An Ontology of Sense?

* How does Deleuze’s theory of sense distinguish itself?
- How do we account for the absence of a discussion of sense after Logic of Sense?
- How is sense deployed into other concepts? We move from sense to order words, from denotation to collective assemblages of enunciations.
If sense is affect, then what is its ontological status?
- Is a “logic of sense” a consideration of the actualization of sense? Is then ontology corresponding with virtual singularities--that is, is logic concerned with the actual, the ontological with the virtual? A logic demands a world exists; an ontology supposes precosmic singularities (considered apart from its actualization.) Think of the Big Bang: as though that virtual singularity contained all the forces that would eventually compose the entire universe. Deleuze argues that if philosophy is only ontology, there can only be an ontology sense. If he’s able to map out an ontology of sense-- if he doesn’t resign himself to only a logic of sense, if he’s claimed that he’s made an ontology - then this is because an ontology corresponds with virtual singularities. A logic of sense is able to trace virtual singularities.
- Is sense a mobius strip? His logic of sense has to be corresponded with an ontology which can only be inferred by a counteractualization, as though logic were the mirror or screen in which we see our existences. We have to cross to the other side and infer the existence of an ontology through a coherent theory of sense. Does Deleuze give up on an ontology of sense? We can say he does but only on condition we understand ontology corresponding to the virtual!
We can only trace out acosmic preindividual singularities through a logic of sense. Ontology pre-exists a world: through an actualization of a world, you have logic, more--you have individuation. Ontology corresponds to the fractal nature of the singularities comprising a virtual transcendental field allowing for the conditions of possibility of individuation into logic. These pre-individual singularities need logic because there is a world, they comprise a world, they proliferate and individuate themselves--this corresponds to the fact that there is a logic. We have to trace the lines of flight beyond the actual to construct an ontological diagram. If there is an ontology of sense, then it can only be possible by mapping out the limits, the structure of the logic of sense. Because once we understand the structural nature of the logic, we can infer (or deduce) the ontological composition of preindividual forces.
If we can consider quarks or photons as acosmic elements, intensive singularities... Even stardust swirling around: it’s not about organs, it’s about organization. Chaos in the soul to give birth to a dancing star. When the world coheres and creates its milieu through autopoetic evolution and counter-formations, contents and expressions are differentiated through all the forms and substances. When we are confronted with the encounter with an object, we are confronted with the sense of the object, its logical individuation. The intensive differences that resonate through the object: these are ontological radiations. Democritus talked of atoms to resolve this issue of ontological consistency. Even Lucretius was not talking about logical individuation, but ontological consistency on the atomic scale.
Without making sense of the world, without breaking apart common sense and good sense, there can never be a truly ontological understand. We approach things through common and good sense, through the dominant modes of representation linked up to resemblance. The world--considered apart from its logic--is swirling with percepts and affects: with a logic we have an application of concepts. Through concepts the logical coordinates assembles a syntax of this same assembling; but the virtual doesn’t adhere, doesn’t acknowledge these constructions, just as it doesn’t recognize contradiction, because the virtual is not opposed to the impossible. Just the same as with the unconscious, in the impossible there is no negation. This is why the dark region of the unconscious, swirling with intensive differences, the Id is like the body without organs which comes to organize the super-Ego which navigates our constant struggle with differences.

1. Words (Semiotics)
Sausurre
Umberto Eco
Derrida, Of Grammatology
Hjelmslev
Pierce
2. Space (Politics / Science)
Bachelard
Kuhn
Lakatos
Feyerbend
Prigogine
Stengers
Serres
3. Infinity, Time (Religion / Mathematics)
Whitehead, Process and Reality
Bergson, Creative Evolution, Matter and Memory
Leibniz
Spinoza
Merleau-Ponty
4. Autopoesis (Machines)
Guattari
Varela
Ux’kull
5. Sense
Wittgenstein
Nietzsche
Deleuze

Vile'm Flusser (Philosophy of Photography: The Image)

Images are significant surfaces. This means that images signify, as well as make comprehensible as an abstraction, “something ‘out there’.” Images are reduced from “four dimensions of space and time” to “two surface dimensions.” (8)

Imagination is this specific ability to abstract surfaces out of space and time and to project them back into space and time. Imagination is the precondition for producing and decoding images. “The ability to encode phenomena into two-dimensional symbols and to read these symbols.” (8)

The significance of images is on the surface. A single glance remains superficial and doesn’t reconstruct the abstracted dimensions. One has to “allow one’s gaze to wander over the surface feeling the way as one goes” in order to enhance and deepen the significance. The path the gaze follows is “complex” and formed by the “structure of the image” and the “observer’s intentions.” (8) This is called ‘scanning’ and reveals the significance of the image. Therefore, it is a kind of synthesis between the intention manifested in the image and the intention belonging to the observer.

Images are not ‘denotative’ (unambiguous) complexes of symbols (like numbers, for example) but ‘connotative’ (ambiguous) complexes of symbols. Images provide space for interpretation. The space reconstructed by scanning is the space of mutual significance. The gaze produces specific relations between elements of the image. Scanning is thus a kind of eternal return: the gaze “can return to an element of the image it has already seen, and ‘before’ can come ‘after: the time reconstructed by scanning is an eternal recurrence of the same process.” (9)

The space and time peculiar to the image is none other than the world of magic. Within the space and time of the image, nothing is excluded; everything participates in a significant context. Moreover, this is a world where everything is repeated. The cyclical reality of the image is therefore structurally different from the linear world of history “in which nothing is repeated and in which everything has causes and will have consequences.” (9) He gives the example of a cock crowing at dawn to describe the difference: “In the historical world, sunrise is the cause of the cock’s crowing; in the magical one, sunrise signifies crowing and crowing signifies sunrise.” (9)

The significance of images is magical. The magical nature of the image has to be taken into account when we want to decode them. It’s wrong to look for a frozen event in images; “rather they replace events by states of things and translate them into scenes.”(9) The dialectic inherent to an image must be seen in the light of this magic, whose power lies in the superficial nature of the image.

Images are mediations between the world and human beings. We ‘ex-ist’: the world is not immediately accessible to us. Images are needed to make the world comprehensible. “But as soon as this happens, images come between the world and human beings.” (9-10) Although they are intended to be maps, they quickly turn into screens.

Instead of representing the world, images obscure it until human beings’ lives finally become a function of the images they create. We cease to decode images and instead project them still encoded into the world which (meanwhile) itself becomes like an image: “a context of scenes, of states of things.” (10) Our reality is magically restructured into a ‘global image scenario.’

This reversal of the function of the image can be called ‘idolatry.’ Flusser suggests we can see this even in the present day in the technical images which proceed to violent recode reality. “Essentially this is a question of ‘amnesia.’” (10) We forget we created the images to orient ourselves; once we can’t decode them anymore, our lives becomes a function of our own images, in other words...

Imagination has turned into hallucination. Flusser believes this is a recurring process. He cites the invention of linear writing as people “trying to remember the original intention behind the images. They attempted to tear down the screens showing the image in order to clear a path into the world behind it. Their method was to tear the elements of the image (pixels) from the surface and arrange them into lines... They thus transcoded the circular time of magic into the linear time of history.” (10) This transcoding was the simultaneous origin of both historical consciousness and history.

From then on, historical consciousness is ranged against magical consciousness. This is struggle which has not died down; Flusser cites “the stand taken against images by the Jewish prophets and the Greek philosophers (particularly Plato.)” (10-11) This struggle of writing against the image runs throughout history.

With writing, a new ability was born called ‘conceptual thinking’ which consisted of abstracting lines from surfaces, that is, producing and decoding them. Conceptual thinking is more abstract than imaginative thinking. All dimensions are abstracted from phenomena, except straight lines: thus with writing, we take “one step further back from the world.” (11)

Texts do not signify the world; they signify the images they tear up. Decoding texts just means discovering the images they signify. Texts intend to explain images, while concepts intend to make ideas comprehensible. “Texts are a metacode of images.”(11)

Texts explain images in order to explain them away, but images also illustrate texts to make them comprehensible. This explains the paradox that the more science struggles against ideologies, it absorbs ideas and becomes itself ideological; just as the more Christianity struggled against Paganism, the more it absorbed the images and itself became pagan. “Conceptual thinking admittedly analyzes magical thought in order to clear it out of he way, but magical thought creeps into conceptual thought so as to bestow significance on it.” (11-12)

Images become more and more conceptual as texts become more and more imaginative. In the course of the dialectical process, conceptual and imaginative thought mutually reinforce one another. As an example of an extreme of conceptual abstraction he suggests we consider computer images, which makes even more sense with modern advances in data compression. At the other end, it is in scientific texts that we can expect to find the greatest imagination. (12)

Behind ones back, the hierarchy of codes is overturned. Texts, originally a metacode of images, have themselves as metacode. But, just like images, writing itself is a mediation and is subject to the same internal dialectic. Writing is torn apart by internal conflict.

If it is the intention of writing to mediate between human beings and their images, it can also obscure images instead of representing them. Even more disturbing, perhaps, is the insinuation of writing itself between human beings and their images. We can’t decode our texts anymore, or reconstruct the signified images.

If the texts become incomprehensible as images, human beings’ lives become a function of their texts. He coins the term ‘textolatory’ to denote a state of hallucination similar to idolatry, of ‘faithfulness to the text’ (in quotes in the text.) He gives two examples: Christianity again, and Marxism.

Texts are projected into the world out there, and the world is experienced, known and evaluated as a function of these texts. The example here is the scientific discourse: any idea we have of the scientific universe which is signified by these texts becomes unsound, since any ideas we form about scientific discourses have been wrongly decoded. “Anyone who tries to imagine anything, for example, using the equation of the theory of relativity, has not understood it. But as, in the end, all concepts signify ideas, the scientific, incomprehensible universe is an ‘empty’ universe.” (12-13)

Textolatry reached a critical level in the nineteenth century. With it, argues Flusser, history came to an end. “History...is a progressive transcoding of images into concepts, a progresive disenchantment (taking the magic out of things), a progressive process of comprehension.” (13) But, again, if texts become incomprehensible, there’s nothing left to explain: history’s over.

During the crisis of texts, technical images were invented. They were invented to make texts comprehensible once more. They place texts under a magic spell “to overcome the crisis of history.” (13)

Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (Parts I, II)

Anti-Oedipus 1: Desiring-Machines
For every organ-machine, an energy machine (1).
Schizophrenia and the time before the man-nature dichotomy/split (1).
Nature lived as process of production (2).
Oedipus presupposes a fantastic repression of desiring-machines (3).
The schizophrenic experiences not nature, but nature as a process of production (3).
Production is immediately consumption and a recording process, without any sort of mediation (4).
The recording process and consumption directly determine production, but within the production process itself (4).
Production as process:
Production of production—actions and passions
Production of recording processes—of the distribution and of co-ordinates that serve as points of reference
Production of consumption—sensual pleasures, anxieties, and pain (4).
Man as the eternal custodian of the machines of the universe (4).
Schizophrenia (or the unconscious) does not distinguish between producer-product (5).
Desiring-machines are always binary machines (5). [Probably due to the co-existence of paranoic (repulsive) machines and miraculating (attractive) machines—in order to create the identifications of the celibate machine—more on this later.]
Productive or connective syntheses: and…and…and (5).
Flow-producing machines couple with organ-machines that interrupts the flow (5).
Desire couples flows, causes the currents to flow, flows itself, and breaks the flows (5).
The object presupposes the continuity of a flow; every flow causes the fragmentation of the object (6).
Schizophrenia (or the unconscious) also does not distinguish between product/producing (6).
Production is always something ‘grafted onto’ the product—desiring-production is the production of production (6).
Schizophrenic as universal producer (7).
Levi-Strauss’s bricolage and schizophrenia—the schizo shows an indifference to the tools at hand and the goal of the project; there is only the drive as anti-teleological principle of desire (7).
Bricolage works with whatever is at hand—a limited set of rules, and a finite and heterogeneous set of tools (7).
Product/producing unity allows for D+G to talk about “an enormous undifferentiated object” (7).
Nirvana and the view that it would be better if there had never been machines or connections (7).
The body suffers from being organized in a triangulated fashion (8).
The full BwO is the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable (8).
Desiring-machines only work when they break down and work continually by breaking down (8).
BwO is nonproductive but is produced as the identity of producing-product in connective synth (8).
BwO is the body without an image (8).
Full BwO is the realm of antiproduction—the connective syntheses couple production w/ antiproduction (8).
2. The Body without Organs (BwO)
In order to resist linked, connected, and interrupted flows, the BwO sets up a counterflow of amorphous, undifferentiated fluid (9).
Repulsions of machines by the BwO (9).
Paranoic machine—BwO repels the machines that attempt to break in and persecute it (9).
BwO invests a counterinside or a counteroutside—paranoic machines occur when the BwO cannot tolerate the desiring-machine’s connections (9).
The socius as a full BwO that forms a surface where all production is recorded, whereupon the entire process appears to emanate from this recording surface (10).
Capital is the BwO of the capitalist being—it produces surplus value as it (seems to miraculously) reproduce itself (10).
Machines and agents cling so closely to capital that their functioning seems miraculated by it (11).
Some kind of full body—either the earth, the body of the despot, or the body of capital (11).
BwO (as capital) now falls back on desiring-production (11).
Attraction or miraculating machines vs. repulsion and paranoic machines—these two coexist, but the paranoic machines attempt to de-miraculate the organs (11).
“But the essential thing is the establishment of an enchanted recording or inscribing surface that arrogates to itself all the productive forces and all the organs of production, and that acts as a quasi-cause by communicating the apparent movement (the fetish) to them” (11-12).
There is a movement from libido (connective synthesis) to an energy of Numen (disjunctive synthesis) that has to do with the divine (miraculating) nature of disjunctive energy (13).
The full BwO is produced as antiproduction to keep itself from having any sort of triangulation imposed on it (15).
The schizo has his own recording code that does not coincide with the social code (15).
Thus he scrambles all the codes, never recording the same event in the same way (15).
3. The Subject and Enjoyment
Production of recording is produced by the production of production (16).
Recording is followed by consumption, but the production of the consumption is produced in and through the production of recording (16).
There is a discerning of this (strange) subject on the recording surface (16).
There is everywhere a reward in the form of becoming or in the production of an avatar (16).
Libido (energy of production)àNumen (energy of recording)àVoluptas (energy of consumption) (16).
Let us term celibate machine that which forms a new alliance between the desiring-machine and the BwO so as to give birth to a new humanity or a glorious organism (17).
The subject is produced as a residuum or confuses himself with this third productive machine (conjunctive synthesis) and with the residual reconciliation that it brings about (17).
Critique of conjunctive synthesis (So it’s…!) (18).
Conjunctive synthesis as autoerotic or automatic pleasure (18).
Delirium and hallucination are secondary in relation the really primary emotion (18).
Pure intensities come from repulsion and attraction and form the opposition of these forces (19).
All intensities are positive in relationship to the 0 intensity that constitutes the full BwO (19).
These oppositions of the forces of attraction and repulsion produce an open series of intensive elements, all of them positive, that are never an expression of the final equilibrium of a system, but consist, rather, of an unlimited numbed of stationary, metastable states through which the subject passes (19).
BwO is an egg…the development of the subject along particular trajectories and vectors (19).
Points of disjunction on the BwO form circles that converge on the desiring-machines (20).
The subject is forever decenteredàparanoic vs. miraculating = celibateà the subject (20).
Klossowski, the celibate machine of the Eternal Return (21).
Homo natura = Homo historia in the schizophrenic process (21).
4. A Materialist Psychiatry
Truly materialist psychiatry has a twofold task: introducing desire into mechanism, introducing production into desire (22).
Trinary schema of schizo—dissociation/autism/being-in-the-world—this indicates a false understanding of the schizophrenic process/phenomenon (22-23).
These three concepts reintroduce the ego through the body-image—the final avatar of the soul (23).
The schizo is past worrying about individualization and considers it a false problem (23).
Freud doesn’t like schizos—they are too much like philosophers—triangulation doesn’t stick (23).
Analytical relation between drives and symptoms—the symbol/symbolized (23).
Oedipus makes a classical theatre out of the unconscious as a factory (24).
Unconscious as representation or expression versus units of production and productive unconscious (24).
Product must be related to the process (24).
Nature = Industry, Nature = History (25).
Kant—the reality of the object is a psychic reality because it is produced by desire (25).
Kant (and psychoanalysis) reduces desiring-production to a production of fantasy, and so is content with exploiting to the fullest the idealist principle that defines desire as lack (26).
If desire produces, its product is real (26).
Desire is the set of passive syntheses that engineer partial objects, flows, and bodies, and that function as unites of production (26).
Desire does not lack an object—it lacks a subject (or fixed subject) unless there is a repression (26).
The objective being of desire is the Real in and of itself (26-27).
What is missing is the objectivity of man (27).
Spinoza in the garb of a Neapolitan revolutionary (28).
Lack is created by society—footnote on Sartre’s use of scarcity as initial premise (28).
Social production is desiring-production under determinate conditions (29).
What needs to be explained is that the masses, at some level, wanted fascism (29).
Fantasy is always group fantasy (30).
Great socialist utopias as counterinvestments whereby revolutionary desire is plugged into the existing social field (31).
Artist causes desiring-machines to undermine technical machines (32).
Technical machine not a cause but an index of a general form of social production (32).
The socius may be the Earth, the body of the Despot, or the body of Money (33).
Capitalism faced with decoding—born of the encounter of two flows—money and free labor (33).
Substituting money for the very notion of a code promotes an axiomatic of abstract quantities (33).
The more the capitalist machine deterritorializes, the more the government reterritorializes to absorb surplus value (35).
Eschatology of materialist psychiatry (35).
5. The Machines
The hyle (flows of matter) as ideal continuity—machine of a machine (36).
The law of production of production links all machines back to other machines (36).
Every machine has a code (38).
Orchid’s surplus code allows for the wasp to tap into and works for the benefit of both species (39).
One vocation of the sign is to produce desire (39).
6. The Whole and Its Parts
Multiplicity is beyond the One and the Many (42).
We no longer believe in a primordial totality or a colorless dialectic of evolution (42).
Totality as the whole at the periphery that does not totalize, but is added as a separate part (42).
The Whole that does not totalize but establishes paths of communication between noncommunicating vessels (43).
BwO is a non-totalized totality (43).
Mechanism and vitalism both fail to address the key issue (43).
Partial objects and nonpersonal hyle (flow), and not global persons (ego formation) (44).
Jung + Freud on the psychoanalyst as father-figure or as magician-figure (46).
“It must be granted either that sexuality is sublimated or neutralized in an through social (and metaphysical) relations, in the form of an analytic ‘afterward’; or else that these relations bring into play a nonsexual energy, for which sexuality has merely served as the symbol of an anagogical ‘beyond’” (46).
Child’s recording process and the process of feedback (from the child) (48).
The unconscious is an orphan (49).
Psychoanalysis perpetuates repression (interminable!) (50).

The Imperialism of Oedipus
Structural interpretation and Oedipus as universal, Catholic symbol (52).
Freud wants to get rid of Oedipus for biological realism (54).
Oedipus biunivocalizes (triangulates, forces an exclusive disjunctive synthesis) (54).
Expressive or productive unconscious? (54).
Psychoanalyst as theatre director and not engineer of the unconscious (54).
Three Texts of Freud
Freud reduces the group to individual—Freud affirms only an exclusive disjunction (54).
Resignation to Oedipus and castration (59).
The One of negative theology, exclusive series (60).
Castration of the unconscious—but the unconscious knows nothing of Oedipus or lack (61).
What are the operations that inject the unconscious with beliefs? (61).
Group fantasy—fucking the socius, wanting to be fucked by the socius (62).
Group = symbolic; individual = imaginary.
Learning to experience institutions themselves as mortal (63).
Group fantasy includes the disjunctions—everyone passes into the body of the other on the BwO (63).
Klossowski and the singular state vs. the gregarious state (63).
Formulation of a subject-group vs. a subjugated group (64) [This can be related properly to the concepts of the molar and molecular in D+G, but also with Sartre’s formulations of serialized groups vs. groups-in-fusion (Critique of Dialectical Reason)].
3 factors—castration/quantitative libido/nonlocalizable resistance (65).
The viscous vs. the liquid libido (does it stick or does it slip?) (65).
What must be distinguished are qualitative flows of libido (differences in kind!) (66).
Flows ooze, traverse the (Oedipal) triangle, breaking apart its vertices (67).
Criteria for an Oedipal cure? Contradictory results (67).
Falsification in order to produce the schizophrenic as identity (plagued with autism) (68).
Connective Syntheses
There are no contradictions in the unconscious (or BwO), only degrees of humor [black humor as that which allows contradictions to coexist and intensify rather than cancel out] (68).
In contrast to either/or exclusions, there is the either…or…or of the combinations and permutations where the differences amount to the same without ceasing to be differences (affirmative/inclusive disjunctive synthesis) (69-70).
Opposition between two types of connective syntheses—global and specific (ego formation, global ‘persons’) vs. partial and nonspecific (flows of desire on the BwO) (70).
Global persons (Oedipus) do not exist prior to the prohibitions that weigh on them and constitute them (70).
The personal material of transgression and the person himself do not pre-exist prohibition (71). [Excursus: this is the only place I have located an instance of ‘transgression.’ Here it is perhaps necessary to distinguish between transcendence and transgression. In the former, the emphasis is placed on the teleological role that involves a relation between system formations (the triangulation that posits Oedipus as the alpha and omega)—(less crudely, transcendence goes beyond). However, there is no beyond to transgression—instead, transgression is created retroactively as the effect of the Oedipal ego formation that occurs due to a constituting law or prohibition. According to Paul, it is the sin in me that transgresses—I do that which I hate because the law designates that which constitutes transgression as such. Call me out if this is vague].
Prohibition displaces itself because it displaces desire (71).
Formation of global persons alters the synthesis of production (71).
Two steps of Oedipus: mother as the site of differentiation and sister as exchange: the logic of 3+1 where the sister serves as that which must be prohibited in order for the subject to constitute his own triangle outside the family (with its independent vertices) and the sister as that which must be kept open for exchange with the outside social field (allowing for the sibling to create her independent Oedipal triangle as well). Thus the +1 functions as that which allows for the triangular structure as such to be disseminated and transmitted across the socius (71).
Thus the point is to reproduce the triangular form, creating new triangles (71).
BwO and the dissolution of biunivocalization and triangulation (72).
Imposing an exclusive disjunction on the sexes (Lacanism) (72).
Phallus or law as transcendent, absent signifier (73).
Oedipusà3+1àthe One being the phallus (73).
Despotic signifier—money as detachable chain is converted into capital as detached object, which exists only in the fetishist view of stocks and lacks (73).
Not to deny Oedipus, but to deny that Oedipus is produced by the unconscious (74).
Teleology of psychoanalysisàtranscendence of psychoanalysisàfirst paralogism (74).
Kant and the criteria immanent to understanding a Transcendental Unconscious [transcendental meaning against transcendence and asserting principles of immanent syntheses of the unconscious] (74-75).
Disjunctive Synthesis
Familial triangulation gives the co-ordinates of differentiation to the ego in regard to generation, sex and vital state (75).
Kant’s God as master of disjunctive synthesis (76).
Inclusive disjunction (schizo) vs. exclusive (Oed) (76).
The schizo is dead or alive but not both at once, but each of the two as the terminal point of a distance over which he glides (76).
The schizo is not neo-Hegelian (76).
Schizo as transsexual, trans-alivedead, trans-parentchild (77).
Schizophrenic God has so little to do with the God of religion, even though they are related to the same (disjunctive) syllogism (77).
Affirm the distance and traverse the space between terms in an inclusive disjunction (77).
The schizo liberates a raw genealogical material (78).
God as the energy of recording—paranoic/miraculating (78).
Immanent and transcendent use of disjunctive synthesis (78).
Oedipus creates the differentiation and the undifferentiated (78-79).
Bateson (“Towards a Theory of Schizophrenia,” Behaviorial Science vol.1 1956), Russell and the double bind as oedipalizing force—second paralogism, double bind as the whole of Oedipus (80).
Psychoanalysis and policing—Marx and the Jewish question (81).
Oedipus and undecidability (in the mathematical sense) (81).
Schizoanalysis de-oedipalizes the unconscious (81).
Turning the analytical machine into a part of the revolutionary machine (81).
The true difference is between the real machinic element and the structural whole of the Imaginary-Symbolic (83).
Lacan, despotic signifier, problem of disciples following transcendent lack (83).
5. Conjunctive Synthesis
We believe in a biochemistry of schizophrenia (in conjunction with the biochemistry of drugs) that will be progressively more capable of determining the nature of this egg and the distribution of a field-gradient-threshold (84).
Intensive emotion as the common root and the principle of differentiation of delirium and hallucinations (84).
The first thing distributed on the BwO are races, cultures and their gods—the schizo participates in history—hallucinates and raves universal history—All delirium is racial but not necessarily racist (85).
Races and cultures designate zones of intensity, fields of potential—Phenomena of individuation and sexualization are produced within these fields—we never stop migrating, we become other individuals as well as other sexes, departing becomes as easy as being born or dying (65).
Artaud—Nietzsche—every name in history is I (66).
Theory of proper names is not concerned with representation but with a class of ‘effects,’ effects that are not a mere dependence on causes, but the occupation of a domain and the operation of a system of signs (66).
D+G:
But simulation must be understood in the same way as we spoke of identification. It expresses those nondecomposable distances always enveloped in the intensities that divide into one another while changing their form. If identification is nomination, a designation, then simulation is the writing corresponding to it, a writing that is strangely polyvocal, flush with the real. It carries the real beyond its principle to the point where it is effectively produced by the desiring-machine. The point where the copy ceases to be a copy in order to become the Real and its artifice. To seize an intensive real as produced in the coextension of nature and history, to ransack the Roman Empire, the Mexican cities, the Greek gods, and the discovered continents so as to extract from them this always-surplus reality, and to form the treasure of the paranoic tortures and celibate glories—all the pogroms of history, that’s what I am, and all the triumphs too, as if a few simple univocal events could be extricated from this extreme polyvocity: such is the ‘histrionism’ of the schizophrenic, according to Klossowski’s formula, the true program for a theater of cruelty, the mis-en-scene of a machine to produce the real (87).
D+G again:
Moreover, the pretender Richemont’s stroke of genius is not simply that he ‘takes into account’ Louis XVII, or that he takes other pretenders into account by denouncing them as fake. What is so ingenious is that he takes other pretenders into account by assuming them, by authenticating them—that is to say, by making them too into states through which he passes: I am Louis XVII, but I am also Hervagault and Mathurin Bruneau, who claimed to be Louis XVII. Richemont doesn’t identify with Louis XVII, he lays claim to the premium due the person who traverses all the singularities of the series converging around the machine for kidnapping Louis XVII. There is no ego at the center, any more than there are persons distributed on the periphery. Nothing but a series of singularities in the disjunctive network, or intensive states in the conjunctive tissue, and a transpositional subject moving full circle, passing through all the states, triumphing over some as over his enemies, relishing others as his allies, collecting everywhere the fraudulent premium of his avatars. Partial object: a well situated scar—ambiguous besides—is better proof than all the memories of childhood that the pretender lacks. The conjunctive synthesis can therefore be expressed: ‘So I am the king! So the kingdom belongs to me!’ But this me is merely the residual subject that sweeps the circle and concludes a self from its oscillations on the circle (88).
D+G: “The law of the double bind operates relentlessly, ruthlessly, flinging us from one pole to the other, in such a way that what is foreclosed in the Symbolic must reappear in the Real in a hallucinatory form (90).
Stimuli are not organizers, but inductors (91).
Parental figures are indifferent inductors and the true organizer is elsewhere—on the side of what is induced, not on that of the inductor (92).
Foucault and the critique of psychoanalysis—healthy triangulation and perverted triangles (93).
If the psychotic escapes Oedipalization, this only means that he is doubly embedded and that there requires a differential calculus as such to analyze the organization of an extended familialism (93).
Bergson represents an opening up of the closed system and inscribing within that system a temporal dimension of duration that is irreducible and nonclosed (96).
Thus, Oedipus is open to a social field—not 3+1, but 4+n (96).
This leads to a poorly closed triangle, a porous or seeping triangle whose vertices are in danger of exploding—father and mother exist only as fragments and are never organized into a structure (96-97).
D+G:
Schizophrenia or desiring-production is the boundary between the molar organization and the molecular multiplicity of desire; this limit of deterritorialization must now pass into the interior of the molar organization, and it must be applied to a factitious and subjugated territoriality. We are now able to surmise what Oedipus signifies: it displaces the limit, it internalizes the limit. Rather a society of neurotics than one successful schizophrenic who has not been made autistic. Oedipus, the incomparable instrument of gregariousness, is the ultimate private and subjugated territoriality of European man. (Moreover the displaced, exorcised limit of border shifts to the interior of Oedipus, between its two poles) (102).
The opposition between the Great Man and the Crowd—Hitler as oedipal subject or German crowd as oedipalized mass (102).
Oedipus is a means of integration into the group (103).
D+G again:
There is therefore a segregative use of the conjunctive syntheses of the unconscious, a use that does not coincide with divisions between classes, although it is an incomparable weapon in the service of a dominating class: it is this use that brings about the feeling of ‘indeed being one of us,’ of being part of a superior race threatened by enemies from outside [This notion corresponds to Zizek’s formulations of racism, insofar as, for Zizek and Lacan, what is always despised is the manner in which the Other enjoys differently from me—or it is because we are under the illusion that the Other has a more direct or original connection with the Thing or objet a] (103).
For Lacan, the segregative use of the conjunctive synthesis is a precondition for Oedipus (104).
D+G on ideology:
It is not a question of ideology. Thereis an unconscious libidinal investment of the social field that coexists, but does not necessarily coincide, with the preconscious investments, or with what the preconscious investments ‘ought to be.’ That is why, when subjects, individuals, or groups act manifestly counter to their class interests—when they rally to the interests and ideals of a class that their own objective situation should lead them to combat—it is not enough to say: they were fooled, the masses have been fooled. It is not an ideological problem, a problem of failing to recognize, or of being subject to, an illusion. It is a problem of desire, and desire is part of the infrastructure. Preconscious investments are made, or should be made, according to the interests of the opposing classes. But unconscious investments are made according to positions of desire and uses of synthesis, very different from the interests of the subject, individual or collective, who desires (104).
D+G on the disintegration of Oedipus:
There again is the question of an intense potential for investment and counterinvestment in the unconscious. Oedipus disintegrates because its very conditions have disintegrated. The nomadic and polyvocal use of the conjunctive syntheses is in opposition to the segregative and biunivocal use. Delirium has something like two poles, racist and racial, paranoiac-segregative and schizonomadic. And between the two, ever so many subtle, uncertain shiftings where the unconscious itself oscillates between its reactionary charge and its revolutionary potential. Even Schreber finds himself to be the Great Mongol when he breaks through the Aryan segregation. Whence the ambiguity in the texts of great authors, when they develop the theme of races, as rich in ambiguity as destiny itself. Here schizoanalysis must unravel the thread. For reading a text is never a scholarly exercise in search of what is signified, still less a highly textual exercise in search of a signifier. Rather it is a productive use of the literary machine, a montage of desiring-machines, a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force (105-106).

Debord: Society of the Spectacle Notes (Part 1)

Separation Perfected
But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence…illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.
--Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity
Feuerbach—copy/original—simulacrum—Deleuze and Baudrillard?
Accumulation of spectacles—"All that once was directly lived has become mere representation" (12).
Detached images enter into a common stream—partial aspects of reality congeal into a pseudo-world set apart as object of contemplation/autonomous image where deceit deceives itself--autonomous movement of non-life.
Three aspects of the spectacle—society itself/parts of society/means of unification. This is the place of false consciousness because it is where all consciousness converges--it is merely the official language of generalized separation [Badiou, language of the state of the situation, field of knowledge that is encyclopedic in its domination--a truth pierces the whole of knowledge by piercing a hole in knowledge, and, shall we say, causes an irruption to take place within the "official language," thereby reconstituting a counter-officiality, a counter-fidelity for the revolutionary reorganization of the molar state of the situation via molecular flows of singular multiplicities that are always already subtracted from the count in an endless proliferation of simulacra--thus the schizophrenic scrambles the codes and disorganizes the hierarchy where beginning and end, cause and effect lose their mark and cease to create limits--or at least, limits that work--so the schizo breaks through the system, showing it to be what it tries to deceive us it isn't--an open system--Oedipus is open to the social field! The openness of the system requires for a new logic of the distribution of singularities on the potential field of forces that animates desire's social fluxion and function (a flunction?). This new logic would have to take into account the affirmative, disjunctive synthesis that forces [shall I risk it?] value and sense to be determined only through the traversal of the distances between and among singular points (thus constituting a non-totalizing Whole that becomes added to the set as a part itself--much like the notion of the power set--the power set as non-totalized Whole allows for the communication of noncommunicating vessels--in effect, what D+G are describing here in Anti-Oedipus is a network that is not considered as a One. This network is added onto the parts as an excessive part--it is this excess that escapes that count-as-one, and it is this excess that constiututes the singular points of intensity on the BwO. But back to the open set--the BwO as open set--affirms what Deleuze will say in the Logic of Sense: "circle qua circle is neither a particular circle, nor a concept represented in an equation the general terms of which must take on a particular value in each instance; it is rather a differential system to which an emission of singularities corresponds" (123). This logic would lead us to conclude that the fields of potential and thresholds of intensities that are all involved with becomings on the BwO are to be opposed to the particularity of the formations of a global person that psychoanalysis constantly refers to (in its ego-obsessed variants). The externality of desire--its external relation to the Real, constituting it as such--forces the symbolic structures of Oedipus and spectacle to succumb to an openness that threatens the closed transmission of triangulating forms. Whereas in the triangle, Oedipalized subject is confined to a vertex, a mere corner--in the circle qua circle, the schizophrenic process flings the subject from any fixed (or repressed) position and endlessly de-centers the subject through a succession of states along a circle that must be conceived in terms of differential relations and not in terms of a fixed radius with particular values! To stress this last point, we have to assert that the formation of a circle must be infinite in progress, and thus errant too; in effect, there can be no telos of the circle, for a teleology would posit an end goal and purpose for the BwO-circle qua circle-will to power breaks apart the limits, rips open the vertices of the triangle, creating the real circle-square (Oedipus is not contradicted or neutralized, but instead both intensities coexist as operative forces--molecular and molarizing) Or does it instead proliferate as an endless number of concentric circles that rudely coexist--constituting the socius as BwO?].
Spectacle is a social relationship mediated by images
It is not deliberate—a weltanschauung or worldview transformed into an objective force.
In its totality—spectacle is the outcome and goal of the dominant mode of production—heart of the spectacle’s real unreality—celebration of a choice already made in the sphere of production—thus as consummation the spectacle serves as a total justification of the system in form and content. The permanent presence of that justification is due to the fact that “governs almost all time spent outside the production process itself” (13).
Separation—reality/image—Why does the spectacle appear as the apparent goal of social practice? The language of the spectacle is made from signs of the dominant mode of production—these signs are the ultimate end-products of that organization [does this start to sound like D+G and the critique of biunivocalization and linearization that occurs through the triangular nature of Oedipus?]
The spectacle is a product of real activity—we incorporate the spectacular order and lend it support—the reciprocal alienation is the essence and underpinning of society.
A world really turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood.
Spectacle as a visible negation of life—it has invented a visual form for itself [The virtual/visual intersection of Debord and Deleuze?]
The spectacle expresses the total practice of one particular economic and social formation; it is that formation’s agenda.
Spectacle as enormous positivity; monopolization of the realm of appearances.
The spectacle globalizes the empire of modern passivity
For the spectacle as perfect image of the ruling economic order, ends are nothing and development is all—though the spectacle only desires to develop itself.
There is an ever-growing mass of image objects [partial objects?], ‘a general gloss on the rationality of the system’ (16).
The spectacle acts as a faithful mirror held up to the production of things and as a distorting objectification of the producers
Being--Having--Appearing to have—individual reality is not, it is only through the social/symbolic order [Again D+G, but with an inverse emphasis: for D+G, schizoanalysis must focus on group fantasies—precisely the spectacle. For Debord, however, it seems that he’s criticizing the gregarious nature of conspicuous consumption as that which forces us more and more into the logic of the spectacle, which entails that we purchase an identity (that is socially legitimated) in the fashion of a consumption of images].
Mere images are transformed into beings; spectacle as opposite of dialogue—representation takes on an independent existence.
So far from realizing philosophy, the spectacle philosophizes reality, and turns the material life of everyone into a universe of speculation (17). [Notice here that Debord produces a common rhetorical (in a non-pejorative sense) move that is usually referred to as a chiasmus—it is the disjunctive power of the genitive!}.
Philosophy is at once the power of alienated thought and the thought of alienated power—never been able to emancipate itself from theology. Material reconstruction of the religious illusion—technological version of the exiling of human powers in a world beyond.
The spectacle is the bad dream and guardian of that sleep.
This ability is due to a self-cleavage and self-contradictoriness inherent to modern practice.
Specialization of power at the root of the spectacle. It acts as a diplomatic representative of hierarchical society—it is thus the most archaic form of social power.
One-way communication—social cleavage/division—spectacle as a second Nature that imposes its own law.
Separation and the spectacle—religious contemplation and the social division of labor—power garbed in a mythical order. Ancient society/modern society—spectacle is about what society can deliver—what is permitted, not what is possible—spectacle as a specious form of the sacred—how to reunite the separation? This is the communist question [Excursus: This reminds me of Levinas’s reconstruction of a desacralized religion that understands that devious forms of power will persist unless we destroy the violence of the sacred].
Economic system founded on separation—proletarianization of the world
Inactivity is in thrall of production—it is of the rationality of production—within the spectacle, all activity and freedom is banned—‘liberation from work’ is false.
Isolation underpins technology; all goods proposed by the spectacular system reinforce the isolation.
Spectacle divides the world into two parts—self-representation of the world and superior to the world—it also unites what’s separate, but only in its separateness.
The more he contemplates, the less he lives—he recognizes his needs in the images of needs, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires—the spectacle’s externality—someone else represents his own gestures to him—the spectator feels at home nowhere.
Workers produce a force independent of themselves—the surplus that is generated by the producers is felt as an abundance of dispossession (23). All time, all space, becomes foreign to them as their own alienated products accumulate. The spectacle is a map of this new world
The spectacle manufactures alienation as its concrete function—if something grows with the self-movement of the economy, it is alienation.
Though he is separated from his product, more produces the world in ever detail—thus he is more and more drastically cut off from a life that is his own creation.
The spectacle is the image that arises when capital accumulates to a certain point [This point can be related to D+G’s theory of the recording surface—capital miraculates a spectacle that serves as a fetish in the sense that the images of capital come to mediate the molecular flows; moreover, the socius comes to impose means of orienting our bodies in conjunction with the operator-word-images that dominate our social interactions. More simply put, the BwO is the body without an image—images being that which strives to promote itself from the rank of a principle of induction to that of a principle of organization and that around which the BwO ought to organize itself. It is in this sense that we should understand Oedipus or Oedipal triangulation as a means of imposing an image on the BwO, and when we assert that one pole of the schizophrenic process is the creation of paranoic machines that repel these images from connecting, we truly begin to highlight the schizophrenic process as a means for radically revolutionizing the socius and the forms of social relationship that follow from the logic of its mediation by the spectacle.]

2. The Commodity as Spectacle
The commodity can only be understood in its undistorted essence when it becomes the universal category of society as a whole. Only in this context does the reification produced by commodity relations assume decisive importance both for the objective evolution of society and for the stance adopted by men towards it. Only then does the commodity become crucial for the subjugation of men’s consciousness to the forms in which this reification finds expression…As labor is progressively rationalized and mechanized man’s lack of will is reinforced by the way in which his activity becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative.
--Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness
35. The self-movement of the spectacle arrogates to itself everything that in human activity exists in a fluid state so as to possess it in a congealed form—being the negative expression of living value, it has become exclusively abstract value.
36. Commodity fetishism is the domination of society by perceptible and imperceptible images—the perceptible world is replaced by a set of images that is superior to the world yet impose themselves as eminently perceptible.
37. World of the commodity rules over all lived experiences.
38. Commodity form as self-equivalent and exclusively quantitative.
39. However, it is still subject to the qualitative—the spectacle must eventually break the bounds of its own abundance.
40. Development of the forces of production is the real unconscious history that has built and modified the conditions of the existence of human groups—human labor into labor-as-commodity after the ‘problem of survival is solved’—Economic growth liberates from the struggle of survival, but we must be liberated from the liberators. An abundance of commodity relations can be no more than an augmented survival.
41. Political economy as the dominant science and the science of domination.
42. Spectacle corresponds to the historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life. The whole of labor force as the total commodity must be returned in fragmentary form to a fragmentary individual completely cut off from the active forces of production. The science of domination is then broken down into sociology, applied psychology, cybernetics, and semiology which oversee the self-regulation of every phase of the process.
43. Perfected denial of man—worker transformed into consumer.
44. Spectacle is a permanent opium war—augmented survival itself belongs to the realm of dispossession: it may gild poverty, but it cannot transcend it.
45. Automation, capable of abolishing labor, must conserve labor as commodity—Thus new forms of employment must be created—the rise of the tertiary and service sector and the necessity for reintegrating newly redundant labor—the factitiousness of needs associated with the commodities on offer calls out a whole battery of reserve forces (for the production and satisfaction of the new pseudo-need).
46. Process of exchange became indistinguishable from utility, thereby placing use value at the mercy of exchange value.
47. Falling rate of use value—real consumer as consumer of illusion—commodity as illusion and spectacle as its most general form.
48. Use value, at once implicit, must become explicit due to the pseudo-justification that a counterfeit life requires.
49. Spectacle as another facet of money, the abstract equivalent of all commodities—the totality of the commodity world is visible in one piece, as the general equivalent of whatever society as a whole can do—spectacle is money for contemplation only—it is the pseudo-use of life.
50. Capital de-centers itself, spreading to the periphery, where is assumes the form of tangible objects—society in its length and breadth as capital’s faithful portrait.
51. Economy’s triumph as independent spells its own doom because it unleashes forces that must destroy economic necessity. It must replace the satisfaction of primary human needs with a ceaseless development of pseudo-needs—all of which merely point to the pseudo-need of an autonomous economy to continue.
52. Where economic id was, there ego shall be—product of the subject out of the struggle that society embodies.
53. Consciousness of desire and the desire for consciousness constitute the project whose goal is the abolition of classes and the direct possession by the worker of every part of his activity.

Deleuze's Bergson (Part I)

Bergsonism: Intuition as Method
Intuition as method entails: 1. stating and creating problems; 2. discovery of genuine differences in kind; 3. apprehension of real time (duration) (14).
First rule: Apply the test of true and false to problems themselves. Condemn false problems and reconcile truth and creation at the level of problems (15).
We are wrong to believe that true and false only refer to solutions—the Schoolmaster gives problems that we are forced to solve, but the true freedom lies in a power to decide and constitute problems themselves (15).
For a speculative problem is solved as soon as it is properly stated [This sounds close to Wittgenstein and language-games] (15).
Discovery vs. invention—we must invent new ways of posing the problem (15).
The solution is what counts, but problems have the solutions they deserve depending on the terms in which they are stated (16).
The history of man is theoretically and practically the construction of problems (16).
Becoming conscious of that activity is like the conquest of freedom (16).
Complementary rule #1: False problems are of two sorts: ‘nonexistent problems’ that arise from the confusion of the ‘more’ and the ‘less’; and ‘badly stated’ questions, so defined because their terms represent badly analyzed composites (17).
Bergson’s analyses are famous:
In the first case, they consist in showing that there is not less, but more in the idea of nonbeing than that of being, in disorder than in order, in the possible than in the real. In the idea of nonbeing there is in fact the idea of being, plus a logical operation of generalized negation, plus the particular psychological motive for the operation (such as when a being does not correspond to our expectation and we grasp it purely as the lack, the absence of what interests us) (17)
[This quote reminds me of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.]
Again, Bergson complains:
We mistake the more for the less, we behave as though nonbeing existed before being, disorder before order and the possible before existence. As though being came to fill a void, order to organize a preceding disorder, the real to realize a primary possibility. Being, order or the existent are truth itself; but in the false problem there is a fundamental illusion, a ‘retrograde movement of the true,’ according to which being, order and the existent are supposed to precede themselves, or to precede the creative act that constitutes them, by projecting an image of themselves back into a possibility, a disorder, a nonbeing which are supposed to be primordial. This theme is a central one in Bergson’s philosophy: It sums up his critique of the negative and of negation, in all its forms as sources of false problems (18).
What Bergson will come to critique again and again is the determination to reduce quality to quantity, difference in kind to difference in degree:
Here again, Bergson’s analyses are famous: for example, the one in which he condemns intensity as such a composite. Whether the quality of the sensation is confused with the muscular space that corresponds to it, or with the quantity of the physical cause that produces it, the notion of intensity involves an impure mixture between determinations that differ in kind, so that the question ‘by how much does the sensation grow?’ always goes back to a badly stated problem. Likewise the problem of freedom, in which two types of ‘multiplicity’ are confused: that of terms juxtaposed in space and that of states which merge together in duration (18-19).
Negation is not added to the action but indicates a half-willing; negation is not added to what it denies but only indicates a weakness in the person who denies (19).
There are two or more irreducible orders (organism/mechanism) and problems arise when we retain only a general idea of order [rather than coextensive, coexisting orders] (19).
Thus the idea of disorder emerges from the idea of order as a badly analyzed composite (20).
Seeing nothing but difference in degree where there are differences in kind is the error common to science and metaphysics (20).
The illusion of false problems arises from Kant’s assertion that reason engenders not mistakes but illusions deep within itself for thousands of years (20).
Thus, in many ways we cannot dispel these illusions, only repress them (21).
The intelligence states problems in general, the instinct is the faculty for finding solutions, but only intuition as method distinguishes between true and false problems, even if this means driving the intelligence to turn against itself (21).
Second Rule: struggle against illusion: find true differences in kind or the articulations of the real (21).
Intuition as method is similar to Platonic division (22).
We mix space and time creating 4-dimensions, but we are unable to separate duration and extensity: same problem with perception—memory (22).
Intuition as method is similar to transcendental analysis: however, Intuition focuses on the conditions of the real and not with possible experiences (23).
Deleuze writes:
His fundamental criticism of metaphysics is that it sees differences in degree between a spatialized time and an eternity which it assumes to be primary (time as deterioration, relaxation or diminution of being…): All beings are defined on a scale of intensity, between the two extremes of perfection and nothingness. But he directs a similar criticism at science; there is no definition of mechanism other than that which invokes a spatialized time, according to which beings no longer present anything but differences of degree, of position, of proportion (23).
The brain does not manufacture representations, but only complicates the relationship between a received movement (excitation) and an executed movement (response) (24).
We only take from the object what interests us, and so we get not the object plus something, but the object minus something (24-25).
We perceive things where they are, perception puts us at once into matter, is impersonal, and coincides with the perceived object (25).
There cannot be a difference in kind between the faculty of the brain and the function of the core, between perception of matter and matter itself (25).
Affectivity gives the subject volume in space (beyond being simply a point). Recollections of memory link instants together and interpolate the past in the present. Memory again, in the form of a contraction of matter that makes the body something other than an instantaneous point, gives it a quality through duration (26).
Affectivity—recollection-memory—contraction-memory [let’s try to think these three together with connective—disjunctive—conjunctive (production, recording, consumption)].
Representation takes two directions that differ in kind—perception that puts us at once in matter and memory that puts us at once in mind (26).
Intuition allows us to go beyond the state of experience to the conditions of real experience:
Intuition leads us to go beyond the state of experience toward the conditions of experience…Bergson speaks of going “to seek experience at its source, or rather above that decisive turn, where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility, it becomes properly human experience.” Above the turn is precisely the point at which we finally discover differences in kind. But there are so man difficulties in trying to reach this focal point that the acts of intuition, which are apparently contradictory, have to be multiplied. Bergson, thus, sometimes speaks of a movement that is exactly appropriate to the experience, sometimes a broadening out, sometimes a tightening and narrowing. For, in the first place, the determination of each ‘line’ involves a sort of contradiction in which apparently diverse facts are grouped according to their natural affinities, drawn together according to their articulation. But, on the other hand, we push each line beyond the turn, to the point where it goes beyond our experience: an extraordinary broadening out that forces us to think a pure perception identical to the whole of matter, a pure memory identical to the totality of the past. It is in this sense that Bergson on several occasions compares the approach of philosophy to the procedure of infinitesimal calculus: When we have benefited in experience from a little light which shows us a line of articulation, all that remains is to extend it beyond experience—just as mathematicians reconstitute, with the infinitely small elements that they perceive of the real curve, ‘the curve itself stretching out into the darkness behind them’ (27).
The point is to open us up to the inhuman and the superhuman (durations which are inferior or superior to our own); to go beyond the human condition (28).
Real experience deals with pure percepts, and not with concepts (28).
Deleuze writes:
After we have followed the lines of divergence beyond the turn, these lines must intersect again, not at the point from which we started, but rather at a virtual point, at a virtual image of the point of departure, which is itself located beyond the turn in experience; and which finally gives us the sufficient reason of the thing, the sufficient reason of the composite, the sufficient reason of the point of departure. So that the expression ‘beyond the decisive turn’ has two meanings: First, it denotes the moment when the lines, setting out from an uncertain common point given in experience, diverge increasingly according to the differences in kind. Then, it denotes another moment when these lines converge again to give us this time the virtual image or the distinct reason of the common point. Turn and return. Dualism is therefore only a moment, which must lead to the re-formation of a monism. This is why, after the broadening out, a final narrowing follows, just as integration follows differentiation. ‘We have alluded elsewhere to those lines of fact, each one indicating but the direction of truth, because it does not go far enough: Truth itself, however, will be reached if two of them can be prolonged to the point where they intersect…In our opinion this method of intersection is the only one that can bring about a decisive advance in metaphysics’ (28-29).
Complementary rule #2: The real is not only that which is cut out (se decoupe) according to natural articulations or differences in kind; it is also that which intersects again (se recoupe) along paths converging toward the same ideal or virtual point (29).
Discussion of the problem of the immortality of the soul: this tends to be solved by a convergence of two different lines: that of an experience of memory and that of a quite different, mystical, experience (30).
The three lines that converge to form consciousness are even more complex: we must consider these lines as having qualities—thus a qualitative probablism. In order to understand the disarticulations of the real, we need to constitute a superior empiricism that is able to extend the lines beyond their turning points—conversely, in order to create a superior probablism, we have to plot the lines that converge in the creation of true and false problems (30) [This last part is the vaguest in the first chapter, and so it needs a lot of unpacking—what does the dualism empiricism/probablism produce?].
Third rule: State problems and solve them in terms of time rather than of space (31).
All the other dualisms of Bergson resonate with a primary dualism: duration/space (31).
Deleuze writes:
The division occurs between (1) duration, which ‘tends’ for its part to take on or bear all the differences in kind (because it is endowed with the power of qualitatively varying with itself), and (2) space, which never presents anything but differences of degree (since it is quantitative homogeneity) (31).
Thus there is not a qualitative division: the qualitative difference is entirely on one side (31).
Deleuze again: “on the one hand, the aspect of space, by which the thing can only ever differ in degree from other things and from itself (augmentation, diminution); and on the other hand, the aspect of duration, by which the thing differs in kind from all others and from itself (alteration) (31).
We must wait for the sugar to dissolve (in terms of Duration) to understand the alterations it undergoes as constituting its essence (32).
There are no differences in kind except in duration—while space is nothing other than the location, the environment, the totality of differences in degree (32).
Intuition is not duration itself. Intuition is rather the movement by which we emerge from our own duration, by which we make use of our own duration to affirm and immediately to recognize the existence of other durations, above or below us (33) [It is this notion of other durations, of a coexistence and coextension that traverses different modes of time or duration (thinking across ‘epochs’ or ‘ages’: Renaissance to Classicism to Romanticism to Victorianism to Modernism to Postmodernism all are unstable de/reterritorializations, and we also have to consider the coexistence of trends such as Dadaism, Futurism, Impressionism, etc.)].
Deleuze writes:
There are very varied general ideas that themselves differ in kind, some referring to objective resemblances in living bodies, others to objective resemblances in living bodies, others to objective identities in inanimate bodies, an others again to subjective demands in manufactured objects. But we are quick to form a general idea of all general ideas and to dissolve differences in kind in this element of generality (33).
Deleuze on Bergson:
The two major aspects of his evolution are the following: Duration seemed to him to be less and less reducible to a psychological experience and became instead the variable essence of things, providing the theme of a complex ontology…The absolute, said Bergson, has two sides (aspects): spirit imbued with metaphysics and matter known by science…science is part of ontology, it is one of ontology’s two halves…If the illusion can be repressed it is because of that other slope, that of duration, which gives us differences in kind corresponding in the final instance to differences of proportion as they appear in space, and already in matter and extension (35).
Problematizing method (a critique of false problems and the invention of genuine ones)
Differentiating (carvings out and intersections)
Temporalizing (thinking in terms of duration)

Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Introduction, Parts 1-2)

This book enquires on the condition of knowledge today in highly developed societies (xxiii).
It is also situated in the crisis of narratives (xxiii).
Philosophy legitimates the rules of science’s language games (xxiii).
‘Modern’ designates any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse in relation to certain grand narratives (such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the eancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth) (xxiii).
‘Postmodern’ designates incredulity toward metanarratives (xxiv).
We do not necessarily establish stable language combinations, and the properties of the ones we do establish are not necessarily communicable (xxiv).
This is not a structuralism or a systems theory but a pragmatics of language particles (xxiv).
The legitimation of the power of the system is based on optimizing its performance—efficiency (xxiv).
The logic of maximum performance is contradictory: it demands both less work (to lower production costs) and more (to lessen social burden of idle population). We have lost faith in salvation from these inconsistencies [Debord and the logic of automation as that which has the ability to abolish labor itself c.f. thesis 45 in The Society of the Spectacle] (xxiv).
Lyotard’s main target is presumably Jurgen Habermas:
Still, the postmodern condition is as much a stranger to disenchantment as it is to the blind positivity of deligitimation. Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside? The operativity criterion is technological; it has no relevance for judging what is true or just. Is legitimacy to be found in consensus obtained through discussion, as Jurgen Habermas thinks? Such consensus does violence to the heterogeneity of language games. And invention is always born of dissension. Postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of the authorities; it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the expert’s homology, but the inventor’s paralogy. Here is the question: is a legitimation of the social bond, a just society, feasible in terms of a paradox analogous to that of scientific activity? What would such a paradox be? (xxiv-xxv).
The Field: Knowledge in Computerized Societies
The status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age (3).
Scientific knowledge is a kind of discourse [Foucault, anyone?] (3).
In the past 40 years (1930-) the leading sciences on technologies have had to deal with language: phonology, linguistics, cybernetics, compatibility among computer languages, etc. (3-4).
These technological transformations have an impact on research and the transmission of acquired learning (4).
The nature of knowledge cannot survive unchanged within this context of general transformation (4).
Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself; it now loses its use-value and takes on a new logic in the way in which it takes on an aspect of commodity fetishism in its own right (4-5).
Lyotard:
In the postindustrial and postmodern age, science will maintain and no doubt strengthen its preeminence in the arsenal of productive capacities of nation-states. Indeed, this situation is one of the reasons leading to the conclusion that the gap between developed and developing countries will grow ever wider in the future…Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major—perhaps the major—stake in the worldwide competition for power…A new field is opened for industrial and commercial strategies on the one hand, and political and military strategies on the other (5).
Learning no longer can be believed to fall within the purview of the State. This occurs only if the messages within society are rich in information and easy to decode. Habermas’s ideology of communicational ‘transparency’ treats the State as a factor of opacity and ‘noise’ (5).
This new form of knowledge-commedity literally deterritorializes the nation-state in the sense that multinational corporations assert the influx of investments that are beyond the control of the nation-state. This question becomes more threatening when multi-national corporations can decide who gets access to certain knowledges (5-6).
This transformation in knowledge will have repercussions on the existing public powers which will force them to reconsider their relations (both de jure and de facto) with the large corporations and, more generally, civil society (6).
The real distinction is not between knowledge and ignorance but between payment knowledge and investment knowledge—in other words, between units of knowledge exchanged in a daily maintenance framework versus funds of knowledge dedicated to optimizing the performance of a project (6).
Habermasian communicational transparency is similar to liberalism:
Liberalism does not preclude an organization of the flow of money in which some channels are used in decision making while others are only good for the payment of debts. One could similarly imagine flows of knowledge traveling along identical channels of identical nature, some of which would be reserved for the ‘decision makers,’ while the others would be used to repay each person’s perpetual debt with respect to the social bond (6).
The Problem: Legitimation
Computerization of society—these hypotheses have a strategic (and not predicative) value in relation to the question (7).
What other direction, besides computerization, could technology take (7)?
The cumulative nature of knowledge is acknowledged, but in what form does the accumulation take (7)?
Scientific knowledge does not represent the totality of knowledge—scientific knowledge in competition and conflict with another kind of knowledge—narrative knowledge (7).
Not that narrative knowledge can prevail over science, but its model is related to ideas of internal equilibrium and conviviality—since knowledge becomes exteriorized from the ‘knower’ and alienated more and more from the user (7).
Demoralization of scientists attests to the central problem of legitimation:
I use the word in a broader sense than do contemporary German theorists in their discussions of the question of authority [Habermas]. Take any civil law as an example: it states that a given category of citizens must perform a specific kind of action. Legitimation is the process by which a legislator is authorized to promulgate such a law as a norm. Now take the example of a scientific statement: it is subject to the rule that a statement must fulfill a given set of conditions in order to be accepted as scientific. In this case, legitimation is the process by which a ‘legislator’ dealing with scientific discourse is authorized to prescribe the stated conditions (in general, conditions of internal consistency and experimental verification) determining whether a statement is to be included in that discourse for consideration by the scientific community [Authorization of discourses—Foucault—the inclusivity of a discourse and the paradigms and arborescent hierarchies of canons] (8).
The question of the legitimacy of science has been linked to the legislators since Plato (8).
The right to decide what is true is not independent of the right to decide what is just (8).
There is a strict interlinkage between the kind of language called science and the kind called ethics and politics (8).
Thus it has to do with double legitimation—who decides what knowledge is and who knows what needs to be decided? In the computer age, the question of knowledge is more and more a question of government (8-9).

Deleuze and Guattari's Thousand Plateaus: Introduction to the Rhizome

Introduction: Rhizome

D+G have reached the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I [This, of course, is preceded by similar assertions about the schizophrenic in Anti-Oedipus]. (3).
A book is an assemblage and a multiplicity:
One side of a machinic assemblage faces the state, which doubtless makes it a kind of organism, or signifying totality, or determination attributable to a subject; it also has a side facing a body without organs, which is continually dismantling the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities to pass or circulate, and attributing to itself subjects that it leaves with nothing more than a name as the trace of an intensity. What is the body without organs of a book? …We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge…Literature is an assemblage. It has nothing to do with ideology. There is no ideology and never has been (4).
This assertion resonates with what D+G write of earlier in Anti-Oedipus pg. 104—they will write there: “It is not an ideological problem…unconscious investments are made according to positions of desire and uses of synthesis, very different from the interests of the subject, individual or collective, who desires’ (104).
D+G insists upon ‘Stratometers, deleometers, BwO units of convergence. Not only do these constitute a quantification of writing, but they define writing as always the measure of something else. Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come (4-5).
D+G write:
Root-book as image of the world—this is the classical book—the law of the book is the law of reflection, the One that becomes two—One becomes two: whenever we encounter this formula, even stated strategically by Mao or understood in the most ‘dialectical’ way possible, what we have before us is the most classical and well reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of thought. Nature doesn’t work that way: in nature, roots and taproots with a more multiple, lateral, and circular system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous one. Thought lags behind nature (5).
D+G assert that the root-tree system of thought has never reached an understanding of multiplicity (5). The binary logic of dichotomy has simply been replaced by biunivocal relationships between successive circles (5).
Opposed to the root-book, there is the radicle-system, or fascicular root as the second figure of the book (5).
The folding of one text onto another implies a supplementary dimension—this is why the fragmented work can be considered the Magnum Opus [think Nietzsche’s Will to Power and its confused reception as his final, systematic work] (6).
Radicle-chaosmos vs. root-cosmos:
The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available—always n – 1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted) (6).
[I find it utterly fascinating that D+G were already asserting the subtraction of the one AND arguing against a facile Maoism in 1980—8 years before Badiou would write Being and Event—no wonder that Badiou refuses to deal with D+G!]
1 and 2. D+G stress principle of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be:
Not every trait in a rhizome is necessarily linked to a linguistic feature: semiotic chains of every nature are connected to very diverse modes of coding (biological, political, economic, etc.) that bring into play not only different regimes of signs but also states of things of differing status. Collective assemblages of enunciation function directly within machinic assemblages; it is not impossible to make a radical break between regimes of signs and their objects. Even when linguistics claims to confine itself to what is explicit and to make no presuppositions about language, it is still in the sphere of a discourse implying particular modes of assemblage and types of social power. Chomsky’s grammaticality, the categorical S symbol that dominates every sentence, is more fundamentally a marker of power than a syntactic marker: you will construct grammatically correct sentences, you will divide each statement into a noun phrase and a verb phrase (first dichotomy…). Out criticism of these linguistic models is not that they are too abstract but, on the contrary, that they are not abstract enough, that they do not reach the abstract machine that connects a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to collective assemblages of enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of the social field…There is no ideal speaker-listener, any more than there is a homogeneous linguistic community. Language is, in Weinreich’s words, ‘an essentially heterogeneous reality.’ There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity…A method of the rhizome type, on the contrary, can analyze language only by decentering it onto other dimensioins and other registers. A language is never closed upon itself, except as a function of impotence (7-8).
[To start with, this passage reminds me of D+G’s insistence on understanding communication at the level of order-words. Habermas’s dream of an ideal language-situation (one in which rhetoric is precluded on the basis that mutual consensus cannot allow for any sort of external persuasion to prevail (counterthought—Gorgias, who promotes the view that language causes an internal persuasive relation—i.e. language composed of order-words makes others want to do what we want them to, without this being explicit in any way—in fact, this is the place where order-words take on an extremely (post-)Marxist hue in the sense that order-words operate on the level of socio-symbolic interpellation. Althusser’s concept of interpellation as the situation of a subject within a discourse and institutional network also has the second significance as a hailing of the subject. Order-words elicit our response, calling us to create collective assemblages of enunciation. On the other hand, order-words call us to respond, but what forces our enunciation into grammatically authenticated sentences? What is it that makes us respond in this way. Deleuze’s later text “He Stuttered” forces us to see elipses, haults, breaks, gaps and all sorts of abnormal speech phenomena as fundamental to the formation of new ways of speaking—here we have a clue for the formation of new subject languages that have real revolutionary potential. Considering the psychoactive effects of mushrooms, we come to see that there are fractal relations with words and phrases, flows of language that dismantle the grammatical structure that so efficiently communicates a rational thought. But rational thoughts merely filter the truly primary thresholds of intensity that create impulsive thoughts and broken speech acts that, in some way, hold more significance because of their fragmentary nature. The way in which words escape our grasp and are enunciated in the psychedelic process has everything to do with the intensive impulses-to-thought that form spirals of language-inductors that fundamentally converge with intensive concentric coruscations-of-the-body].
3. Principle of multiplicity: the multiple must be treated as a substantive in order to unlink it from the One as subject or object:
A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase in number as the multiplicity grows…An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections…We do not have units of measure, only multiplicities or varieties of measurement. The notion of unity appears only when there is a power takeover in the multiplicity by the signifier or a corresponding subjectification proceeding: This is the case for a pivot-unity forming the basis for a biunivocal relationships between objective elements or points, or for the One that divides following the law of a binary logic of differentiation in the subject. Unity always operates in an empty dimension supplementary to that of the system considered (overcoding) (8).
All multiplicities are flat since they fill or occupy all of their dimensions: thus D+G speak of a plane of consistency even though the dimensions of this plane increase with the number of connections that are made on it—the plane of consistency is the outside of all multiplicities:
The war machine-book against the State apparatus-book. Flat multiplicities of n dimensions are asignifying and asubjective. They are designated by indefinite articles, or rather by partitives (some couchgrass, some of a rhizome…) (9).
4. Principle of asignifying rupture—this is asserted against an oversignifying break—wasp and orchid forming a rhizome of heterogeneous elements:
At the same time, something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp…the two becomings interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing deterritorialization ever further…the aparallel evolution of two beings that have absolutely nothing to do with each other (10).
5 and 6. Principle of cartography and decalcomania:
In linguistics as in psychoanalysis, its object is an unconscious that is itself representative, crystallized into codified complexes, laid out along a genetic axis and distributed within a syntagmatic structure. Its goal is to describe a de facto state, to maintain balance in intersubjective relations, or to explore an unconscious that is already there from the start, lurking in the dark recesses of memory and language. It consists of tracing, on the basis of an overcoding structure or supporting axis, something that comes ready-made. The tree articulates and hierarchizes tracings; tracings are like the leaves of a tree…The rhizome is altogether difference, a map and not a tracing…What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious…A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the
tracing, which always comes back ‘to the same’ (12).
Here D+G oppose the map to the tracing—hating to repeat myself, this sounds again like Deleuze’s analysis of the circle qua circle—thinking the map in terms of differential coordinates.
However, the tracing should always be put back on the map—for the tracing does not reproduce the map, it translates it into an image and transforms the rhizome into roots and radicles:
It has organized, stabilized, neutralized the multiplicities according to the axes of significance and subjectification belonging to it. It has generated, structuralized the rhizome, and when it thinks it is reproducing something else it is in fact only reproducing itself. That is why the tracing is so dangerous. It injects redundancies and propagates them (13).
I hear Debord in these lines again—what else is the Spectacle but the tracings that reproduce themselves into a stultifying grid that forces desire into straitjackets—back to Debord later.
Melanie Klein and Freud breaking the rhizome or projecting the map back onto the family photo:
In the case of the child, gestural, mimetic, ludic, and other semiotic systems regain their freedom and extricate themselves from the ‘tracing,’ that is, from the dominant competence of the teacher’s language—a microscopic event upsets the local balance of power. Similarly, generative trees constructed according to Chomsky’s syntagmatic model can open up in all directions, and in turn form a rhizome (14-15).
Extending their thoughts on the trees and roots to the brain:
Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified matter. What are wrongly called ‘dendrites’ do not assure the connection of neurons in a continuous fabric. The discontinuity between cells, the role of the axons, the functioning of the synapses, the existence of synaptic microfissures, the leap each message makes across these fissures, make the brain a multiplicity immersed in its plane of consistency or neuroglia, a whole uncertain, probabilistic system (‘the uncertain nervous system’) (15).
The difference between short-term and long-term memory is not merely quantitative—short term memory works under conditions of discontinuity, rupture, and multiplicity, and long-term memory tends to be arborescent and centralized (imprint, engram, tracing, or photograph) (16).
Again, to stress their point against the arborescent:
Even if the links themselves proliferate, as in the radicle system, one can never get beyond the One-Two, and fake multiplicities. Regenerations, reproductions, returns, hydras, and medusas do not get us any further. Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with centers of significance and subjectification, central automata like organized memories…The channels of transmission are preestablished: the arborscent system preexists the individual, who is integrated into it at an allotted place (16).
Schizoanalysis treats acentered systems—transduction of intensive states replaces topology—the rhizome is the production of the unconscious, inducing new statements and different desires (17-18).
The God who sows and reaps as opposed to the God who replants and unearths (replanting of offshoots versus sowing of seeds) (18).
Henry Miller: grass as what grows between things—successive lateral offshoots in immediate connection with an outside (19).
No universal capitalism—capitalism at a crossroads of all kinds of formation—always a neocapitalism that invents an eastern and western face, reshaping them for the worst (20).
Root-tree as transcendent model and tracing—canal-rhizome as immanent process that overturns the model and outlines a map [Here the emphasis is on an overturning of the regime of the model and the copy, one of Deleuze’s lasting oppositions to Plato—or a radical reinvention of Plato—affirmation of pure simulacra as the decisive overturning of the model/copy].
Rhizome brings into play different regimes of signs and even nonsign states—it is not derived from the One, but instead is subtracted—constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions (21).
Rhizome is not the object of reproduction—it is an antigenealogy—rhizome as short-term memory or antimemory—rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots:
The rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory of central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states What is at question in the rhizome is a relation to sexuality—but also to the animal, the vegetal, the world, politics, the book, things natural and artificial—that is totally different from the arborescent relation: all manner of ‘becomings’ (21).
A rhizome is made of plateaus—Gregory Bateson defines a plateau as: “a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids an orientation toward a culmination point or external end"—D+G will expand on the concept of a plateau:
any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome…An assemblage, in its multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotics flows, material flows, and social flows simultaneously…There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author) (22-23).
What need to be develop are a perceptual semiotics and a Nomadology (23).
Cultural book and anticultural book—mathematics as a monster slang (24).
Short-term ideas and the interbeing of the rhizome:
American literature, and already English literature, manifest this rhizomatic direction to an even greater extent; they know how to move between things, establish a logic of the AND, overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings. They know how to practice pragmatics (25).