra ya que su objectivo, lejos de ser especifico, es realzar la experiencia personal de quien la admira y cuyo futuro es imposible de prever.”

“To pay more or to pay less [for a work of art] is a question that…is up to the individual to decide. The value of art has nothing to do with money, but with the emotive connection with an artwork. Its goal is to enhance the personal experience of the person admiring it, and therefore its future is impossible to predict.” (Marie Elena Angulo, qtd. in “Assigning Value to Art,” ABCDARCO, 2, Feb. 12, 2009)

The creation of market value today is immense and immeasurable but susceptible to control, discipline, modulation, and change. (Paraphrase of Antonio Negri in “Value and Affect” [1999])

IT IS FUNNY THAT AT AN ART FAIR EVERYTHING I HAVE READ AND HEARD IS ABOUT QUESTIONING IF ART CAN HAVE A VALUE AT ALL.

THERE SEEMS TO BE SOME PARTICULAR ANXIETY AMONG ARTISTS, CRITICS, AND THE GENERAL PUBLIC THAT ART BE BOTH A COMMODITY TO BE BOUGHT AND SOLD, AND BECAUSE IT CALLS FORTH A SUBJECTIVE RESPONSE IT BE BEYOND THE COMMODITY FORM.

AN OLD ANXIETY AT ARCO? MAYBE SOMEONE FROM THE AUDIENCE CAN FILL US IN DURING THE QUESTION/ANSWER?

IN ANY CASE, I WANT TO BEGIN WITH TWO TERMS THAT ARE NOT ONLY IMPORTANT FOR HOW WE THINK OF THE ETHICS OF ARCO, BUT CRUCIAL TO HOW WE UNDERSTAND THE LIFE OF CULTURAL PRODUCTION IN India TODAY.

THOSE TWO TERMS ARE VALUE AND AFFECT!

SLIDE 1:

WHAT IS VALUE?
BECAUSE VALUE TODAY IS DEFINED BY THE QUALITATIVE CHANGE IT BRINGS TO A PRODUCT LINE (as in value added services); or an identity (as in cultural value)—VALUE IS BASICALLY DEFINED AS OUTSIDE OF ANY MEASURE.
BUT DOES THAT MEAN THAT IT IS OUTSIDE OF CONTROL?
PEOPLE WORKING IN THE FIELD OF MARXIST CULTURAL ANALYSIS OR FOUCAULDIAN BIOPOLITICS SUCH AS ANTONIO NEGRI ANSWER CLEARLY NO, VALUE IS NOT BEYOND CONTROL.
IN FACT THE PRODUCTION OF VALUE IS A FORM A CONTROL.

How to define Affect?
In recent work by feminist political economists, postcolonial critics, and Marxist philosophers, affect is defined as the substance of interaction and communication: distinct from “emotion,” affect is defined by its relational character, not limited by an internalized feeling. In that regard, affect is considered pre-individual, operating in those strata of being where the subject and populations meet. Recalling Baruch Spinoza’s “ethics,” the production of affect is not conceivable otherwise than in terms of the production of a relational capacity: the capacity to affect and be affected.

“It is not right to say that the cinematographic image is in the present. What is in the present is what the image ‘represents’, but not the image itself, which, in cinema as in painting, is never to be confused with what it represents. The image itself is the system of the relationships between its elements, that is, a set of relationships of time from which the variable present only flows. “ Gilles Deleuze, Cinema Two: The Time Image

AFFECT IS A BODILY CAPACITY TO AFFECT AND BE AFFECTED. IT IS SUBJECTIVE (ABOUT YOUR HABITS), AND POPULATIONAL (HABITS DEVELOPED SOCIALLY AND BIOLOGICALLY).
PEOPLE INVOLVED IN AFFECT STUDIES HAVE FOREGROUNDED THE IMPORTANCE OF BREAK AWAY FROM THE MIND/BODY DUALISMS THAT HAVE CHARACTERIZED WESTERN THOUGHT FROM ITS INCEPTION.
AFFECT IS NOT ABOUT EMOTIVE RESPONSE; IT IS ABOUT CAPACITIES THAT EMERGE FROM THE INTERACTION OF MANY, MANY BUNDLED PROCESSES IN THE BODY, IN PERCEPTION, IN ATTENTION, IN MEMORY.
IN SHORT, AFFECT IS ABOUT RELATIONS OF TIME EMBODIED IN SENSORIMOTOR CIRCUITS. (THE PHILOSOPHICAL PREDECESSORS HERE ARE SPINOZA, NIETZSCHE, BERGSON, WHITEHEAD, MEARLEU-PONTY, DELEUZE, LUCRETIUS AND BHARATMUNI)
THIS IS HOW BERGSON DEFINES THE IMAGE: BETWEEN REPRESENTATION AND MATTER, IMAGES ARE SENSORIMOTOR CIRCUITS.

“… define attention as an adaptation of the body rather than of the mind and to see in this attitude of consciousness mainly the consciousness of an attitude.”
-Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

Memory, Sensation, Duration in Contemporary Media Assemblages in India

I am attempting to think through the implications for media assmeblage analysis of the connection that Bergson makes between the body and duration. This is an excerpt from an article I recently wrote. It may appear in South Asian Culture and History.

The main point here for the purposes of this paper, is that Office Tiger presents itself as a corporation that provides measurable value-added services to Western firms, but these quantities are abstractions from the streams of immeasurable and immense values of immaterial and affective labor. This is the labor that inhabits, enables and exceeds the boundaries between home and office, between merit and privilege, between men and women, and between work time and leisure time. It is this space of creativity in between times that Office Tiger attempts to control as its own domain. Indeed, it is the value of temporality itself (starting work on-time, the duration of the work day, the intensification of labor-time through multi-tasking: Aneesh’s “time zone warp,” Deleuze’s Untimely plane of immanence from which the variable present only flows) that is most under attack and occupation by the pedagogies of Office Tiger.

It will be no surprise that this transvaluation of value is central to the actual connectivity between work and information technology, established through an algorithm-based governance structure that Aneesh terms “algocratic.” As Upadhya remarks in her review of Aneesh’s study, the algocratic mode of hegemony depends on technology, especially information technology, which structures work routines and workplace behaviour: in the post-industrial economy many work tasks are now performed through computers and the symbolic manipulation of code, giving rise to new systems of control, based on the coding process. “The algocratic mode has enabled new global flows of information labour as well as control over geographically dispersed workers through constant online access and monitoring, as seen in the model of geographically and temporally ‘distributed development’ followed by Indian software outsourcing companies.” Indeed, the digitization of information and its circulation in real time across the globe is the single most important catalyst for this transvaluation of value. For his part, Hardt notes that one “novel aspect of the computer is that it can continually modify its own operation through its use. Even the most rudimentary forms of artificial intelligence allow the computer to expand and perfect operation based on interaction with its user and environment.”

            It is the value-added to specific cinematic clichés by information technology that brings me to a consideration of contemporary Bollywood cinema. I have argued in Untimely Bollywood that contemporary Hindi-Urdu cinema is undergoing a definite phase transition, and that by diagramming the set of durations (or vibratory fields) assembled through the various processes constituting cinema—time embodied in form—we could begin to write a nonlinear history of South Asian media. Giorgos Artopoulos and Eduardo Condorcet note that in Bernard Cache’s analysis of the assemblage entered into by a kite, a method for diagramming “inflections on surfaces of varied curvature” becomes available to thought and practice. “In doing so, he describes the evolution of a form, and its shaping force in time. With the use of advanced geometries, time can be embodied in form—form—for example the kite—is the ‘site’ for the calculation of multiple forces. Digitally-generated environments to be inhabited by a ‘player’ raise the issue of human presence in the space-less environment of the computer” (214). Cinema as inflections moving, embodied in time, in form, and always doubled by the Untimely: this would alas, be too metaphorical, and hence useless, for an effective diagram. But let us progressively differentiate this metaphor, and show the set of intensive entities constituting it.

One way to consider duration ontologically is to follow the relations it enters into. Deleuze suggested that there are definite properties of duration. “Pulsed time and non-pulsed time are completely musical, but they are something else as well. The question would be to know what makes up this non-pulsed time. This kind of floating time that more or less corresponds to what Proust called “a bit of pure time.” The most obvious, the most immediate feature of…non-pulsed time is duration, time freed from measure, be it a regular or irregular, simple or complex measure. Non-pulsed time puts us first and foremost in the presence of a multiplicity of heterochronous, qualitative, non-coincident, non-communicating durations. The problem therefore is clear: how will these heterochronous, heterogeneous, multiple, non-coincident durations join together…” Durations do not (necessarily) communicate, but they do join together. What I have been calling a non-coinciding resonant unity is this “joining together” of duration yielding a media assemblage with emergent properties. Through embedded or transversal time-scales, a non-pulsed time mobilizes self-organization, morphogenesis and a virtual plane. Following Deleuze’s suggestion for a biological understanding of temporal cycles, Delanda puts the problem thus:

Thinking about the temporality involved in individuation processes as embodying the parallel operation of many different sequential processes throws new light on the question of the emergence of novelty. If embryological processes followed a strictly sequential order, that is, if a unique linear sequence of events defined the production of an organism, then any novel structures would be constrained to be added at the end of the sequence….On the contrary, if embryonic development occurs in parallel, if bundles of relatively independent processes occur simultaneously, then new designs may arise from disengaging bundles, or more precisely, from altering the duration of one process relative to another, or the relative timing of the start or end of a process. This evolutionary design strategy is known as heterochrony…”

If heterochrony is the necessary condition of affective capacities, then sexuality (praxis) finds its non-coinciding incipience here as an ecology of sensation, in folded bundles of parallel processes, that disengage, feedback, and mutate. It is this heterochronous duration that marks both the immensity of affective labor, and its susceptibility to control. It also limns an edge of chaos in the phase transition of contemporary Bollywood.

Eddies within eddies, without a trace. The great challenge of Deleuze’s notion of hearing the inaudible is to open the body’s perception to resonating durations in a continuous multiplicity. This is not easy, but there is an intuition necessary to it. 

 

NOTES:

---

  

In a review of Virtual Migrations: The Programming of Globalization, Carol Upadhya highlights A. Aneesh’s description of two contrasting systems of Indian software labour deployment—bodyshopping and virtual migration. “Although there is some ethnographic description of the transnational experiences of Indian software workers that place them in an unsettled, interstitial space, the experiences of offshore software workers remain unaddressed. Instead, he focuses on the systems of control that have emerged to govern dispersed IT labour. He argues that virtual software labour migration is characterised by spatial integration (in which work is delinked from the work site) and temporal integration (in which workers in different time zones are linked together), and that this has led to the emergence of a new ‘governance scheme’ and organisational structures. The former are labelled as ‘algocratic’ or in accordance with the rule of algorithm, as distinct from the earlier governance schemes of bureaucratic and panoptical dominance” (Carol Upadhya, Review of Virtual Migrations, in Contributions to Indian Sociology, 42:2, 2008, 344-347, 345).  Upadhya expresses some skepticism of the extension of code to various forms of globalization in India, noting, “I am suspicious of the extension of the metaphors of ‘code’ and ‘programming’ to such a wide range of phenomena and processes: while he is attempting to provide a fresh formulation to describe these forms, the excessive use of these terms may appear more clever than insightful” (346). In what sense is code not a metaphor? Here we would insist that code is the very ontology of social relatedness, the form of value itself, in such IT labor. Negri defines immaterial labor and explicates its implications thus: “Today we face a tendency towards the hegemony of immaterial work (intellectual, scientific, cognitive, relational, communicative, affective, etc.) increasingly characterizing both the mode of production and processes of valorization. It goes without saying that this form of work is entirely subordinate to new modes of accumulation and exploitation. We can no longer interpret these according to the time employed in production. Cognitive work is not measurable in those terms; it is even characterized by its immensurability, its excess. A productive relation links cognitive work to the time of life. It is nourished by life as much as it modifies it in return, and its products are those of freedom and imagination. This creativity is precisely the excess that characterizes it” (Antonio Negri, The Porcelain Workshop, Noura Wedell, trans., [Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008] 20).

Aneesh, Virtual Migration 2.

Upadhya 345.

“Rather than the politicization of real abstraction that Virno gleans from the supposed collapse of labor qua measure, Cillario sees the current figure of real abstraction as centering on the proliferation and production of new procedures, of codes of production, of transmissible ‘hows’ rather than measurable ‘whats’. The organizational codifications of the processes in which incommensurate use values are produced becomes central, but the locus of abstraction becomes not labor per se, or commodity-exchange, but the role of cognition within the laboring process. Even if procedures themselves are then subjected to the standards of exchange (i.e., they in turn become products), their centrality to a capitalism that more and more takes the figure of ‘flexible accumulation’ marks a mutation in the character of real abstraction. As Cillario writes, ‘‘The incessant impetus aimed at the change in the methods and procedures of laboring activities is the generative nucleus of the abstractive process of knowledge’’ (1990, 168 /9). The centrality of procedures also means that, in a way that is not necessarily pregnant with emancipatory possibilities, reflexivity is at the heart of contemporary capitalism. That is, it is not just the abstraction of capital’s forms, but its colonization of cognition, that is crucial to an understanding of the present. ‘‘The concept of abstraction which is adequate to the phase in which knowledge becomes capital stems from the reflexive character of the process of social labor’’ (Cillario 1990, 168; 1996, 52)” (Toscano, Alberto, “The Open Secret of Real Abstraction,” Rethinking Marxism, 20:2 (2008), 273—287).

Hardt 94.

Stuart Kauffman’s elegant definition of a phase transition is useful to recall here. In At Home in the Universe, he writes that “when a large enough number of reactions are catalyzed in a chemical reaction system, a vast web of catalyzed reactions will suddenly crystallize. Such a web, it turns out, is almost certainly autocatalytic—almost certainly self-sustaining, alive” (58); “The ratio of possible reactions to polymers is so vast that eventually a giant catalyzed component and autocatalytic sets emerge. Given almost any way in which nature might determine which chemicals catalyze which reactions, a critical molecular diversity is reached at which the number or red catalyzed reactions passes a phase transition and a vast web of chemicals crystallizes in the system. This vast web is, it turns out, almost always collectively autocatalytic” (65).

Gilles Deleuze, “Making Inaudible Forces Audible,” in Two Regimes of Madness, Amy Hodges and Mike Taormina, trans. (New York: Semiotexte, 2006) 156-160, 157.

Delanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Ch. 2, 110?

On Mark Hansen’s Bodies in Code

 

Rigid Waves is an example of...?

Hansen writes: “Forging such a cultural image of the body is crucial if we are to forestall the instrumentalization of the body and all that follows from it, above all the foreclosure of being-with or the finitude of our form of life. Far from being a mere ‘instrument’ or the first ‘medium’ (as some versions of posthumanism allege), the body is a primordial and active source of resistance; indeed, it is as resistance–as the ‘living expression of something simultaneously organization and obstacle to its organization’–that the body forms the source of excess supporting all levels of constitution (or individuation), from the cellular to the cosmic. As source of excess, the body possesses a flexibility that belies any effort, such as that of cybercultural criticism (and behind it, of cultural constructivism), to reduce it to a passive surface for social significance. The body is, affirms Millon ‘an entity that becomes a person, a creative subject, a being or an individual according to the circumstances.’” (Bodies in Code 15)

You kinda just wanna cheer at this passage. I do in some part of me: I want to say Yes, yes, the body is resistance, resistance, resistance. 

It’s precisely what I argue against in Untimely Bollywood (Duke UP, 2009). That the excess of the body should not be confused with the anthropocentric notion of resistance in cultural(ist) criticism (the excess of the body is a non-coinciding virtuality that potentializes the body, and thus is not a story about us). More, that the form of power necessary to turn the body into the privileged site of primordial resistance reminds one of Marcuse, and so of course also of Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis in History of Sexuality and many other texts. What do we make then of this resistance?

There is a correlated problem: that of the example. What is the status of the example in Hansen’s work. One thinks of Derrida’s analysis of the example in the law of genre, to wit that the example always comes to fulfill the theory, that the example is always already gridded by the theory. This is of course precisely what happens in Hansen’s work: the example comes to confirm the theory that has set the stage for its arrival–the theory frames the example…

Notes on G. Deleuze’s “Michel Foucault’s Main Concepts”

 

The Twin of History: Thought

 

 

These are notes that I hope to turn into a fully developed post. 

But to think is to reach a non-stratified material, somewhere between the layers, in the interstices. Thinking has an essential relation to history, but it is no more historical than it is eternal. It is closer to what Nietzsche calls the Untimely: to think the past against the present–which would be nothing more than a common place, pure nostalgia, some kind of return, if he did not immediately add: “in favor, I hope, of a time to come.” There is a becoming of thought which passes through historical formations, like their twin, but which does not resemble them. Thinking must come from the outside of thought, and yet at the same time be engendered from within–beneath the strata and beyond them. (241)

There is so much here, as always. To think is to join with processes of de-formation, of the pure tendency of a variable curvature. A function of correlated movements, structures, strata. And in the interstice, where formations communication with formations, where a patterning of force is just taking shape, there in the becoming of this between-the-layers we find the diagram. This diagrammatic thought is historical but not of history. It is time out of joint, something monstrous, still to come, something whose force lies in the dynamism of its mutations. 

 

Foucault’s untimely thinking discovers three axes: 1. strata as historical formations (archeology); 2. the outside as beyond (strategy), and 3. the inside as a substratum (genealogy). This is difficult for me, as I think Deleuze is relating Foucault’s method to A Thousand Plateaus as much as to anything Foucault ever wrote. So I want to pick apart slowly what Deleuze means by these three axes.