Against Identity

Deleuze, G. . Difference and Repetition (transl. Patton, P.) . Columbia University Press . 1994 (1968) . ISBN 978-0-231-08159-7

Introduction

A general idea is a particular idea in itself, given that each can be replaced with one that resembles it – in relation to a given word. When exchange is the criterion for generality then theft and gift are the criteria for repetition. DPB Note that generality and repetition are opposed. Repetition interiorizes and reverses itself: the event of the fall of the Bastille repeats n Federation days. Generality opposes this as the universality of the singular. Generality belongs to the order of laws, law determining the resemblance of its subjects. Law shows how repetition remains impossible for its subjects, the particulars. A law compels its subjects to illustrate it. A perseveration (volharding DPB) is not a repetition. A constant in a law is a variable in a more general law. Repetition is against the law, as per the similar form and equivalent content of it. ‘If repetition exists it expresses at once a singularity opposed to the general, a universality opposed to the particular, a distinctive opposed to the ordinary, an instanteneity opposed to variation and an eternity opposed to permanence’ {pp. 2-3}. Repetition occurs only in the passage from order of generality to another as if underneath or between two generalities. DPB: Wolframian ‘interesting behavior’. Repetition is the thought of the future: eternity belonging to one time, the infinite belonging to an instant. ‘They (Kierkegaard and Nietzsche) want to put metaphysics in motion, in action. They want to make it act, and make it carry out immediate acts’ {p 8}. A new representation is not enough, because that is already mediation. ‘Rather, it is a question of producing within the work a movement capable of affecting the mind outside of all representation; it is a question of making movement itself a work, without interposition; of substituting direct signs for mediate representations; of inventing vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the mind’ {p 8}. DPB I like to think that this is the description of computation I like, and the promse I made to model the firm explicitly and not some representative form of it: not the representation of the thing but the thing itself.

Infinite comprehension makes possible remembering and recognition. The relation of the concept to its object is called representation, under these two aspects of memory and self-consciousness. ‘According to the principle of sufficient reason there is always one concept per particular thing. According to the reciprocal principle of the identity of indiscernibles, there is one and only one thing per concept’ {p 12}. DPB: the first one means that each thing can belong to one concept alone, lest it is not that thing. The second one means that if two things are between them indiscernible then they must logically belong to the same concept. Three ways are discussed by which concepts can become blocked, namely they can remain in play unchanged. Firstly, in regard the blocking of a concept, there is logical blockage, predicates determine the blockage of a concept. DPB: this means that conditions regulate access of a thing to a concept. It must remain fixed in the concept but transposed in the thing (a person is a different animal than a horse): ‘This is why the comprehension of the concept is infinite; having become other in the thing, the predicate is like the object of another predicate in the concept’ {p 12}. DPB: this reminds me of the existence of connotations: the idea can be anything, but they are particulars belonging to a generality. In its real use the comprehension extends to infinity but in its logical use there is an artificial blockage. Because of this difference (reaching infinity) of the concept, no individual (fully) corresponds. And thus it allows the greatest possible space for resemblances to be captured. A second kind of the blockage of a concept is a natural blockage of the concept: when a concept with finite comprehension is put in a particular space and time forcibly. The difference between the comprehension imposed on it and the weak demanded comprehension is infinite. This saldo is a ‘discrete extension’: belonging to an identical concept and the same singularity in existence (twins). The difference of this natural blockage with a logical blockage is that this is a true repetition instead of a resemblance in thought. Generality designates logical power to concepts and repetition which testifies to their powerlessness and real limits’ {cf. P 13}. ‘Repetition is the pure fact of a concept with finite comprehension being forced to pass as such into existence .. ‘ {p 13 emphasis DPB}. The comprehension of a concept cannot be infinite because it is defined by a finite number of words. Repetition appears as difference without a concept (see above: transfer from one concept to the next). A third kind of blockage of a concept concerns freedom: the less one remembers and the less one is conscious of remembering one’s past, the more one repeats it. And so the credo is to work and remember through the memory in order not to repeat it {cf p 15}. ‘Self-consciousness in recognition appears as the faculty of the future or the function of the future, the function of the new’ {p 15}. DPB this is illustrated by the Bastille and the entailing annual celebrations. GD: there is a reverse relation between repetition and remembering (being aware, being conscious, comprehending) because it takes place for a lack of memory and when memory is there, one can be conscious of the repetition, it is recognized and the repetition can be stopped. Until that point all the milieu and the system is set to repeat. It is not a representation but an inherent enactment of what is required without the knowledge of the repetition. When recognition takes place then representation and repetition face each other and merge, but they remain at different levels (what is and what is represented as a reflection). In sum the three kinds of natural blockage are the discrete (nominal concepts of logic and representation and thus delineated), the alienated (concepts of nature because concepts of nature are naturally devoid of memory, alienated and outside of themselves??) and the repressed (concepts of freedom, psychoanalytic limitations through repression). ‘Repetition thus appears as a difference, but a difference absolutely without concept; in this sense, an indifferent difference’ {p 15 emphasis DPB}. DPB this means different but not comparable, because it is a difference such that there is no concept (yet) to compare to what is perceived . The comparison can yet be made when there is a concept. In that case there is recognition and (if there is a memory &c.) it can turn out to have been a repetition. Psychologically death can be the source of repetition. ‘The disguise and the variations, the masks and the costumes, do not come ‘over and above’: they are, on the contrary, the internal genetic elements of repetition itself, its integral and constituent parts’ {p 17}. DPB how must this be understood? Apparently the change comes in a disguise: they appear to be a kind of a symptom of the former system behavior, but they are in fact the symptom of its repetition, and therefore intrinsically different. While they appear to be the same (prior and post the repetition taking place), they are in fact disguised and intrinsically different. Now the variations are the tools of the repetition to disguise itself. And because they are not properties known they are a disguise of the old thing up to the point that the new situation is recognized. ‘Repetition is truly that which disguises itself in constituting itself, that which constitutes itself only by disguising itself’ {p 17} DPB this is the same in other words. But with an emphasis on the disguise being a tool for the introduction (induction) of the repetition. Apparently the mind ‘wants’ to be be ‘fooled’ by the appearances of the system. But the repetition cannot be derived directly from the disguise. Its source is disguising and disguised. ‘In short, repetition is in its essence symbolic; symbols or simulacra are the letter of repetition itself. Difference is included in repetition by way of disguise and by the order of the symbol’ {p17}. DPB therefore variation is not from without but intrinsic to repetition. It is not a deviation from the representation to be corrected but an intrinsic element of repetition. This reminds me of the relation between the rules of the system on a micro-scale and the behavior of that system on a macro-scale and the impossibility to translate the one into the other. ‘The variations express, rather, the differential mechanisms which belong to the essence and origin of that which is repeated’ {p 17}. The repetition is the mask. Because the repeated is different in kind from the represented, the repeated cannot be represented. The idea of a death instinct must be seen in the light of three paradoxical and complementary requirements: 1) given repetition an original and positive principle 2) given repetition an autonomous disguising power 3) an immanent meaning related to terror as well as movement of selection and freedom.

Our problem concerns the essence of repetition. It is a question of knowing why repetition cannot be explained by the form of identity in concepts or representations; in what sense it demands a superior ‘positive’ principle’ {p 19 emphasis DPB}. It is not about the making of a series of exact copies time and again, but the artist will inject disequilibrium, an instability: an element of one instance is combined with another element of a following one: ‘ .. a dissymmetry or gap, which disappears only in the overall effect’ {p 19}. DPB this is the relation between the idea and the meme. Every idea is a bit different but in the overall picture they are sufficiently the same to be considered one and every instance a variation of them (in object essentialism). But the real issue is how the cause can have less symmetry than the effect. Else causality would be a simple conjecture always. A signal is a system with orders of disparate size. A sign is what happens in the system, an effect with two aspects: 1) in one it expresses productive dissymmetry 2) in the other it cancels it?? ‘The sign is not entirely of the order of the symbol; nevertheless, it makes way for it by implying an internal difference (while leaving the conditions of its reproduction still external)’ {p 20}. DPB This reminds me of Luhmannian double contingency, and also of the ‘versions’ of some thing that become something, which are parents nor children, and then at some point become a parent. Also, this points at a positive causality where differences and variation are immanent: the effect can be more symmetrical than the cause. DPB This means an increase of order from one ‘generation’ to the next. In a dynamic order there is no representative concept, nor any figure represented in a pre-existing space. ‘There is an Idea and a pure dynamism which creates a corresponding space’ {p 20 emphasis DPB}. DPB This is the essence of computation as I see it – and I believe also Wolfram suspects it, and Dennett glimpses it. Not the computation as in a representation of the moves of the behavior of a system, but what actually takes place to get a system from a state to the next. The behavior that results from it is called the space which the systems assumes. ‘The network is like a fabric stretched upon a framework, ‘but the outline, the principal rhythm of that framework, is almost always a theme independent of the network’ {p 21}. DPB Laying the groundwork of scales. The rhythm is different while the other is founded on the one. GD Cadence-repetition is a regular division of time, but a period exists only insofar as it is determined by a tonic accent, commanded by intensities. DPB Does this mean counting events? And what does the second part mean? But cadence is the envelope and the relation between rhythms and therefore we should distinguish the two: the first one the appearance of the first one. Is it the identity of the nominal concept which explains the repetition of a word? Consider this illustration: ‘Take the example of rhyme: it is indeed verbal repetition, but repetition which includes the difference between two words and inscribes that difference at the heart of a poetic Idea, in a space which it determines’ {p 21 emphasis DPB}. DPB I like the illustration of the Idea here: this is indeed what the meme is to the idea: what the rhyming words have not in common but over and above the total of their individual meanings. What is more they together determine the space which they occupy – nothing else does this. The repetition of a word is treated as ‘generalized rhyme’, not as ‘restricted repetition’ {p 21}. ‘This generalisation can proceed in two ways: either a word taken in two senses ensures a resemblance or a paradoxical identity between the two senses; or a word taken in one sense exercises an attractive force on its neighbours, communicating an extraordinary gravity to them until one of the neighbouring words takes up the baton and becomes in turn a centre of repetition’ {p 22}. DPB I guess I am over eager but this phrase seems to point at connotations: the sense one word takes because the other word is in its vicinity. Reproduction of the Same is not a motor for bodily movements DPB I assume 1) the Same is an instance of (a quality of, a property of?) the resemblance (GD it is a representation!), and 2) that repetition in the biological sphere refers to adaptation and accommodation. Imitation involves a difference between inside and outside. Learning does not occur in the relation between representation and action, but in the relation between sign and response. DPB a representation of what some thing is and the action and the response resulting from the sign. Maybe this means that the system does what it can only do and it is not the representation that is relevant for the behavior of the system. A sign involves heterogeneity in three ways: 1) in the object which bears or emits it representing two different realities 2) in themselves because it envelops another object within the limits of the one bearing it, ‘..and incarnates a natural or spiritual power (an Idea)’ and 3) in the response they elicit because the movement of the response does not ‘resemble’ that of the sign. DPB what does this mean? Maybe this points to the concept that systems can only instigate action internally. ‘When a body combines some of its own distinctive points with those of a wave, it espouses the principle of a repetition which is no longer that of the Same, but involves the Other – involves difference through the repetitive space thereby constituted’ {p 23}. DPB I believe this describes a Monad in a Nomad reality. ‘Signs are the true elements of theatre. They testify to the spiritual and natural powers which act beneath the words, gestures, characters and objects represented. They signify repetition as real movement, in opposition to representation which is a false movement of the abstract’ {p 23}. DPB Signs signify repetition. An Idea incarnates a natural power. What is the relation between an Idea and a Sign? A meme is a sign or a representation? An Idea is all that a sign could potentially Importantly ideas belong to operations of systems and I am using ideas as literal ideas in people’s minds. But they are the drivers of the ideas in people’s minds and I need to explain this different application, because it is bound to confuse the reader. GD What is the Self of repetition? Repetition is difference without a concept in two forms: 1) the difference is external to the concept and it is a difference between objects represented by the same concept 2) the difference is internal to the Idea and it ‘.. unfolds as pure movement, creative of a dynamic space and time which correspond to the Idea. The first repetition is repetition of the Same, explained by the identity of the concept or representation; the second includes difference, and includes itself in the alterity of the Idea, in the heterogeneity of an ‘a-presentation’’ {p 24}. DPB this seems to point at the establishing of repetition from the interaction between the interior and the exterior. ‘One is revolving the other evolving. One involves equality, commensurability, and symmetry; the other is grounded in inequality, incommensurability and dissymmetry. .. The two repetitions are not independent. One is the singular subject, the interiority and the heart of the other, the depths of the other. The other is only the external envelope, the abstract effect. The repetition of dissymmetry is hidden within symmetrical ensembles or effects; a repetition of distinctive points underneath that of ordinary points; and everywhere the Other in the repetition of the Same. This is the secret, the most profound repetition: it alone provides the principle of the other one, the reason for the blockage of concepts ’ {p 24}. DPB I have made a big point in pointing out that there is a difference between the operations of the system and what it expresses. In addition, to complicate things further, it is the people which belong to the system that do the expressing. And so the operations of the system work independently from the behavior that this (social) system exhibits.

GD A distinction was made between generality and repetition, and a distinction was made between repetition external to the concept and repetition internal to the Idea. The relation between these is that the consequences of the first are unfolded in the second. Because if repetition is devoid of an interior then how can a concept be naturally blocked allowing repetition which has nothing to do with a generality to appear (DPB It seems to imply that complexity and emergence can come from this kind of repetition). And when we do have the interior of repetition we are capable of understanding the outer repetition (as a cover) but also recapture the order of generality. DPB This refers to relations such as between the population of individuals that are of one species and the differences between the generations of them and between the position of one of the individuals and the populations of later generations. And that there can be generalities between the individuals of a multitude but that cannot account for the emergent behavior, meaning the inherent immanent variation to be generated by them. In other words it sees that there is a immanent balancing power of variation and generalization. The laws are inferior to the singularities, ‘..which weave their repetitions in the depths of the Earth and the Heart, where laws do not yet exist. The interior of repetition is always affected by an order of difference: it is only to the extent that something is linked to a repetition of an order other than its own that the repetition appears external and bare, and the thing itself subject to the categories of generality. It is the inadequation between difference and repetition which gives rise to the order of generality’ {p 25 emphasis DPB}. DPB Only in relation to something else and different does the repetition become obvious and generalizable. How does this relate to the perception of the observer? Every thing is different. But why do we feel the problem is ill defined as long as there is no principium individuationis for each? ‘It is because a difference can be internal, yet not conceptual (as the paradox of symmetrical objects shows). A dynamic space must be defined from the point of view of an observer tied to that space (DPB defining that space as per its niche?), not from a external position’ {p 26}. DPB but this is related to the observer: whatever she is able to perceive is the language available for her to express her perceptions in: that aspect of the thing which strikes her senses and induced her to express herself about it. So the concept is capable of not being capable to cover a difference. And this is what Maturana & Varela mean when they write about the only thing happening happens for the observer: ‘.. there is a step-by-step, internal, dynamic construction of space which must precede the ‘representation’ of the whole as a form of exteriority’ {p 26}. DPB what happens in the multitude is a different thing from what an observer can observe happening in it. And also the systems makes its own space, the space it is in is constructed by the systems itself, it tensions its space. Two questions: ‘.. what is the concept of difference – one which is not reducible to simple conceptual difference but demands its own Idea, its own singularity at the level of Ideas? ‘.. what is the essence of repetition – one which is not reducible to difference without concept, and cannot be confuse with the apparent character of objects represented by the concept, but bears witness to singularity as a power of Ideas?’ {p 27}.

Chapter I – Difference in Itself

Two aspects of indifference are 1) undifferenciated (differences becoming), nothingness, indeterminate in which everything is dissolved and 2) a white nothingness, a once more calm surface upon which float unconnected determinations. The indeterminate is indifferent but the unconnected determinations are indifferent too. Is difference the intermediate between these two extremes or is it the only extreme? ‘Difference is the state in which one can speak of determination as such’ {p 28 emphasis DPB}. DPB if there is a difference then that is it, all the rest follows from that, that is differenciation, difference becoming. ‘That a difference should be between two things is empirical and the determinations are extrinsic. However, instead of something distinguished from something else, imagine something which distinguishes itself – and yet that from which it distinguishes itself does not distinguish itself from it’ {p 28 emphasis DPB}. DPB The starting point is the difference, not the things it differs from, or between. ‘Difference is this state in which determination takes the form of unilateral distinction’ {p 28}. DPB: one event takes place ‘bij de gratie van’ een ander event, maar op zichzelf staand. Bijvoorbeeld bliksem bestaat alleen in de context van andere omstandigheden, maar als het ontstaat dan bestaat het alleen gecontrasteerd daartegen. GD describes it as a cruel monstrosity. ‘We must therefore say that difference is made, or makes itself, as in the expression ‘to make the difference’ {p 28}. DPB this is a difference from nothing = difference. Differenciation is the becoming of a difference. The 4 aspects of reason in regards its role as a medium for representation: 1) identity = the form of the undetermined concept 2) analogy = the relation between the determinable concepts 3) opposition = relation between determinations within concepts 4) resemblance = in the determined object of the concept itself. If the difference leaves its cave to ‘make the difference’, it changes its meaning (from being a monster) and becomes the selective test to find out which differences may be inscribed in the concept. Two things differ when they are other, not in themselves but in something else and therefore when they also agree in something else. ‘The greatest difference is always an opposition, but of all the forms of opposition which is the most perfect, the most complete, that which ‘agrees’ best?’ {p 30 emphasis DPB} GD explains that this describes its impossibility as per its negation, or where it begins or ceases to exist. ‘Contraries in this case are modifications which affect a subject with respect to its genus. .. contrariety in the genus is the perfect and maximal difference and contrariety in the genus is specific difference’ {p 30}. In all other cases it is irrelevant as a difference: specific difference is a quality of the essence itself, it is synthetic (determination of species is composition) and added to the genus. Genera tend to remain the same in themselves while becoming other in the differences which divide them. The determination of species carries within itself the genus and all the intermediary differences. Differences are linked with differences across levels of division, like a transport of difference. ‘In this manner, therefore, the determination of species ensures coherence and continuity in the comprehension of the concept’ {p 31}. DPB this is a useful idea in regards the way that ideas and memes remain in play to keep ideas afloat also when their environment of other ideas change. In sum, specific difference is the greatest difference in a relative sense. DPB I understand singularity to be an invariant point in phase space. Perhaps the rules of the system do not apply for it (mathematical meaning) or the behavior of the system at those points is unpredictable (saddle points). But to identify a system and to represent it, the singluarities are required and they are invariably there, so they should remain in the boundaries of the system, namely its phase space. As a consequence specific difference never goes as far as to represent a universal concept (namely an Idea) ‘.. encompassing all the singularities and turnings of difference, but rather refers to a particular moment in which difference is merely reconciled with the concept in general’ {p 32}. ‘Difference can be no more than a predicate in the comprehension of a concept’ {p 32}. Judgement establishes the relation between a concept and the terms or the subjects to which it is affirmed. It has the faculty of distribution, the partition of concepts through common sense, and hierarchisation, the measuring of subjects through good sense. Analogy is the essence of judgement, via the analogy of the identity of concepts, and therefore generic or categorial difference, any more than specific difference, can deliver a proper concept of difference. ‘.., Difference appears only as a reflexive concept’ {p 34}. And it ceases to be only to become catastrophic. ‘As a concept of reflection, difference testifies to its full submission to all the requirements of representation, which becomes thereby ‘organic representation’ {p 34}. DPB I believe this refers to the thought that a difference can only exist per se, and as a representation all the involved objects should be present and in that sense they do then materialize the difference in their present configuration. ‘But does not difference as catastrophy precisely bear witness to a irreducible ground which continues to act under the apparent equilibrium of organic representation?’ {p 35}. DPB the series is continually about to break up forever on the brink of collapse but it is represented by an organic form and, according to Schoedinger, sticks around for longer than expected.

There has only ever been one ontological proposition: Being is univocal’ {p 35}. Gilles Deleuze borrowed the doctrine of ontological univocity from Scotus.{4} He claimed that being is univocal, i.e., that all of its senses are affirmed in one voice. Important: Deleuze adapts the doctrine of univocity to claim that being is, univocally, difference. The model of judgement can be replaced with that of proposition as a complex entity: sense (what is expressed), designated (what expresses itself), and expressors or designators (numerical modes, differential factors characterising the elements which were endowed with sense and designation). One ontological being can be referred to by several distinct senses. This allows the observer to treat the senses as analogues and the unity of being as an analogy. The ontological proposition: that which is designated ontologically is the same for qualitatively distinct senses, but also the sense is ontologically the same for individuating modes, for distinct expressors. ‘ ..the ontological proposition involves a circulation of this kind (expression as a whole)’ {p 36}. DPB I believe this is the same thing as the double contingency of Luhmann and my one hand clapping. ‘In effect, the essential in univocity is not that Being is said in a single and same sense, but that it is said, in a single and same sense, of all its individuating differences or intrinsic modalities’ {p 36 emphasis of the author}. Being is the same for each, but the modalities are not the same. The essence of univocal being is that individuating differences are included while these do not have the same essence and do not change the essence of being. DPB all the glimpses into the being are the same, while the glimpses are not the same. The glimpses are part of the construction of the being but they do not change it, like white is constructed of other colors. The voice of being includes all its modes: ‘Being is said in a single and and same sense of everything of which it is said, but that of which it is said differs: it is said of difference itself’ {p 36}. There are two kinds of distributions: 1) logos: the dividing up of what is distributed as per a particular and fixed determinations assimilated to properties or limited territories within representation and 2) nomadic, without property enclosure or measure. This is not a division of what is distributed but a division among those who divide themselves in an open space, without (clear) limits. The persons (?) are positioned here and there such as to occupy the largest possible space. It seems to be a space, a rule of play, the occupying itself. One is the division of the distribution of an existing space, the other the defining of the space by being distributed in it. Things become distributed across the entire extensity of a univocal and undistributed Being. DPB this reminds me of a kind of a sorting mechanism based on attraction and repulsion (restriction) but very light and such that they intrinsically assume a position in a vast space that is inescapable. This is not the distribution of things such as required by representation, but all things are divided up within being in the univocity of simple presence: ‘Here, limit {peras} no longer refers to what maintains the thing under a law, nor to what delimits or separates it from other things. On the contrary, it refers to that on the basis of which it is deployed and deploys all its powers; hubris ceases to be simply condemnable and the smallest becomes equivalent to the largest once it is not separated from what it can do. This enveloping measure is the same for all things ..’ {p 37 emphasis of the author}. DPB the limit sits in what the whole of the restrictions of the thing can do. It seems to me that the phrase ‘what it can do’ above is the same as computation. An arrangement of things can do something and when it is left unrestricted it is limited by what it can do only. Wolfram puts on top of that the computation of equivalent sophistication. When it is (indeed) restricted it can develop into something the sophistication of the computation of which is comparable to that of the other things in its universe with which it coexists (and codevelops, or rather it co-computes. This is the same thing as the compartmentalization which is brought about by the attractor in a phase space. It can work the same on everything and once it takes effect the effort it makes effortlessly equals that of moving a mountain in a day. That is the hierarchy and not whether things anticipating in it are larger or smaller none of them participate in being more or less: ’Univocal Being is at one and the same time nomadic distribution and crowned anarchy’ {p 37}. Is a reconciliation possible between analogy and univocity? ‘For analogy, as we have seen, rests essentially upon a certain complicity between generic and specific differences (despite their difference in kind): being cannot be supposed a common genus without destroying the reason for which it was supposed thus; that is, the possibility of being for specific differences… It is not, therefore, surprising that from the standpoint of analogy, everything happens in the middle regions of genus and species in terms of mediation and generality – identity of the concept in general and analogy of the most general concepts’ {p 38}. DPB so the answer is No? But univocity is essentially and immediately related to individuating factors, namely that which acts within them as a transcendental principle (and not constituted by the experience of the individual). ‘We must show not only how individuating difference differs in kind from specific difference, but primarily and above all how individuation properly precedes matter and form, species and parts, and every other element of the constituted individual’ {p 38 emphasis of the author}. DPB individuation is the primate principle to precede all else. What is it? ‘With univocity, however, it is not the differences which are and must be: it is being which is Difference, in the sense that it is said of difference’ {p 39}. DPB Difference is the essence of being. What does the last bit mean? ‘Moreover, it is not we who are univocal in a Being which is not; it is we and our individuality which remains equivocal in and for a univocal Being’ {p 39}. DPB This is about the voices contributing to the univocality, inside it and outside of it, that affirm it as a being. I believe that Vid are usually univocal but sometimes they can’t help themselves and the equivocal shimmers through. ‘If it is true that distinction in general relates being to difference, formal distinction (DPB grounded in being or the object, but not necessarily numerical) and modal distinction (DPB relation between being or the attributes on one hand and their intensive variations on the other) are two types under which univocal being is related, by itself, to difference in itself’ {p 40 emphasis DPB}. Following Spinoza, univocal is not neutral or indifferent but an object of pure affirmation (bevestiging), identical with unique, universal and infinite. DPB Everything is different and therefore the difference takes center stage, instead of the things and heir predicates. Real distinctions are never numerical but only formal, and numerical distinctions are never real but only modal (intrinsic modes of the unique substance and its attributes). Modes are determined as degrees of power and a single obligation, namely ‘.. to deploy all their power or their being to within the limit itself’ {p 40}. ‘Any hierarchy or pre-eminence is denied in so far as substance is equally designated by all the attributes in accordance with their essence, and equally expressed by all the modes in accordance with their degree of power’ {p 40}. DPB a cosmology which extends itself in and forms and defines the space it exists in and that exists in it and because of it. Substance appears independent of modes, but modes depend on substance. Nietzschian returning (eternal return) is the being of becoming. The becoming of itself. ‘Returning is thus the only identity, but identity as a secondary power; the identity of difference, the identical which belongs to the different, or turns around the different’ {p 41}. DPB this is a pivot of the text so far and a bridgehead to the concept of repetition it seems, and indeed: ‘Such an identity, produced by difference, is determined as ‘repetition’. Repetition in the eternal return, therefore, consists in conceiving the same on the basis of the different. However, .. it carries out a practical selection among differences according o their capacity to produce – that is, to return or to pass the test of the eternal return’ {p 41 emphasis DPB}. DPB that is it: repetition is driven by difference! It is not the whole or the same which returns or the prior identity: ‘Only the extreme forms return – those which, large or mall, are deployed within the limit and extend to the limit of their power, transforming themselves and changing one into another’ {p 41}. DPB the transformation is from within and originates in the differences taking effect to the limit. ‘It is the being-equal of all that is unequal and has been able to fully realise its inequality’ {p 41}. The Overman is defined as the superior of everything that ‘is’. ‘In all these respects, eternal return is the univocity of being, the effective realisation of that univocity’ {p 41}. ‘The wheel in the eternal return is at once both production of repetition on the basis of difference and selection of difference on the basis of repetition’ {p 42 emphasis DPB}. DPB This seems to me to be the first step to define individuation.

The signification of the very notion of limit changes completely: it no longer refers to the limits of finite representation, but in the contrary to the womb in which finite determination never ceases to be born and to disappear, to be enveloped and deployed within orgiastic representation’ {p 43}. DPB This was noted before, namely that the system tensions the space it is in and it is not a kind of a boundary that keeps it within particular limits, but the ‘ends of its wits’ do. In the infinite do the differences appear and disappear (evanescence). And so the limits are local but they are originated from the global, namely the infinite, where the differences are made that determine the limits. DPB this resonates with me because it reminds me of the origination of ideas for a firm in wider society. And also it originates from chaos theory, where small differences can lead to large ones, that can lead to minor changes in turn, and conversely a large change may well disappear out completely as if dampened. ’In short, orgiastic representation has the ground as its principle and the infinite as its element, by contrast with organic representation which retains form as its principle and the finite as its element. It is the infinite which renders determination conceivable and selectable: difference thus appears as the orgiastic representation of determination and no longer as its organic representation’ {p 42 Emphasis DPB}. DPB this explains Malthus for populations. And Darwin for species: the absolute worst are selected away and leave over the generations, an exploded and limited group of individuals hardened by selective forces. They explode orgiastically to then be restricted into an organic form, but now it has to exist there. ‘..better by saying the infinite of that finite determination itself, by representing it not as having vanished and disappeared but as vanishing and on the point of disappearing, thus as also being engendered in the inifinite’ {pp. 43-4 emphasis of the author}. How should contrariety be defined in terms of difference? ‘It is true that contrariety represents only the movement of interiority in the infinite. This movement allows indifference to subsist, since each determination, in so far as it contains the other, is independent of the other as though of a relation with the outside. Each contrary must further expel its other, therefore expel itself, and become the other it expels. Such is the movement of contradiction as it constitutes the true pulsation of the infinite, the movement of exteriority or real objectivation’ {pp. 44-5 emphasis DPB}. DPB this is a (preliminary) description of a monad in a nomad environment. Some thing must be able to distinguish some thing else and therefore some of the other thing must be in itself and by expelling the other it must expel itself too and therefore become the other. But the same holds true for the other, who is in the process of expelling this thing in focus. ‘For it is not the same manner that the positive and the negative are the Same: the negative is now at once both the becoming of the positive when the positive is denied, and the return of the positive when it denies or excludes itself. No doubt each of the contraries determined as positive and negative was already contradiction, ‘But the Positive is only implicitly this contradiction, whereas the negative is the contradiction posited..’. Difference finds its own concept in the posited contradiction: it is here that it becomes pure, intrinsic, essential, qualitative, synthetic and productive; here that it no longer allows indifference to subsist. To maintain or to raise contradiction is the selective test which ‘makes’ the difference (between the effectively real and the passing or contingent phenomenon)’ {p 45 emphasis of the author}. DPB whence the asymmetry? Is it like stable and unstable: if stable is the same as positive it persists and if negative is unstable it will not persist and therefore become positive and persist in that way and as such. But negative can in this view become positive. The other way around is also possible but is not so likely because it will disappear before it has become well-established. Positive exists because it can be absent. Negative is when the positive is absent and therefore as a concept it is posited. ‘This procedure of the infinitely small, which maintains the distinction between essences (to the extent that one plays the role of inessential to the other), is quite different to contradiction. We should therefor give it a special name, that of ‘vice-diction’’ {p 46 emphasis DPB}. DPB this describes how in the infinitely small the exchange between the thing and the environment that co-defines it takes place, while one of the things plays the role of the inessential. As a consequence: ‘The inessential includes the essential in the case, whereas the essential contains the inessential in essence’ {p 46}.

It is in this sense that ( .. ) the inheritance of predicates in each subject supposes the compossibility of the world expressed by all these subjects: God did not create Adam as a sinner, but rather the world in which Adam sinned’ {p 48 emphasis DPB}. DPB Alchian: the environment complexifies such that the firm can only be adopted and then adapt to the circumstance. The concept of compossibility appears to be the same thing as the dimensioning of the universe of a thing by the thing. The thing by its properties tensions it and in that way it constructs its cosmology and what it can do as per its cosmology is its niche (M&V). ‘Finite difference is determined in a monad as that part of the world clearly expressed, infinitely small difference as the confused ground which underpins that clarity. In these two ways, orgiastic representation mediates determination and makes it a concept of difference by assigning it a ‘reason’’ {p 48}. DPB This describes the relation between the infinitely small and the finite as the basis for difference. Grounding is a topic in metaphysics. One thing is sometimes said to “ground” another when the first in some way accounts for the being of the second. ‘The point is that in the last resort infinite representation does not free itself from the principle of identity as a presupposition of representation’ {p 49 emphasis of the author}. DPB an identity is required for there to be something to represent: if there is no identity then there is nothing to represent.

There is a crucial experience of difference and a corresponding experiment: every time we find ourselves confronted or bound by a limitation or an opposition, we should ask what such a situation presupposes. It presupposes a swarm of differences, a pluralism of free, wild or untamed differences; a properly differentiated and original space and time; all of which persist alongside the simplifications of limitation an opposition’ {p 50 emphasis DPB}. DPB there are many different ways in which things can be different and therefore the presupposition has to be that the space where this takes place is much differentiated. ‘In any case, what is missing is the original, intensive depth which is the matrix of the entire space and the first affirmation of difference: here, that which only afterwards appears as linear imitation and flat opposition lives and simmers in the form of free differences’ {pp. 50-1}. DPB this is what ‘brings the differences to life’. ‘Everywhere, the depth of difference is primary’ {p 51}. Its depth is not an added dimension but immanent in the difference itself. ‘The misfortune in speaking is not speaking, but in the speaking for others or representing something’ {p 52}. DPB This is the central point about the univocity and the equivocity. ‘This is what the philosophy of difference refuses: omnis determinatio negatio … We refuse the general alternative propose by infinite representation: the indeterminate, the indifferent, the undifferentiated or a difference already determined as negation, implying and enveloping the negative (by the same token, we also refuse the particular alternative: negative of limitation or negative of opposition). In its essence, difference is the object of affirmation or affirmation itself’ {p 52}. DPB There is the risk of confusion of this theory with that of the beautiful soul: all nice differences but reconcilable and without teeth, namely wrought through bloody conflict and not a justice of the peace on the battle field without a sense of cruelty and a taste for destruction. ‘The reprises or repetitions of the dialectic express only the conservation of the whole, all the forms and all the moments, in a gigantic Memory. Infinite representation is a memory which conserves. In this case, repetition is no more than a conservatory, a power of memory itself. .. According to the other conception, difference is primary: it affirms difference and distance. Difference is light, aerial and affirmative. To affirm is not to bear but, on the contrary, to discharge and to lighten’ {pp. 53-4}. DPB Where do we go with this? It reminds me of the number theory of Wolfram: to treat numbers as a thing in itself and then to find the patterns when they are developed through operations. Then patterns appear in a literal (non-representational) sense are as seldom as in every other process in nature. It is very rare when there is not such a difference aka the normal is when the numbers – and therefore every process in nature – is different from every other. ‘The most profound difference in kind is between the average forms and the extreme forms (new values): the extreme is not reached by carrying the average forms to infinity or by using their opposition in the finite to affirm their identity in the infinite’ {p 54}. DPB The operation of normalization (or averaging) of the differences changes in some way the quality of what the difference ‘an sich’ is. And therefore selection procedures using this operation cannot work in regards the preservation of differences. ‘The extreme is not the identity of the opposites, but rather the univocity of the different; the superior form is not the infinite, but rather the eternal formlessness of the eternal return itself, throughout its metamorphoses and transformations. Eternal return ‘makes’ the difference because it creates the superior form. Eternal return employs negation like a Nachfolge and invents a new formula for the negation of the negation: everything which can be denied is and must be denied. The genius of eternal return lies not in memory but in waste, in active forgetting’ {p 55, emphasis of the author}. DPB the primate is with the difference itself. In eternity. Resulting in the ‘gift of’ eternal return. This enables the superior form. Its importance is not the memory building up but instead in the forgetting. Everything else follows. Why is the crux in the forgetting? It makes something new from the existing situation, thereby forgetting the existing situation. But the chances that the existing situation will ever develop again are vanishingly small, and therefore also effectively forgotten. DPB This is how it should be: memory is the (unintentional) result. Of all the tacks it could have takes this is what it turned out to be. But the leading principle is eternal return that leads it to what it has actually become. ‘For if eternal return is a circle then Difference is at the centre and the Same is only on the periphery: it is a constantly decentered, continually tortuous circle which revolves only around the unequal’ {p 55 emphasis DPB}. DPB sic. ‘.. difference is affirmation. This proposition, however, means many things: that difference is an object of affirmation; that affirmation itself is multiple; that it is creation but also that it must be created, as affirming difference, as being difference in itself. It is not negative which is the motor’ {p 55}. DPB representation mediates but does not motivate. ‘Movement, for its part, implies a plurality of centres, a superposition of perspectives, a tangle of points of view, a coexistence of moments which essentially distort representation..’ {p 56 emphasis DPB}. DPB From the differences and their perspectives, not from negativity and negation, comes movement. ‘Each point of view must itself be the object, or the object must belong to the point of view’ {p 56}. DPB this resembles a lot the view of Luhmann and that of M&V that the only thing moving is the observer. ‘Difference must become the element, the ultimate unity; it must therefore refer to other differences which never identify it but rather differenciate it. Each term of a series, being already a difference, must be put into a variable relation with other terms, thereby constituting other series devoid of centre and convergence’ {p 56}. DPB this is the hard part in practical terms. But consider the case of biological evolution: there exist a series of genetic instances and there eist a series of phenomenologcal instances. These are two semi-connected planes tha can move independently from the other in principle, with the exception of the one generating the other and the other selecting (being the basis for selection of) the other. And the same mechanism I have in mind for the planes of memes (or Ideas) and their realizations. If ideas are at the centre of my theory then how am I going to make the relation between ideas and the differences referred to here? Just thinking ahead: if an idea is an answer to a question then they are different and only expressable in terms of other answers to questions.. ‘It is in difference that movement is produced as an ‘effect’, that phenomena flash their meaning like signs’ {p57}. DPB we appear to be moving towards the end of the first act: difference is the source of movement. ‘Each difference passes through all the others; it must ‘will’ itself or find itself through all the others. That is why eternal return does not appear second or come after, but is already present in every metamorphosis, contemporaneous with that which it causes to return’ {p 57}. DPB This is the necessary connection between difference and eternal return. ‘The world is neither finite nor infinite as representation would have it: it is completed and unlimited’ {p 57}. DPB so far the center stage for difference. CUT!

The Idea is not yet the concept of an object which submits the world to the requirements of representation, but rather a brute presence which can be invoked in the world only in function of that which is which is not representable in things. The Idea has therefore not yet chosen to relate difference to the identity of a concept in general: it has not given up hope of finding a pure concept of difference in itself’ {p 59 emphasis DPB}. DPB this is important here because this is the first mention of the Idea and its relation with the difference. ‘..the dialectic of difference has its own method – division – but this operates without mediation, without middle term or reason; it acts in the immediate and is inspired by the Ideas rather than by the requirements of a concept in general’ {p 59}. DPB my understanding here is the Wolfram conception of computation: not a representation of what takes place but what is taking place. This resonates with the example of the limitation of operations on numbers in the memory of a practical computer. Now the number changes through the design of the computer, and not because of the requirements of the natural process which it represents. In the physical reality such limitations can exist too, but they are then part of the process by which the natural process comes about and not because of the computation of the representation. This is very important because of my promise to design an explicit model of human organization and the firm. Not implicit as in a representation of what we can understand in some respect, but how it occurs in the real. Also it is a bit of an open door statement about the difference between the multitude living up to ‘what is is for’ versus to show that it satisfies the requirements of the concept that it happened to be assigned to. But beware : ‘Division is not the inverse of a ‘generalization’; it is not a determination of a species. It is in no way a method of determining species, but one of selection. It is not a question of dividing a determinate genus into definite species, but of dividing a confused species into pure lines of descent, or of selecting a pure line from material which is not’ {pp. 59-60} DPB this is the discussion about the existence of a species and whether it can come to be through division. It can’t, because the conditions of its operation must be actively and exactly specified for the concept or the category to be definable. ‘Difference is not between species, between two determinations of a genus, but entirely on one side, within the chosen line of descent: there are no longer contraries within a single genus, but pure and impure, good and bad, authentic and inauthentic, in a mixture which gives rise to a larger species’ {p 60}. DPB difference is the basic unity. It is a thing in itself and therefore not a relative thing. It does exist however because things are different. But the things which are different are not of the category species and difference is therefore not relative between species. ‘Thus in accordance with the oldest tradition, the circular myth is indeed the story-repetition of a foundation. Division demands such a foundation as the ground capable of making the difference. Conversely, the foundation demands division as the state of difference in that which must be grounded’ {p 62}. DPB this is the connection in a traditional sense between the practice of repetition of an event, and difference, and, conversely between the practice of division and repetition. ‘Perhaps, however, we have reasons to say both that there is non-being and that the negative is illusory. .. In this relation, being is difference itself. Being is also non-being, but non-being is not the being of the negative; rather it is the being of the problematic, the being of problem and question. Difference is not the negative; on the contrary, non-being is Difference: heteron, not enantion’ {p 63 emphasis of the author, emphasis in bold DPB}. ‘.. taken in its strictest sense, eternal return means that each thing exists only in returning, copy of an infinity of copies which allows neither original nor origin to subsist. That is why the eternal return is called ‘parodic’: it qualifies as simulacrum that which it causes to be (and to return). When eternal return is the power of (formless) Being, the simulacrum is the true character or form of the ‘being’ – of that which is. When the identity of things dissolves, being escapes to attain univocity, and begins to revolve around the different. That which is or returns has no prior constituted identity: things are reduced to the difference which fragments them, and to all the differences which are implicated in it and through which they pass’ {p 67 emphasis DPB}. ‘For eternal return, affirmed in all its power, allows no installation of a foundation-ground. .. It makes us party to a universal ungrounding. By ‘ungrounding’ we should understand the freedom of the non-mediated ground, the discovery of a ground behind every other ground, the relation between the groundless and the ungrounded, the immediate reflection of the formless and the superior form which constitutes the eternal return. Every thing, animal or being assumes the status of simulacrum..’ {p 67}. DPB This is the essence of the structure and process discussion: the adoption of the unicity of difference implies the acceptance of this in-between (or on-its-way) where structure = form. ‘The fault of representation lies in not going beyond the form of identity, in relation to the object seen and the seeing subject. Identity is no less conserved in each component representation than in the whole of infinite representation as such’ {p 68}. DPB This seems related to the common mistake in assuming that anything else but the focus of the observer is responsible for change. GD refers a lot to modern art to indicate that representation is to be abandoned: ‘It is not enough to multiply perspectives in order to establish perspectivism. To every perspective or point of view there must correspond an autonomous work with its own self-sufficient sense: what matters is the divergence of series, the decentering of circles, ‘monstrosity’. The totality of circles and series is thus a formless ungrounded chaos which has no law other than its own repetition, its own reproduction in the development of that which diverges and decentres’ {p 69}. DPB this seems to make a reference possible to autopoiesis and the creation of chaos from deterministic terms as per chaos theory. ‘Everything has become simulacrum, for by simulacrum we should not understand a simple imitation bu rather the act by which the very idea of a model or privileged position is challenged or overturned. The simulacrum is the instance which includes a difference within itself, such as (at least) two divergent series on which it plays, all resemblance abolished so that one can no longer point to the existence of an original and a copy’ {p 69}.

Chapter II Repetition for Itself

Repetition changes not the object repeated but the mind of the observer {cf Hume}. The principle of discontinuity or instanteneity in repetition: for repetition to take place one instance (of it?) has to disappear for another to appear. But how can it occur when it disappears? It has no in-itself. But if there is AB AB AB A, then when the mind sees A what is new is the expectation of B to occur also. Therefore is not repetition a product of the mind: does the paradox of repetition not only sit in the change or difference that is introduced into the mind, that the mind draws from repetition? Hume argues that identical and similar cases are grounded in the imagination: when perturbed it retains one case when another appears. ‘When A appears we expect B to appear with a force corresponding to the qualitative impression of all the contracted ABs. This is by no means a memory, nor indeed an operation of the understanding: contraction is not a matter of reflection’ {p 70}. DPB this is how I have modeled the mechanism of reinforcement in NetLogo. The AB is a flash, a sign across a system. If the AB is the sign, then the A (by itself) when unrepeated, is an aberration to the pattern. According to GD to notice it is not an operation of memory nor of understanding nor does it require reflection. But then what is left: is it an operation of pure perception? ‘Properly speaking: it forms a synthesis of time. A succession of instants does not constitute time any more than it causes it to disappear; it indicates only its constantly aborted moment of birth. Time is constituted only in the originary synthesis which operates on the repetition of instants. This synthesis contracts the successive independent instants into one another, thereby constituting the lived, or living, present. It is in this present that time is deployed. To it belong the past and the future: the past in so far as the preceding instants are retained in the contraction; the future because its expectation is anticipated in this same contraction. The past and the future do not designate instants distinct from a supposed present instant, but rather the dimensions of the {resent itself in so far as it is a contraction of instants’ {pp. 70-1}. DPB The retaining of past instants appears to be memory of some kind. Those past instances ‘contract’ into one another to constitute the present. This reminds me of neural networks, which retain ’impressions’ of events also, but they ‘flatten’ them into an algorithm, but they can reproduce (future) events with great depth and detail. That derivative depth and detail is said to be ‘contracted’ into the retaining system’s present. And the anticipation of future events is also contracted to form the present. But these are different (anticipatory) events, which intertwine with the past events to form the present. I reckon the sequence whereby they are contracted in the present bears consequences for the structuring of the present. This rendering of time is relevant for my ‘frivolity on time’: time is a construct for people to deal with the present: the present only exists as a contraction of future and past events and this ‘produces’ the present.

This is how time is perceived: while constructing the present! But it doesn’t take place as such and instead it is a representation. ‘The present does not have to go outside itself in order to pass from past to future. Rather, the living present goes from the past to the future which it constitutes in time, which is to say also from the particular to the general: from the particulars which it envelops by contraction to the general which it develops in the field of its expectation (the difference produced in the mind is generality itself in so far as it firms a living rule for the future). In any case, this synthesis must be given a name: passive synthesis’ {p 71 emphasis of DPB}. DPB this is a kind of a ‘levar o cabo’ mechanism, whereby the present is constructed from the past and the conditions of the anticipations of the future drawn from the present and into the present. To come from particulars (juist die) to the general (zo een) is also to come from many details to a population, from which statistical anticipations can be derived. ‘Although it is constructive, it is not, for all that, active. It is not carried out by the mind, but occurs in the mind which contemplates, prior to all memory and all reflection’ {p 71 emphasis of the author}. DPB This is a kind of passive perception (onwillekeurige involuntary function) and it is not an act which is continually conscious, but rather an involuntary act which happens regardless whether one is or isn’t conscious. I remember this somewhat esoteric illustration of dolphins swimming partly above and partly under the surface of the water to represent the thoughts occurring partly conscious and partly not conscious. And so time is a function of perception and specific for human beings. ‘Time is subjective, but in relation to the subjectivity of a passive subject. Passive synthesis or contraction is essentially asymmetrical: it goes from the past to the future in the present, thus from the particular to the general, thereby imparting direction to the arrow of time’ {p 71 emphasis of DPB}. DPB the arrow of time is informed about the direction it is supposed to take because of the flow from particular to general? I think I understand this: it is impossible to go back from general to particular and that is why the arrow of time is directed towards irreversibility! Once the shit (as a statistical substance which is constructed from particular elements) is out of the horse, then in the future it is increasingly difficult to put it back into the horse. When the particulars of the past are stored in a temporary space (not memory) it is not the past, but a reflexive past, a representation of it. DPB Whatever it is that people do with the the events they encounter. GD The future is now correlated and also not the immediate anticipated future but a reflexive representation of it. DPB In sum: By constructing a past from particulars and, constructing a future generated using generalities from the past, people construct a present. The constitution of repetition implies 3 instances: 1) in-itself causing it to disappear as it appears 2) for itself of the passive synthesis and 3) for-us reflected representation of active synthesis (eg voluntary memory). An analogous problem is of clock strokes: each is independent but together they are apart from memory contracted into ‘an internal qualitative impression within this living present or passive synthesis which is duration’ {p 72}. DPB = computation. ‘Difference therefore appears to abandon its first figure of generality and to be distributed in the repeating particular, but in such a way as to give rise to new living generalities’ {p 72}. DPB I thought we had already abandoned that figure of generality because that belongs to representation?! ‘We are made of contracted water, earth, light and air – not merely prior to the recognition or representation of these, but prior to their being sensed. Every organism, in its receptive and perceptual elements, but also in its viscera, is a sum of contractions, of retentions and expactations’ {p 73}. DPB Wolfram says that people’s perception is constituted from the same stuff as what they are trying to perceive with their powers of perception. And so computation is the rearranging of the elements of the configuration leading to that perception, not the representation of it or of them. ‘Each contraction, each passive synthesis (DPB eg involuntary perception), constitutes a sign which is interpreted or deployed in active synthesis. The signs by which an animal ‘senses’ the presence of water do not resemble the elements which its thirsty organism lacks’ {p 73 emphasis of DPB}. DPB so the faculties of the organism to find water are operational on a different scale (whole organism) than the faculties that lack water (cells). This is a good description of the micro- to macro problem. This is exactly why whatever is of interest to a population is not necessarily of interest to one of its members. The big thing is to find out their relation: what are the lacking elements and what are the signs, and, analogous, what are the lacking elements in the population and what are the signs of a solution the firm recognizes?

Is it through acting that we acquire habits or through contemplating? The established train of thought in psychology is that the self cannot contemplate itself, but this is not the question: ‘The question is whether or not the self itself is a contemplation, whether it is not in itself a contemplation, and whether we can learn, form behaviour and form ourselves other than through contemplation’ {p 73}. DPB In other words this suggests that there is no self if there is no contemplation. This reminds me of the thought about the consciousness as the traveling dolphins: sometime above (conscious) and sometimes below (unconscious) water, but continually going. A person is continually learning and forming behavior even when not contemplating, namely conscious of itself. ‘Habit draws something new from repetition – namely, difference (in the first instance understood as generality). In essence, habit is contraction’ {p 73}. DPB Contraction is the forming of the past and the future into the present. From these contractions habits are formed, or perhaps the other way around: from habits a contraction is formed, namely a pattern that can now be stored for later use and without further consideration (GD refers to the verb ‘to contract a habit’). But if I remember it correctly the contraction is not a conscious act. That is a given, but the forming of a habit can be even if the contraction that results from it is not. Contraction is to be understood as the fusion of successive tick-tocks in a contemplative soul, not the tick, opposed by the tock as a dilating or relaxing part. Passive synthesis is of this last kind: we expect it to last and we expect to perceive a tock after the tick, ‘.. a perpetuation of our case’ {p 74}. Habit is a contraction not because it is an instantaneous action which combines with another to form an element of repetition, but because it is a fusion of that repetition into the contemplating mind: ‘.. but a contemplative soul whose entire function is to contract a habit’ {p 74}. DPB this is about the fact that a human has a brain: had there been no pattern then there would’ve been no requirement for it. But what is the connection between the concept of a pattern as I often use it and the contraction as it is used here? The entire ‘practice’ of contracting is meant to deal with the changes in the environment. The mind does it through the recognizing of patterns or even the contracting of habits. These are patterns of behavior intended to maintain oneself in the future. ‘We do not contemplate ourselves, but we exist only in contemplating – that is to say: in contacting that from which we come’ {p 74}. To contemplate is to draw something from something else, and in order to get a picture of ourselves we must contemplate something else. There is not continuity apart form habit, from thousands of component habits. ‘It is easy to multiply reasons which make habit independent of repetition: to act is never to repeat, whether it be an action in process or an action already completed. As we have seen, action has, rather, the particular as its variable and generality as its element. However, while generality may well be quite different from repetition, it nevertheless refers to repetition as the hidden basis on which it is constructed. Action is constituted, in the order of generality and in the fields of variables which correspond to it, only by the contraction of elements of repetition. This contraction, however, takes place not in the action itself, but in a contemplative self which doubles the agent’ {p 75 emphasis of DPB}. DPB this statement reminds me of the relation between ideas and memes. But it refers to action also. What does it mean? Contraction is constituted from elements of repetition. Thisbelongs to the system, not to representation. Imaginary repetition is not a false repetition which stands in for the absent true repetition: true repetition takes place in imagination. Between a repetition which never ceases to unravel itself and a repetition which is deployed and conserved for us in the space of representation, there was difference, the for-itself of repetition, the imaginary. Difference inhabits repetition’ {p 76 emphasis of DPB}. DPB Difference lives in repetition. 1) difference allows us to pass from one order of repetition to another – from the instantaneous repetition to the actively represented through the intermediary of passive synthesis (capability to notice things while not focusing on them) and 2) to pass from one order of repetition to another and from one generality to another within the passive syntheses themselves (chickens head pulsate cardiacally and are synthesized perceptionally with grain). ‘In every way, material or bare repetition, so-called repetition of the same, is like a skin which unravels, the external husk of a kernel of difference and more complicated internal repetitions. Difference lies between two repetitions’ {p 76 emphasis of the author}. DPB this is the first explanation of the relation between difference and repetition. It is a difference between different kinds of repetitions, ‘.. repetition is a differenciator of difference’ {p 76}. DPB Important! The differences emerge from two or more sequences of differences, each a series constituting repetitions, and also different between them. Therefore a difference of differences. To differenciate means the becoming of difference. To differenciate differences is differences of differences which become.

Regarding time: ‘The synthesis of time constitutes the present in time. It is not that the present is a dimension of time: the present alone exists. Rather, synthesis constitutes time as a living present, and the past and the future as dimensions of this present. This synthesis is nonetheless intertemporal, which means that this present passes. .. It necessarily forms a present which may be exhausted and which passes, a present of a certain duration which varies according to the species, the individuals, the organisms and the parts of organisms under consideration’ {pp. 76-7}. DPB This is important, this I believe. Time is a construct of people. It is given by passive synthesis, not a conscious effort to link the events in them and around them to themselves, but it is instead unconscious. ‘The duration of an organism’s present, or of its various presents, will vary according to the natural contractile range of its contemplative souls’ {p 77}. DPB formula is a bit esoteric for me, but the concept is that the system’s hardware determines its contracting capabilities. Note the plural of the final word souls: this reminds me of the instances of the mind written about by Luhmann. But I seem to remember that he wrote about instances of minds not souls. ‘More precisely, need marks the limits of the variable present. The present extends between two eruptions of need, and coincides with the duration of a contemplation. The repetition of need, and of everything which depends upon it, expresses the time which belongs to the synthesis of time, the intratemporal character of that synthesis’ {p 77 emphasis of the author}. DPB Can I use this to underpin the idea of distinctions and erasing of them to define cognition such that firms react to difference to make a distinction and erase it (fulfillment of orders). In other words in this context they satisfy a need, or perhaps it is better to say they satisfy a lack of something in themselves. And time depends on that process. ‘Signs as we have defined them – as habitudes or contractions referring to one another – always belong to the present’ {p 77 emphasis of the author}. ‘Need expresses the openness of a question before it expresses the non-being or the absence of a response. To contemplate is to question. .. ‘What difference is there…?’ This is the question the contemplative soul puts to repetition, and to which it draws a response from repetition’ {p 78}. ‘These thousands of habits of which we are composed – these contractions, contemplations, pretensions, presumptions, satisfactions, fatigues; these variable presents – thus form the basic domain of passive synthesis. The passive self is not defined simply by receptivity – that is, by means of the capacity to experience sensations – but by virtue of he contractile contemplation which constitutes the organism itself before it constitutes the sensations. This self, therefore, is by no means simple: it is not enough to relativise or pluralise the self, all the while retaining for it s a simple attenuated form’ {p 78}. Selves are the product of contemplation: ‘ .. whenever a contracting machine capable of drawing a difference from repetition functions somewhere’ {pp. 78-9}. DPB what does this mean for the contemplation of a social system? And more specific can I use this to model the firm in general? Namely as a machine for the identification of differences and then to erase them. In principle this is a general machine and it is tweaked for the occasion, depending on the initial ideas pertaining to it when it is founded.

The first synthesis of time constitutes time as a present that passes: ‘Time does not escape the present, but the present does not stop moving by leaps and bounds which encroach upon one another. This is the paradox of the present: to constitute time while passing in the time constituted. We cannot avoid the necessary conclusion – that there must be another time in which the first synthesis of time can occur. This refers us to a second synthesis’ {p 79 emphasis of the author}. Why does the present pass or why is it not coextensive with time? The first synthesis, of habit, is the foundation of time, but we must distinguish the foundation (how something is established and possesses the soil) from the ground (measures the possessor and the soil against the other). ‘Habit is the foundation of time, the moving soil occupied by the passing present. The claim of the present is precisely that it passes. However, it is what causes the present to pass, that to which the present and habit belong, which must be considered the ground of time. It is memory that grounds time (emphasis of DPB). .. Habit is the originary synthesis of time, which constitutes the life of the passing present; Memory is the fundamental synthesis of time which constitutes the being of the past (that which causes the present to pass). At first sight, it is as if the past were trapped between two presents: the one which it has been and the one in relation to which it is past. The past is not the former present itself but the element in which we focus upon the latter. Particularly, therefore, now belongs to that on which we focus – in other words, to that which ‘has been’; whereas the past itself, the ‘was’, is by nature general’ {pp. 79-80 emphasis DPB}. DPB this reminds me of the focus of the observer of Luhmann and the observer of M&V.

The retention of habit is the state of successive habits contracted in a present present (sic). These instants formed a particularity, while the present itself (open to the future as per expectation) constitutes the general. The reproduction involved in memory is in the past (understood as the mediation of presents) which becomes general while the (present as well as former) present becomes particular. The former present finds itself represented in the present one {cf. P 80}. ‘The limits of this representation or reproduction are in fact determined by the variable relations of resemblance and contiguity (nabijheid DPB) known as forms of association. In order to be represented the former presence must be broken up into partially simultaneous presents with very different durations which are then contiguous with one another and even at the limit, contiguous with the present present’ {p 80}. DPB this resembles the movement from state to state. It reminds of computation a la Wolfram. And it reminds of the connotations. But this is compartmentalized into elements that each makes transfer from state to state wile they are contiguous in some way. ‘Now the former present cannot be represented in the present one without the present one itself being represented in that representation. .. not only to represent something but also to represent its own representativity. The present and former presents are not, therefore, like two successive instants on the line of time; rather, the present one necessarily contains an extra dimension in which it represents the former and also represents itself. The present present is treated not as the future object of a memory but as that which reflects itself at the same time as it forms the memory of the former present’ {p 80}. DPB a comparison is possible between the two, but beneath that is the computation taking place, whereby the memory of the system is all that it can do and the present is what it does. Active synthesis has correlative (non-symmetrical) aspects: reproduction and reflection, remembrance and recognition, memory and understanding. DPB these remind me of the two hands clapping: what is expressed is also perceived&c. ‘The past does not cause one present to pass without calling forth another, but itself neither passes nor comes forth. For this reason the past, far from being a dimension of time, is the synthesis of all time of which the present and the future are only dimensions. We cannot say that it was. It no longer exists, it does not exist, but it insists, it consists, it is. It insists with the former present, it consists with the new or present present. It is the in-itself of time as the final ground of the passage of time. In this sense it forms a pure, general, a priori element of all time’ {p 82 emphasis of the author}. DPB What does this mean: it does not connect with the idea that the present is squeezed in between the past and the future. Instead the past does not exist but as a version of a former presence stored in memory. ‘There is thus a substantial temporal element (the Past which was never present) playing the role of ground. This is not itself represented. It is always the former or the present present which is represented’ {p 82}. The difference between the material repetition 1) and the spiritual repetition 2) is: 1) is a succession of independent elements or instants and 2) is a repetition of the Whole on diverse co-existing levels. DPB 1) I understand but 2) is a meme? 1) and 2) have a different relation to difference itself. Difference is drawn from 1) and it is included in 2), 1) is bare, 2) is clothed, 1) is a repetition of parts, 2) of the whole, 1) involves succession 2) coexistence, 1) is actual 2) is virtual, 1) is horizontal 2) is vertical. DPB: does this comply with my understanding that the actual is what something presently is (or rather what it is in surrounded with in te sense of condtioned by factors external to it) and the virtual is everything it possibly could be in reality?In consequence, the difference between presents themselves is that between the two repetitions: that of the elementary instants from which difference is subtracted, and that of the levels of the whole in which difference is included’ {p 84}. DPB is this what actually occurs and what is represented to us respectively? NO: ‘Neither of these two repetitions is, strictly speaking, representable’ {p 84}. Material repetition comes undone even as it occurs and can be represented only by the active synthesis. Spiritual repetition unfolds in the being in itself of the past, whereas representation concerns only presents resulting from active synthesis, subordinating all repetition. DPB I don’t understand this. Maybe a little regarding the active synthesis: the one deals with it online real-time, the other represents it. And also: the one repetition takes plae in the system I focus and the other one takes place in the mind of the one who focuses. ‘The passive syntheses are obviously sub-representative’ {p 84}. But how can we penetrate the in-itself of the past without reducing it to the former present that it was, or to the present present to which it is past? The answer is reminiscence (Proust). Two presents telescoped together: the former present that it was, and the present present that it could be. Former presents may be represented beyond forgetting by active synthesis. ‘If there is an in-itself of the past, then reminiscence is its noumenon or the thought with which it is invested. Reminiscence does not simply refer us back from a present present to former ones, .. The present exists, but the past alone insists and provides the element in which the present passes and successive presents are telescoped’ {p 85}.

The past is repetition by default, and it prepares this other repetition constituted by the metamorphosis in the present. Historians sometimes look for empirical correspondences between the present and the past, but however rich it may be, this network of historical correspondences between the present and the past involves repetition only by analogy or similitude. In truth the past is in itself repetition, as is the present, but they are repetition in two different modes which repeat each other. Repetition is never a historical fact, but rather the historical condition under which something new is effectively produced’ {p 90 emphasis of DPB}. DPB The past is by definition a repetition. It prepares the ground for the other repetition, namely through habits does it enable anticipation and therefore the constitution of the future, at least that future component of the present. ‘Repetition is a condition of action before it is a concept of reflection’ {p 90 emphasis of the author}. DPB This is important because it points at the mechanic character of the dynamics of a system, including a system involving people. Actions are performed based on the perception of past actions and then the consequences are perceived passively and / or actively and reflected upon to anticipate what’s up and design new actions. ‘.. expelling the agent and the condition in the name of the work or product; making repetition, not that from which one ‘draws off’ a difference, nor that which includes difference as a variant, but making it the thought and the production of the ‘absolutely different’; making it so that repetition is, for itself, difference in itself’ {p 94}. DPB ever closer to the machine of Ashby.

Biopsychic life implies a field of individuation in which differences in intensity are distributed here and there in the form of excitations. The quantitative and qualitative process of the resolution of such differences is what we call pleasure. A totality of this kind – a mobile distribution of differences and local resolutions within an intensive field – corresponds to what Freud called the Id, or at least the primary layer of the Id. The word ‘id’ {ça} in this sense is not only a pronoun referring to some formidable unknown, but also an adverb referring to a mobile place, a ‘here and there’ {ça et là} of excitations and resolutions’ {p 96}. DPB This reminds me of the distinctions and the resolutions of my thesis. In the above terms: differences in intensity exist and they have the form of excitations. Pleasure means that existing differences are resolved qualitatively and quantitatively because they are effaced such that they are resolved. The idea of pleasure obtained and the idea of pleasure to be obtained can only act under the presumption that there is a past and a future, pleasure as such is presupposed. But habit, as a passive binding synthesis presupposes the pleasure principle. ‘When pleasure acquires the dignity of a principle, then an only then does the idea of pleasure act in accordance with that principle, in memory or in projects. Pleasure then exceeds its own instanteneity in order to assume the allure of satisfaction in general..’ {p 97}. DPB This is the relation between the difference emerging and the difference cancellation: important, because why does the firm bother at all to make any distinction in the first place and then go through the trouble of erasing it? But if it can be said to experience pleasure from the erasure then what is that pleasure in (terms of the) cosmology of a firm? Maybe this is a part of the answer: ‘The repetition of an excitation has as its true object the elevation of the passive synthesis to a power which implies the pleasure principle along with its future and past applications. Repetition in habit or the passive synthesis of binding is thus ‘beyond’ the principle’ {p 98 emphasis of DPB}. DPB an eye is not ‘for’ something, it is there because there was the continual excitation of light on a part of the body. But now that it is there it serves the pleasure principle in the sense that the organism lives longer &c. The operation of seeing is independent of the pleasure principle: it was established regardless the chances of obtaining pleasure from it and its operation is passive and therefore not intentional.

Virtual objects belong essentially to the past’ {p 101}. DPB I believe this refers to the finite number of ideas that compose an Idea: when an idea is launched then it becomes part of the set of all ideas: the Idea. But it is regurgitated (as part of the Same?), it is extended with each time an idea is launched in the present and therefore it belongs to the past: ‘The virtual object is not a former present, since the quality of the present and the modality of its passing here affect exclusively the series of the real as this is constituted by active synthesis. However, the pure past as it was defined above does qualify the virtual object; that is, the past as contemporaneous with its own present, as pre-existing the passing present and as that which causes the present to pass. Virtual objects are shreds of pure past. .. Although it is deducted from the present real object, the virtual object differs from it in kind: not only does it lack something in relation to the real object from which it is subtracted, it lacks something in itself, since it is always half of itself, the other half being different as well as absent. This absence, as we shall see, is the opposite of a negative. Eternal half of itself, it is where it is only on condition that it is not where it should be. It is where we find it only on condition that we search for it where it is not. It is at once not possessed by those who have it and had by those who do not possess it. It is always a ‘was’’ {pp. 101-2 emphasis of the author}. DPB this is descriptive of a meme. GD The model is considered to be realist because everything happens between presents. It is materialist because ‘brute, automatic repetition is presupposed’. ‘It is individualist, subjective, solipsistic or monadic because both the former present – in other words, the repeated or disguised element – and the new present – in other words, the present terms of the disguised repetition – are considered to be only the conscious or unconscious, latent or manifest, repressed or repressing representations of the subject. The whole theory of repetition is thereby subordinated to the requirements of simple representation, from the standpoint of its realism, materialism and subjectivism. Repetition is subjected to a principle of identity in the former present and a rule of resemblance in the present one’ {p 104 emphasis of the author, emphasis in bold of DPB}. DPB Important because it is explained how two presents coexist, namely in the sense of a repetition and a framing thereof in present terms. However, while it may seem that the two presents are successive, at a variable distance apart in the series of reals, in fact they form, rather, two real series which coexist in relation to a virtual object of another kind, one which constantly circulates and is displaced in them (even if the characters, the subjects which give rise to the positions, the terms and the relations of each series, remain, for their part, temporarily distinct). Repetition is constituted not from one present to another, but between the two coexistent series that these presents form in function of the virtual object (object = x)’ {pp. 104-5 emphasis of DPB}. DPB this reminds me of the double planes of cultural evolution analogous to the genotype phenotype and the memeplex-and-realization proposition. What happens is that there is a past that gets transformed into the present and there is a present that functions as a frame, I presume this is the actual. These are two series generated independently and where they connect a new repetitin is constituted.

Consider the statements 1) only that which is alike differs and 2) only differences are alike. 1) resemblance as a condition for difference and therefore an identical concept for both. This means that they differ on condition they are alike and an analogy of both the differing things to the concept. Finally their difference is reduced to an opposition determined by these three moments. 2) resemblance, identity, analogy and opposition are mere effects, namely products of a primary difference or -system of differences. According to the 2) the difference must immediately relate the differing terms to one another. Difference must be articulation and connection in itself: ’.. it (difference DPB) must relate different to different without any mediation whatsoever by the identical, the similar, the analogous or the opposed. There must be a differenciation of difference, an in-itself which is like a differenciator, a Sich-unterscheidende, by virtue of which the different is gathered all at once rather than represented on condition of a prior resemblance, identity, analogy or opposition’ {p 117 emphasis of the author, emphasis in bold of DPB}. Are 1) and 2) the same or are they applicable to different systems and incompatible between them? Under the same conditions does difference fall under the categories of representation. Under what conditions does difference develop this in-itself as a ‘differenciator’ and gather a different outside representation? 1) organization into a system of two or more series each defined by the differences between its terms. Important summary of differenciation: Differences between the series are connected by communication of some kind between them, constituting differences between differences. These second-order differences play the role of differenciator relating the first-order differences to the second-order ones. ‘This state of affairs is adequately expressed by certain physical concepts: coupling between heterogeneous systems, from which is derived an internal resonance within the systems, and from which in turn is derived a forced movement the amplitude of which exceeds that of the basic series themselves. The nature of these elements whose value is determined at once both by their difference in the series to which they belong, and by the difference of their difference from one series to another, can be determined: these are intensities, the peculiarity of intensities being to be constituted by a difference which itself refers to other differences (E-E’ where E refers to e-e’ and e to ɛ-ɛ’ …)’ {p 117 emphasis of the author}. Examples are: words in aesthetic systems and concepts in philosophical systems. When communication between heterogeneous series is established then something passes between borders and ‘flashes occur’. What ensures this communication between the series? ‘Given two heterogeneous series, two series of differences, the precursor plays he part of he differenciator of these differences. In this manner, by virtue of its own power, it puts them into immediate relation to one another: it is the in-itself of difference or the differently different’ – in other words, difference in the second degree, the self-different which relates different to different by itself’ {p 119}. This difference in itself or difference which relates heterogeneous systems is the disparate. ‘We have seen that small and large apply badly to difference, because they judge it according to the criteria of the Same and similar. If difference is related to its differenciator, and if we refrain from attributing to the differenciator an identity that it cannot and does not have, the the difference will be small or large according to its possibilities of fractionation – that is, according to the displacements and the disguise of the differenciator’ {p 120}. Differences large or small can not claim resemblance and the relaxation of it respectively. ‘Resemblance is in any case an effect, a functional product, an external result – an illusion which appears once the agent arrogates to itself an identity that it laced. The important thing is not that the difference be small or large, and ultimately always small in relation to a greater resemblance. The important thing, for the in-itself, is that the difference, whether small or large, be internal’ {pp. 120-1 emphasis in bold of DPB}. Difference is the kernel of the system.In playing this role (of precursor DPB) it (Language DPB) differenciates the differences between the different things spoken of, relating these immediately to one another in series which it causes to resonate’ {p 121}. DPB this reminds me of the propensity of a system to define its cosmology and he topology of its space from within through internal resonances, and the explanation here is that this occurs through the differences of differences within series, in this case in different series of language as it is used. ‘What takes place in the system between resonating series under the influence of the dark precursor is called ‘epiphany’’ {p 121}. ‘The trinity complication-explication-implication accounts for the totality of the system – in other words, the chaos which contains all, the divergent series which lead out and back in, and the differenciator which relates them one to another. Each series explicates or develops itself, but in its difference from the other series, which it implicates and which implicate it, which it envelops and which envelop it; in this chaos which complicates everything. The totality of the system, the unity of the divergent series as such, correspnds to the objectivity of a ‘problem’’ {pp. 123-4 emphasis of the author, emphasis in bold of DPB}. DPB This is an explanation of my concept of the monads and perhaps even the nomad reality of Weaver (are we getting there). ‘The essential point is the simultaneity and contemporaneity of all the divergent series, the fact that all coexist. From the point of view of the presents which pass in representation, the series are certainly successive, one ‘before’ and the other ‘after’. It is from this point of view that the second is said to resemble the first. However, this no longer applies from the point of view of the chaos which contains them, ..’ {p 124 emphasis of the author}. When two series coexist they unfold simultaneously and they are equal, then the differences between the two are equal. However small the differences are the one is not a model for the other the other not a copy of the one. Resemblance and identity are functional effects of that difference which is originary with the system. The systems coexist independent of any resemblance. ‘It is under this aspect, without doubt, that the eternal return is revealed as the groundless ‘law’ of this system. The eternal return does not cause the same and the similar to return, but is itself derived from a world of pure difference. .. The eternal return has no other sense but this: the absence of any assignable origin – in other words, the assignation of difference as the origin, which then relates different to different in order to make it (or them) return as such’ {p 124}. ‘Repetition is no more the permanence of the One, than the resemblance of the many. The subject of the eternal return is not the same but the different, not the similar but the dissimilar, not the one but the many, not necessity but chance’ {p 126 emphasis in bold of DPB}. The same and the similar are effects of the operations of the eternal return.

Chapter III The Image of thought

GD to philosophize involves to refer all presuppositions to the empirical self. And in that sense it is both objective and subjective, to start with what everyone knows, pre-conceptually and pre-philosophically. ‘The philosopher takes the side of the idiot, as though of a man without presuppositions’ {p 130 emphasis of DPB}. DPB Important, mention in the introduction: This is applicable also to my approach of economic thinking. No presupposed ideas should be required to explain why and how firms exist. My explanation, namely my theory should be explained in terms of the empirical self of the envisioned audience. ‘Many people have an interest in saying that everybody knows ‘this’, that everybody recognizes this, or that nobody can deny it. (They triumph easily so long as no surly interlocutor appears to reply that he does not wish to be so represented, and that he denies or does not recognize those who speak in his name.)’ {p 131}.

GD Conceptual philosophical thought presupposes a pre-philosophical and natural image of thought borrowed from common sense. According to this image thought has an affinity with the true. In terms of it, everyone is supposed to know what it means to think. This image prejudges everything. But it is not a natural given: ‘’Everybody’ knows very well that in fact men think rarely, and more often under the impulse of a shock than in the excitement of a taste for thinking’ {p 132}. DPB Nice for the introduction. Also interesting that this is the only condition from which to develop this philosophy: to appeal to a general lack of something! But they claim a lack of every other element of cognition, namely hearing, memory &c. but never a lack of capabilities to think. Something is recognized ’when all the faculties (perceiving, memory, imagination, understanding DPB) together relate their given and relate themselves to a form of identity in the object’ {p 133}. DPB How can this image of thought be overturned as a pure act of recognition? Importantly: the faculties are a kind of an overlay over themselves and they have a connection between themselves, but they are not a kind of a Cartesian function as such. ‘Such is the world of representation in general. We said above that representation was defined by certain elements: identity with regard to concepts, opposition with regard to the determination of concepts, analogy with regard to judgment, resemblance with regard to objects’ {p 137 emphasis of the author}.

Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. .. In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed. In this sense it is opposed to recognition. In recognition, the sensible is not at all that which can only be sensed, but that which bears directly upon the senses in an object which can be recalled, imagined or conceived’ {p 139 emphasis of DPB}. GD The sensible can be attained via the senses, or not through the senses, but through other faculties. The sensible presupposes the use of the senses and the exercise of the other faculties in a common sense. ‘The object of encounter, on the other hand, really gives rise to sensibility with regard to a given sense’ {p 139}. DPB Important: thinking is induced in an encounter by something that can be sensed. It is opposed to recognition whereby the induction takes place by a sensibility which bears upon the senses through recalling, imagination or conception. ‘Our concern here is not to establish such a doctrine of the faculties. We seek only to determine the nature of its requirements. In this regard, the Platonic determinations cannot be satisfactory. For it is not figures already mediated and related to representation that are capable of carrying the faculties to their respective limits but, on the contrary, free or untamed states of difference in itself; not qualitative opposition within the sensible, but an element which is in itself difference, and creates at once both the quality in the sensible and the transcendent exercise within sensibility. This element is intensity, understood as pure difference in itself, as that which is at once both imperceptible for empirical sensibility which grasps intensity only already covered or mediated by the quality to it gives rise, and at the same time that which can be perceived only from the point of view of a transcendental sensibility which apprehends it immediately in the encounter’ {p 144 emphasis in bold of DPB}. DPB this grasps the essence of the difference between the ‘states of difference in itself’ and ‘instances of difference related to representation’ in the sense that they are perceived through the senses.

GD There is something which is communicated between the faculties. But it is metamorphosed and does not form a common sense. There are in this sense Ideas which traverse all the faculties but which are the object of none in particular. ‘Perhaps, in effect, as we shall see, it will be necessary to reserve the name of Ideas not for pure cogitanda but rather for those instances which go from sensibility to thought and from thought to sensibility, capable of engendering in each case, according to their own order, the limit- or transcendent-object of each faculty.. Ideas are problems, but problems only furnish the conditions under which the faculties attain their superior exercise. Considered in this light, Ideas, far from having as their milieu a good sense or a common sense, refer to a para-sense which determines only the communication between disjointed faculties’ {p 146 emphasis of the author}. DPB Important. Where does an Idea exist. Like the meme it exists in the ‘space’ between having been perceived and having been expressed. GD inserts thinking.

Chapter IV Ideas and the Synthesis of Difference

Ideas are problematic. Problems are Ideas. DPB Answers to questions are ideas. ‘Ideas have legitimate uses only in relation to concepts of the understanding; but conversely, the concepts of the understanding find the ground of their (maximum) full experimental use only in the degree to which they are related to problematic Ideas: either by being arranged upon lines which converge upon an ideal focus which lies outside the bounds of experience, or by being conceived on the basis of a common horizon which embraces them all. Such focal points or horizons are Ideas – in other words, problems as such – whose nature is at once both immanent and transcendent’ {pp. 168-9 emphasis in bold of DPB}. DPB if something is immanent (transfer to a next state originates in them) and transcendent (they are superior to the transfer such enabling a focus). I am looking for this relation between ideas and memes. If Ideas are memes, then memes are both immanent (inducing the next state) and transcendent (allowing a focus): change originates from them (possible) and they are above change (possible). GD An object outside experience is represented in a problematic form: problems are the real objects of Ideas. DPB if an idea is an answer to a problem (represented with a question), then an Idea is all the possible answers to that problem. There is one problem and all these answers have it as their object. ‘The object of an Idea, Kant reminds us, is neither fiction nor hypothesis nor object of reason: it is an object which can be neither given nor known, but must be represented without being able to be directly determined. Kant likes to say that problematic Ideas are both objective and undetermined’ {p 169}. DPB but what is the substance of an Idea? How can a river have an Idea and social system have an Idea too? But then again, what is the difference between them in principle? Maybe there is a misunderstanding in regard the use of the word idea, because if an idea is an instance of a meme, then what is the relation between an idea as it is used here and the idea in that former sense?

The undetermined is positive and it acts like a focus or a horizon within perception. ‘In effect, the undetermined object, or object as it exists in the Idea, allows us to represent other objects (those of experience) which it endows with a maximum of systematic unity’ {p 169 emphasis of DPB}. DPB This explains how the suspected object of the Idea is also suspected to be / become an object of experience. Now it is possible that something from experience is recognized as an object of an Idea such that it is likened to a unity. ‘In this manner, however, the undetermined is only the first objective moment of the Idea. For on the other hand, the object of the Idea becomes indirectly determined: it is determined by analogy with those objects of experience upon which it confers unity, but which in return offer it a determination ‘analogous’ to the relations it entertains with them. Finally, the object of the Idea carries with it the ideal of a complete and infinite determination, since it ensures a specification of the concepts of the understanding, by means of which the latter comprise more and more differences on the basis of a properly infinite field of continuity’ {p 169 emphasis of DPB}. DPB This is akin to my encounter and the Luhmann event where the mind meets the meme through the experiences which I have coined realizations, namely the expressions and perceptions during the encounter (Luhmann event). Now the Idea (or its object) is likened to the experience at some level of detail. Both as a consequence are affected by / in the event. The quote also describes how this takes place: as a pursuit of a complete determination of the understanding for reasons of the infinity of the continuity (the understanding is expanded through the realization that there are ever more more differences). ‘Ideas, therefore, present three moments: undetermined with regard to their object, determinable with regard to the objects of their experience, and bearing the ideal of an infinite determination with regards to concepts of the understanding’ {p 169 emphasis of DPB}. DPB This resonates with me because of the process of the hands clapping where the mind is influenced by the encounters with memes. But in addition this describes how the pump works: why do they ‘want to’ enter encounters time and again. GD likens the Idea to dx. DPB my understanding is that many dx make up an x and therefore it is x which should be likened to the Idea. But dx only is something in relation to x and when related they add up to zero. I am not clear about this. ‘Ideas are concrete universals in which extension and comprehension go together – not only because they included variety or multiplicity in themselves, but because they include singularity in all its varieties. They subsume the distribution of distinctive or singular points; their distinctive character – in other words, the distinctiveness of Ideas – consists precisely in the distribution of the ordinary and the distinctive, the singular and the regular, and in the extension of the singular across regular points into the vicinity of another singularity. There is no abstract universal beyond the individual or beyond the particular and the general; it is singularity in itself which is ‘pre-individual’ {p 176 emphasis of DPB}. DPB The first sentence refers to both the meme and the mind. Or rather it refers to the encounter, where the extension and the comprehension are shaped. The Ideas include singularity in all its varieties. Singularities stretch up to the vicinity of the next one. There is no abstract of them but it is the singularity itself that is pre-individual.

The central question here is whether infinite is real of fictive. ‘That is why the metaphysical question was announced from the outset: why is it that, from a technical point of view, the differentials are negligible and must disappear in the result? It is obvious that to invoke here the infinitely small, and the infinitely small magnitude of the error (if there is ‘error’), is completely lacking in sense and prejudges infinite representation’ {p 177 emphasis of DPB}. DPB I believe this is what chaos theory has taught us (or what it has confirmed) and also it is confirmed by Wolfram: that the differentials or any numbers assigned to real things) are irrelevant for the processes. It is a mere ranking for human consumption. To treat the differentials in calculus as they are treated is required to enable the identification of optima, not because they are pertinent to the system under review (DPB my words, this is a common mistake in economics also). ‘In short, the complete determination of a problem is inseparable from the existence, the number and the distribution of the determinant points which precisely provide its conditions (one singular point gives rise to two condition equations). However, it then becomes more and more difficult to speak of error or the compensation of errors. .. They (the condition equations DPB) are constitutive of the problem and of its synthesis’ {p 177 emphasis of the author}. DPB This reminds me of the meme and the realization as an Idea in an actual (the ensemble of the problem and its conditions). The point is that there is no such thing as a thing and therefore not a variation from its ideal and therefore not an error. ‘However, the problematic element, with its extra-propositional character, does not fall within representation. Neither particular nor general, neither finite nor infinite, it is the object of the Idea as a universal. This differential element is the play of difference as such, which can neither be mediated by representation nor subordinated to the identity of the concept’ {p 178}. DPB Re problematic: see the first sentence of the summary of this chapter. Three aspects of a problem are: 1) it is different in kind from a solution 2) it is transcendant in relation to the solutions it engenders (find the problem which belongs to these questions is akin to a problem of mathematical integration) and 3) it is immanent in the solutions which cover it. Every problem is dialectical (there are no non-dialectical problems, by positing the question a distinction is automatically made) and every solution is mathematical (or economic, &c): ‘Problems are always dialectical: the dialectic has no other sense, nor do problems have another sense’ {p 179 emphasis of the author}. The discipline does provide solutions to problems but also ‘.. the expressions of the problems relative to the field of solvability which they define’ {p 179}. DPB Why would this possibly be important? I reckon it is because of the way that firms develop solutions to the problems with which they find themselves confronted. They are in fact solution machines for the problems assigned to them. DPB Possibly important as a matter of introduction to the final chapters where distinctions are discussed.

Ideas are multiplicities: every idea is a multiplicity or a variety. In this Riemannian usage of the word ‘multiplicity’ (taken up by Husserl, and again by Bergson, the utmost importance must be attached to the substantive form: multplicity must not designate a combination of the many and the one, but rather an organisation belonging to the many as such, which has no need whatsoever of unity in order to form a system’ {p 182}. DPB see explanation from Wikipedia: The philosopher Jonathan Roffe describes Deleuze’s concept of Multiplicity as follows: “A multiplicity is, in the most basic sense, a complex structure that does not reference a prior unity. Multiplicities are not parts of a greater whole that have been fragmented, and they cannot be considered manifold expressions of a single concept or transcendent unity. On these grounds, Deleuze opposes the dyad One/Many, in all of its forms, with multiplicity. Further, he insists that the crucial point is to consider multiplicity in its substantive form – a multiplicity – rather than as an adjective – as multiplicity of something. Everything for Deleuze is a multiplicity in this fashion.”Deleuze argues in his commentary Bergsonism (1966) that the notion of multiplicity forms a central part of Bergson’s critique of philosophical negativity and the dialectical method. The theory of multiplicities, he explains, must be distinguished from traditional philosophical problems of “the One and the Multiple.”{4} By opposing “the One and the Multiple,” dialectical philosophy claims “to reconstruct the real,” but this claim is false, Bergson argues, since it “involves abstract concepts that are much too general.”{5}

Instead of referring to “the Multiple in general”, Bergson’s theory of multiplicities distinguishes between two types of multiplicity: continuous multiplicities and discrete multiplicities (a distinction that he developed from Riemann).{6} The features of this distinction may be tabulated as follows:

Continuous multiplicities Discrete multiplicities
differences in kind differences in degree
divides only by changing in kind divides without changing in kind
non-numerical – qualitative numerical – quantitative
differences are virtual differences are actual
continuous discontinuous
qualitative discrimination quantitative differentiation
succession simultaneity
fusion juxtaposition
organization order
subjective – subject objective – object
duration space

Wikipedia June 2019

So in other words a multiplicity is a multitude with a measure of organization (coherence) but without an identity. But that is also how I have used it, namely to explain what takes place in a multitude of ideas when there is not yet an autopoietic system in place. ‘’Multiplicity’, which replaced the one no less than the multiple, is the true substantive, substance itself. The variable multiplicity is the how many, the how and each of the cases. Everything is a multiplicity in so far as it incarnates an Idea. .. Instead of the enormous opposition between the one and the many, there is only the variety of multiplicity – in other words, difference’ {p 182 emphasis of DPB}. DPB This means that every system is one on the condition that it can do something. I have to amend this in the text, that an autopoietic system is a multiplicity too, but one of a kind. As per the autopoiesis it has an additional design condition. ‘An Idea is an n-dimensional, continuous, defined multiplicity.Colour – or rather, the Idea of colour – is a three-dimensional multiplicity. By dimensions we mean the variables or co-ordinates upon which a phenomenon depends; by continuity, we mean the set of relations between changes in these variables – for example, a quadratic form of he differentials of the co-ordinates; by definition we mean the elements reciprocally determined by these relations, elements which cannot change unless the multiplicity changes its order and its metric’ {p 182 emphasis of DPB}. DPB I have written how I understand dimensions: I remember that it is something like this: what is comparable between the properties of different elements or components. I do not agree with the continuous in a mathematical sense, because I don’t believe that there is such a thing as a continuous form. GD The conditions for the emergence of an Idea are: 1) the elements of the multiplicity must have neither sensible form nor conceptual signification, nor, therefore, any assignable function 2) The elements must be determined reciprocally namely by reciprocal relations that alllow no independence to exist and 3) a differential relation must be actualized in diverse spatio-temporal relationships at the same time. ‘The Idea is thus defined as a structure. A structure or an Idea is a ‘complex theme’, an internal multiplicity – in other words, a system of multiple, non-localisable connections between differential elements which is incarnated in real relations and actual terms. In this sense, we see no difficulty in reconciling genesis and structure’ {p 183 emphasis of DPB}. DPB This is very important, because this is at the heart of the emergence of a firm as a firm. This is called structuralism. The text goes on as follows: It is sufficient to understand that the genesis takes place in time not between one actual term, however small, and another actual term, but between the virtual and its actualization – in other words, it goes from the structure to its incarnation, from the conditions of a problem to the cases of solution, from the differential elements and their ideal connections to actual terms and diverse real relations which constitute at each moment the actuality of time’ {p 183 emphasis of DPB}. DPB Important! This is a description of how I understand individuation. This genesis is static, it is passive synthesis.

First example:-

Second example: the organism as biological Idea. ‘Nevertheless, chromosomes appear as loci; in other words, not simple as places in space but as complexes of relations of proximity; genes express differential elements which also characterise an organism in a global manner, and play the role of distinctive points in a double process of reciprocal and complete determination; the double aspect of genes involves commanding several characteristics at once, and acting only in relation to other genes; the whole constitutes a virtuality, a potentiality; and this structure is incarnated in actual organisms, as much from the point of view of the determination of their species as from that of the differenciation of their parts, according to comparative speeds or slowness which measure the movement of actualisation’ {p 185 emphasis of DPB}. DPB This words well how an organism is an instance, an example of an organism, which occupies a part, a compartment in the space of all possible solutions, a station at the pivot of an out of equilibrium network. That particular solution that has become that organism, which tensions the space of its compartment (can we say its niche?) and in doing so it tensions the space of all possible solutions in regards organisms. But as yet it is unclear which instances of particular species are to be expected, and how many are at all possible. And in particular that is unknown, because the sequence determines what can come after. Each of the strands that have become a particular organism is sensitively dependent on (initial or at least external) conditions, and as a consequence when something changes somewhere then a species that could have followed the one just gone extinct will now never be possible and a range of new organisms (designs) has become possible with the extinction of that one. In this same sense, and somewhat confusingly, the meme is an Idea also. It is a bit confusing because it involved ideas in a more literal sense, while in the above example it is the Idea of a physical solution.

Third example: Are there social Ideas, in a Marxist sense? ‘The social Idea is the element of quantitability, qualitability and potentiality of societies. It expresses a system of multiple ideal connections, or differential relations between differential elements: these include relations of production and property relations which are established not between concrete individuals but between atomic bearers of labour-power or representatives of property. The economic instance is constituted by such a social multiplicity – in other words, by the varieties of these differential relations’ {p 186}. DPB This quote GD suggests to tension the economic sphere as per the dimensions of a number of parameters assigned to the ‘bearers of..’ as their incarnation. This is very interesting, because GD sees people ‘as a species’ as the composing elements. They contribute to the economic system as per their neutral contribution and that determines those dimensions. The number of dimensions is small and limited. The ideas are considered to be separated from the individual people bearing them. The identity of the people is not considered to be relevant (atomic bearers). ‘In short, the economic is the social dialectic itself – in other words, the totality of the problems posed to a given society, or the synthetic and problematising field of that society. In all rigour, there are only economic social problems, even though the solutions may be juridical, political or ideological, and the problems may be expressed in these fields of resolvability’ {p 186}. DPB Important (though doubtfully quotable) and indirect. The point is that the economic system is seen as a social dialectic. I wonder if this means a system as such, because the final sentence mentions resolvability. And so is it a dialectic system resolving problems?

Ideas are complexes of coexistence. In a certain sense all Ideas coexist, but they do so at points, on the edges, and under glimmerings which never have the uniformity of a natural light. On each occasion, obscurities and zones of shadow correspond to their distinction. Ideas are distinguished from one another, but not all in the same manner as forms and the terms in which these are incarnated. They are objectively made and unmade according to the conditions which determine their fluent synthesis. This is because they combine the greatest power of being differentiated with an inability to be differenciated. Ideas are varieties which include in themselves sub-varieties’ {pp. 186-7 emphasis of the author}. DPB Important The concept of an Idea is not (or not only) the same as the concept of an idea as it is used everyday. It can be anything including any process. But it seems that the concept points at the ‘mechanics’ of these things and processes, not their representation. They are ‘complexes of coexistence’ which means that they start where another begins. I guess this takes a while, and on some occasions it never happens and there is always a fibrillation. Anyhow, the locus where one begns and the other ends s at the point where attractions and repulsions take their influence. And also that they develop in the context of others. But that does not mean the same as the taking effect of their forms, I take it that this means their behavior. They have no overlappings, but they touch where they have, or seems to have (it is not clear), common points. They are distinct but not in the same way as they are said to be distinct, namely in a linguistic sense. They are made to what they are (if they are) by the conditions they pose to one another. They tension the space they occupy and in that sense they differentiate, but they do not differenciate, namely make new differences, become by themselves different. This bit is difficult to understand, unless it is taken into account that they require an observer to differenciate (them). Can it be that such newness is in the eye of the observer and it did not pre-exist because the observer was not present? Consider the example of the liver fluke: from the perspectves of the individual hsts it is less strange that this contraption comes together than it is for the (human) observer to whom this solution appears to be a very unlikely coincidence. Ideas are an sich varieties which have in them sub-varieties (is this the same as to say that they have sub-Ideas in them?). That implies that Ideas are not just memes but that they are memeplexes too. The answer may be here, important: ’We can distinguish three dimensions of variety. In the first, vertical dimension we can distinguish ordinal varieties according to the nature of the elements and the differential relations: for example, mathematical, mathematico-physical, chemical, biological, sociological and linguistic Ideas.. … Each level implies differentials of a different dialectical ‘order’, but the elements of one order can pass over into those of another under new relations, either by being dissolved in the larger superior order or by being reflected in the inferior order. In the second, horizontal dimension we can distinguish characteristic varieties corresponding to the degrees of a differential relation within a given order, and to the distribution of singular points for each degree (such as the equation for conic sections, which gives according to the case an ellipse, a hyperbola, a parabola or a straight line; or the varieties of animal ordered from the point of view of unity of composition; or the varieties of language ordered from the point of view of their phonological system). Finally, in depth we can distinguish axiomatic varieties which determine a common axiom for differential relations of a different order, on condition that this axiom itself coincides with a third-order differential relation (for example, the addition of real numbers and the composition of displacements; or, in an altogether different domain, the weaving speech practiced by the Griaule Dogons). Ideas and the distinctions between Ideas are inseparable from their types of varieties, and from the manner in which each type enters into the others. We propose the term ‘perplication to designate this distinctive and coexistent state of Ideas’ {p 187 emphasis of the author, emphais in bold of DPB}. DPB There are three kinds of varieties: vertical, horizontal and in depth, which are always there and their particular combination is inseparable from the Idea and its distinctions. This means that there is no inherent difference between memes and memeplexes, but their elements can pass over between orders (I guess of observation), such as memes passing over from one social system, say efficiency objectives from business economics to another, say efficient spending of tax money as an agenda item in politics, and they are characterized by their differential relations within an order, meaning that they have a different relation between them and that I have tried to solve using the concept of connotations. The third one I find difficult to understand: a common axiom in vigor on different orders: that means that there are common properties on different order, but that is the same as to say that an organism has the same properties as the molecule. ‘Ideas are by no means essences. In so far as they are the object of Ideas, problems belong on the side of events, affections, or accidents rather than on that of theorematic essences. Ideas are developed in the auxiliaries and the adjunct fields by which their synthetic power is measured. Consequently, the domain of Ideas is that of the inessential’ {p 187 emphasis of DPB}. DPB Their variety can change and therefore they are not essential and therefore they are inessential, a mobile scatter of Ideas with varying relations between them and between orders and axioms. Important: but isn’t the axiom determined by the observer and is this therefore not the crux of the fact that the Idea is subject to the focus of the observer? ‘In this sense, it is correct to represent a double series of events which develop on two planes, echoing without resembling each other: real events on the level of the engendered solutions, and ideal events embedded in the conditions of the problem, like the acts – or, rather, the dreams – of the gods who double our history. The ideal series enjoys the the double property of transcendence and immanence in relation to the real’ {pp.188-9 emhasis of DPB}. DPB These are like my two planes of development: one of the realization of memes and one of the development of memes themselves. The realization is the real and the memes are the virtual (GD calls it ideal, but what he means is all the real potential in the virtual). The final sentence is about their relation: the ideal is transcendent in the sense that it is everything that the system could possibly be (but never is, because it is not as such and because it changes all the time) and it is is immanent to the real because it is the fountain of possibilities for it: some of the possibilities are selected and most are not. ‘For this reason, the procedure capable of following and describing multiplicities and themes, the procedure of vice-diction, is more important than that of contradiction, which purports to determine essences and preserve their simplicity. It will be said that the essence is by nature the most ‘important’ thing. This, however, is precisely what is at issue: whether the notions of importance and non-importance are not precisely notions which concern events or accidents, and are much more ‘important’ within accidents than the crude opposition between essence and accident itself. The problem of thought is tied not to essences but to the evaluation of what is important and what not, to the distribution of singular and regular, distinctive and ordinary points, which takes place entirely within the inessential or within the description of a multiplicity, in relation to the ideal events which constitute the conditions of a ‘problem’. To have an Idea means no more than this, and erroneousness or stupidity is defined above all by its perpetual confusion with regard to the important and the unimportant, the ordinary and the singular’ {pp. 189-90 emphasis of the author, emphasis in bold of DPB}. DPB There is no ‘important’ thing. Nothing is important. It is just Ideas developing themselves in the intermediacy of the real. It is, however, and important issue for those who want to stay alive: now they must make sense of what might be dangerous to them and express themselves accordingly in order to protect themselves. ‘Vice-diction has two procedures which intervene both in the determination of the conditions of the problem and in the correlative genesis of cases of solution: these are, in the first case, the specification of adjunct fields and, in the second, the condensation of singularities’ {p 190 emphasis of the author}. 1) identification of the conditions through the identification fragments of ideal past or future events which render the problem solvable and 2) establish the modality by which they are connected to the initial field.

There is no more opposition between event and structure or sense and structure than there is between structure and genesis. Structures include as many ideal events as they do varieties of relations and singular points, which intersect with the real events they determine. Those systems of differential elements and relations which we call structures are also senses from a genetic point of view, with regard to the actual terms and relations in which they are incarnated. The true opposition lies somewhere else: between Idea (structure-event-sense) and representation. With representation, concepts are like possibilities, but the subject of representation still determines the object as really conforming to the object, as an essence’ {p 191}. DPB I have quoted this for the potential relevance of the definition of the term structure and how it relates to representation. It resonates with me because of the promise I made to deliver an explicit model of the firm. GD Representation is knowledge realized through recognition by the one who thinks. ‘The virtuality of the Idea has nothing to do with possibility. Multiplicity tolerates no dependence on the identical in the subject or in the object. The events and singularities of the Idea do not allow any positing of an essence as ‘what the thing is’’ {p 191}. DPB Important I find the first sentence disconcerting because I have used it in the text as precisely that: all that it could possibly be. But I believe the term possibility is used in a different (and possibly the correct) way here: it means that a multiplicity is any one/many that shows some kind of behavior and it should not depend on either the object nor the subject to identify the identical in the other. Instead there is some recognition of the one in the other based on what they both can do, not what either ‘is’. In other words the possibility should not be used in a statistical sense, namely one of the options known prior to the experiment. The final outcome is open ended and the real cannot be known in advance, while yet it is immanent in the ideal, given a particular environment.

What is the difference between a problem and a question? ‘ .. questions express the relation between problems and the imperatives from which they proceed’ {p 197 emphasis of the author}. DPB Of all the possible influences, the imperatives are the ones that drive the behavior that has attracted the focus of the observer. This is the formulation of the problem in general and the expression of that problem in terms of the motivators in the focus of the observer is the question (is this the case?). Kant. … He defined an imperative as any proposition declaring a certain action (or inaction) to be necessary. ‘It is rather a question of the throw of the dice, of the whole sky as open space and of throwing as the only rule. The singular points are on the die; the questions are the dice themselves; the imperative is to throw. Ideas are the problematic combinations which result from the throws’ {p 198}. DPB Important the final sentence suggests that the Idea is the total of the outcomes based on that particular arrangement. Not all the possible outcomes (as I suggest in my text), but the ones that have actually come out. No, it can also mean the ones that have come out plus the ones that will come out in the future. That implies all the possible outcomes, many of which will not in actuality take place. But is this the same as to say all the possible? ‘.. ;each throw of the dice affirms the whole of chance each time. The repetition of throws is not subject to the persistence of the same hypothesis, nor to the identity of a constant rule. The most difficult thing is to make chance an object of affirmation, but it is the sense of the imperative and the questions that it launches. .. Chance is arbitrary only in so far as it is not affirmed or not sufficiently affirmed, in so far as it is distributed within a space, a number and under rules destined to avert it’ {p 198 emphasis of the author}. DPB I am trying to get a fix on the Idea. ‘What does it mean, therefore, to affirm the whole of chance, every time, in a single time? This affirmation takes place to the degree that the disparates which emanate from a throw begin to resonate, thereby forming a problem. The whole of chance is then indeed in each throw, even though this be partial, and it is there in a single time even though the combination produced is the object of a progressive determination. The throw of the dice carries out the calculation of problems’ {p 198}. DPB Important here is the connection between the source of repetition and the difference, as per the Idea, namely the Difference, is conceived in every event of the throwing of a die. This is how the circular relation is made between the imperatives and the problems which follow from them: ‘Resonance constitutes the truth of a problem as such, in which the imperative is tested, even though the problem itself is born of the imperative. Once chance is affirmed, all arbitrariness is abolished every time’ {p 198}. DPB important perhaps also, it seems, because of the role of resonance. And then a further conditioning vis a vis thought: ‘Consequently, far from being the properties or attributes of a thinking substance, the Ideas which derive from imperatives enter and leave only by that fracture in the I, which means that another always thinks in me, another who must also be thought. Theft is primary in thought’ {pp. 199-200}. Every thing has its beginning in a question, but the question itself cannot be said to begin. Might the question, along with the imperative which it expresses, have no other origin than repetition?’ {p 200}.There are, nevertheless several throws of the dice: the throw of the dice is repeated. Each, however, takes the chance all at once, and instead of having the different, or different combinations, result from the Same, has the same, or the repetition, result from the Different. In this sense, the repetition which is consubstantial with the question is at the source of the ‘perplication’ of Ideas. The differential of the Idea is itself inseparable from the process of repetition which defined the throw of the dice’ {pp. 200-1}.

Ideas contain all the varieties of differential relations and all the distributions of singular points coexisting in diverse orders ‘perplicated’ in one another. When the virtual content of an Idea is actualised, the varieties of relation are incarnated in distinct species while the singular points which correspond to the values of one variety are incarnated in the distinct parts characteristic of this or that species’ {p 206}. DPB Important! From this description I understand that the Idea is all that an arrangement of something can be. The examples are: the Idea of color is like white light that contains all the possible colors, white noise that contains all possible sounds, white language, white society. This is much like my understanding of a meme. ‘Thus, with actualisation, a new type of specific and partitive distinction takes the place of the fluent ideal distinctions. We call the determination of the virtual content of an Idea differentiation; we call the actualisation of that virtuality into species and distinguished parts differenciation. It is always in relation to a differentiated problem or to the differentiated conditions of a problem that a differenciation of species and parts is carried out, as though it corresponded to the cases of solution of the problem. It is always a problematic field which conditions a differenciation within the milieu in which it is carnated’ {pp. 206-7 emphasis of DPB}. DPB Very important! This is how GD explains the relation between the Idea and its actualisation, namely the meme and its realization. The determination is the T and the actualisation is the C. The problem is first Td before it can be Cd. The C is conditioned by a problematic field in the milieu of its carnation. GD there is no negation: first there is a process of determination of the elements and their relations, pure positive, then there is a process of affirmation also pure positive. DPB This resonates with me, because the conditioning is a positive process, where some elements and their relations (differences between multiple differentiated processes) are conditioned through restrictions, but these restrictions are attractions and repulsions and therefore positive. Hence there is no negation. GD negation only exists in the representation, the primary is always with difference and differenciation. {cf 207}.

GD Using the concept of the virtual avoided to enter in a vagueness of a notion closer to the undetermined than the determined. DPB The use of the concept of the virtual enables us to deal with things that are not fully determined. Why are they not fully determined? Because nothing ever is, and it cannot be because it nothing is essential. Therefore there is always something of the environment in the observed thing. ‘The virtual is not opposed to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual. .. Indeed, the virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the real object – as though the object had one part of itself in the virtual into which it plunged as though into an objective dimension’ {pp. 208-9 emphasis of the author}. DPB This explains how the virtual is not a statistical space, but instead all the outcomes are possible. ‘The reality of the virtual consists of the differential elements and relations along with the singular points which correspond to them. ‘The reality of the virtual is structure. We must avoid giving the elements and relations which form a structure an actuality which they do not have, and withdrawing from them a reality which they have. We have seen that a double process of reciprocal determination and complete determination defined that reality: far from being undetermined, the virtual is completely determined’ {p 209}. DPB the virtual offers a determined state, then the actual conditions that to render one of them real. But the statement above explains that the elements and relations are not actual but real. Is this what Marta said that I mistook? The actual is determined only by outside factors. So the virtual is in the structure of the system, the outside conditions to affirm it such that they become real. ‘Whereas differentiation determines the virtual content of the Idea as problem, differenciation expresses the actualisation of this virtual and the constitution of solutions (by logical integrations)’ {p 209 emphasis of DPB}. DPB This explains the workings of the virtual and the actual through processes of differentiation and differenciation. This is the pump. ‘For the nature of the virtual is such that, for it, to be actualised is to be differenciated. Each differenciation is a local integration or a local solution which then connects with others in the overall solution or the global integration. This is how, in the case of the organic, the process of actualisation appears simultaneously as the local differenciation of parts, the global formation of an internal milieu, and the solution of a problem posed within the field of constitution of an organism. An organism is nothing if not the solution to a problem, as are each of its differenciated organs, such as the eye which solves a light ‘problem’; but nothing within the organism, no organ, would be differenciated without the internal milieu endowed with a general effectivity or integrating power of regulation’ {p 211 emphasis of DPB}. DPB This is very important. This quote explains how local integration and global solution go hand in hand in an internal milieu. It resonates with me because of the notion of nesting. In this case various nested systems can coexist and become integrated and further differenciate in the context of one another. They are each others’ environments (milieux). In fact the quote says that development of differences – or becoming of differences (differenciation) – takes place in the fringes of the virtual and the actual of each of those integrated systems which is affected by a change to them.

The only danger in all this is that the virtual could be confused with the possible. The possible is opposed to the real; the process undergone by the possible is therefore a ‘realization’. By contrast, the virtual is not opposed to the real; it possesses a full reality by itself. The process it undergoes is that of actualisation’ {p 211 emphasis DPB}. DPB Very important This is a possible mistake in my thesis compared to how it is explained here. Because I have used the virtual as all the possible outcomes and it is the opposition of the all the actuals. This problem is more urgent because I have called this process realization. Which following this GD statement (warning) is wrong. The process described here is different: the virtual generates and offers possible outcomes, all of them real, and not restricted in themselves (I understand that). The former actual (which can only be particulars of the environment of the thing in focus) then restricts it to the real that it becomes/will become. It was a field of real and it will remain real. This is the same as the a variable of Ashby which regulates the workings of the system, which can only be external to the system in focus, it is the definition of Ashby’s machine. It is the production of existence, it is where the space of the system is tensioned up through actualisation: The virtual, by contrast, is the characteristic state of Ideas: it is on the basis of its reality that existence is produced, in accordance with a time and a space immanent in the Idea. Secondly, the possible and the virtual are further distinguished by the fact that one refers to the form of identity in the concept, whereas the other designates a pure multiplicity in the Idea which radically excludes the identical as a prior condition. Finally, to the extent that the possible is open to ‘realisation’, it is understood as an image of the real, while the real is supposed to resemble the possible. That is why it is difficult to understand what existence adds to the concept when all it does is double like with like (DPB When is intended as the suggestion what if). Such is the defect of the possible: a defect which serves to condemn it as produced after the fact, as retroactively fabricated in the image of what resembles it’ {pp. 211-2 emphasis of DPB}. DPB Important This is the solution to that misunderstanding: the possible is known afterwards only when one can do the statistics and determine what was possible before the dice were thrown such that the outcome was to become clear and the calculation was to be done. ‘Actual terms never resemble the singularities they incarnate. In this sense, actualisation or differenciation is always a genuine creation’ {p 212}. DPB This is the formula.

How does actualisation occur in things themselves? Why is differenciation at once both composition and determination of qualities, organisation and determination of species?’ {p 214}. ‘The entire world is an egg. The double differenciation of species and parts always presupposes spatio-temporal dynamisms. Take a division into 24 cellular elements endowed with similar characteristics: nothing yet tells us the dynamic process by which it was obtained – 2 x 12, (2 x 2) + (2 x 10), or (2 x 4) + (2 x 8)…? .. Thus, in the case of fishing: entrap the prey or strike it, strike it from top to bottom or from bottom to top. It is the dynamic processes which determine the actualisation of Ideas’ {p 216}. DPB This is an interesting / useful illustration. ‘The world is an egg, but the egg itself is a theatre: a staged theatre in which the roles dominate the actors, the spaces dominate the roles, and the Ideas dominate the spaces. Furthermore, by virtue of the complexity of Ideas and their relations with other Ideas, the spatial dramatisation is played out on several levels: in the constitution of an internal space, but also in the manner in which that space extends into the external extensity, occupying a region of it’ {p 216 emphasis of DPB}. DPB This is my monadic concept where everything depends on everything else in the milieu. What resonates also is, again, the integration of systems into one another, whereby each tensions up its own space and at once the space that the whole integrated thing takes up. ‘Everything is even more complicated when we consider that the internal space is itself made up of multiple spaces which must be locally integrated and connected, and that this connection, which may be achieved in many ways, pushes the object or living being to its own limits, all in contact with the exterior; and that this relation with the exterior, and with other things and living beings, implies in turn connections and global integrations which differ in kind from the preceding. Everywhere a staging at several levels’ {p 217 emphasis of DPB}. DPB the monad in the nomad. GD says that the wider spheres gather time for the components to tension their space before time arrives at their sphere. In this way a connection is established between the wider spheres and the narrower ones because now the wider sphere differenciates because of the changes in the narrower one, and changes its space, whereby also the narrower sphere must change.

Chapter V Asymmetrical Synthesis of the Sensible

The world ‘happens’ while God calculates; if the calculation were exact, there would be no world. The world can be regarded as a ‘remainder’, and the real in the world in terms of fractional or even incommensurable numbers. Every phenomenon refers to an inequality by which it is conditioned. Every diversity and every change refers to a difference which is its sufficient reason’ {p 222}. DPB This first statement resembles determinism but for a lack of exact calculations. But I don’t believe I believe this, because God’s calculations are precise. They couldn’t be more precise in fact. It is not imprecision that generates a world, and that renders the world a remainder. Lest the remark were intended differently, namely that there is no room for egalization and that new differences are generates time and again and that that is the source for difference and new difference. And in turn that that these new differences are the source for the existence of the world.

Every phenomenon flashes in a signal-sign system. In so far as a system is constituted or bounded by at least two heterogeneous series, two disparate orders capable of entering into communication, we call it a signal. The phenomenon that flashes across this system, bringing about the communication between disparate series, is a sign’ {p 222 emphasis of DPB}. DPB important signs because I use signs also, although I have to step up the precision of my terminology. GD ‘We call this state of infinitely doubled difference which resonates to infinity disparity. Disparity – in other words, difference or intensity (difference of intensity) – is the sufficient reason of all phenomena, the condition of that which appears. .. The reason of the sensible, of the condition of that which appears, is not space and time, but the Unequal in itself, disparateness as it is determined and comprised in difference of intensity, in intensity as difference’ {p 222 emphasis of the author}. DPB The doubled difference refers to the 2 it takes to tango, the double contingency of Luhmann. But GD explains here that difference of intensity, Unequal in itself, is a sufficient reason for the sensible to exist.

Intensity is difference, but this difference tends to deny or cancel itself out in extensity and underneath quality. It is true that qualities are signs which flash across the interval of a difference. In s o doing, however, they measure the time of an equalisation – in other words, the time taken by the difference to cancel itself out in the extensity in which it is distributed’ {p 223}. DPB Important Intensity is a particular kind of difference. Quality is the representation of an intensity. But this kind of difference cancels itself out in extensity, namely through (what I call) its expressions. The phrase underneath quality means that it cancels out not in plain sight but underneath it, in the system, where it is not sensible. This resonates because of its application to the canceling out of the differences that firms cognize in their environment. There are differences taking place in the firm, they are canceled out though the interactions in its environment and underneath particular qualities of the firm sensed (in the eye of) its stakeholders. ‘It is indeed in this manner that the principle of causality finds in the signaling process its categorical physical determination: intensity defines an objective sense for a series of irreversible states which pass, like an ‘arrow of time’, from more to less differenciated, from a productive to a reduced difference, and ultimately to a cancelled difference’ {p 223}. DPB Important elaboration of the process where the difference is canceled out through the extensity. But also it is a philosophical description of entropy production and the direction of time. Difference is the reason for change only to the extent that the change is required to cancel out the difference {cf. P 223}. GD Good sense distributes things: on the one hand and on the other hand, the final compensation and homogenization: ‘Good sense is by nature esschatological, the prophet of a final compensation and homogenization. .. Good sense is the ideology of the middle classes who recognize themselves in equality as an abstract product. It dreams less of acting than of constituting a natural milieu, the element of an action which passes from more to less differenciated: for example, the good sense of eighteenth century political economy which saw in the commercial classes the natural compensation for the extremes, and in the prosperity of commerce the mechanical process of the equalization of portions. It therefore dreams less of acting than of foreseeing, and of allowing free rein to action which goes from the unpredictable to the predictable (from the production of differences to their reduction. Neither contemplative nor active, it is prescient. .. Good sense does not negate difference: on the contrary, it recognizes difference just enough to affirm that it negates itself, given sufficient extensity and time’ {p 225}. DPB Very Important! Good sense is the concept that explains the canceling out of difference via the extensity of the system I a process of balancing. This concept I can use as a relativation of the positioning of market thinking and the invisible hand as the new providence, and the industrialisation of distribution of wealth in society (equalisation of portions). Good sense is based upon a synthesis of time, in particular the one which we have determined as the first synthesis, that of habit. Good sense is only good because it is wedded to the sense of time associated with that synthesis’ {p 225}. DPB I don’t really believe in the validity of the concept of time, other than for human consumption. But this notion of time can be replaced as a notion of clicks as a concept of a change of state of some thing relative to another thing. But if time is associated with habit it is also associated with repetition and therefore a irreducible order and that makes it ok. GD The past is very improbable (removed from its essences by lots of variation). The future is probable and cancels out difference (variation) and is therefore good. It is also therefore predictable. ‘Objects are divided up in and by fields of individuation, as are Selves’ {p 226}. DPB This is Wolfram rephrased, namely that our powers of perception are generated by the same processes as the processes in nature we are trying to perceive. ‘Good sense, therefore, has two definitions, one objective and one subjective, which correspond to those of common sense: a rule of universal distribution and a rule of universally distributed. Good sense and common sense each refer to the other, each reflect the other and constitute one half of the orthodoxy’ {p 226}. DPB Good sense does the distributing and common sense is what something can do once the distribution has taken place.

GD Difference is inexplicable. It is explicated, but in systems where it is cancelled. This means that it is essentially implicated, its being is implication (involve, entangle // entangle, mix up // tempt, entice). ‘Difference of intensity is cancelled or tends to be cancelled in this system, but it creates this system by explicating itself’ {p 228}. DPB The being of difference is implication and it is canceled by explication. This resonates with me and I have visualized it in a picture of the mixing currents. GD Quality has the double aspect of a sign: 1) referral to an implicated order of constitutive differences and 2) cancel out the differences in the extended order of constitutive differences in which they are explicated. DPB This is an important argument for the double layer memeplex-and-realization, where the memeplex is 1) and the realization is 2). ‘This is also why causality finds in signalling at once both an origin and an orientation or destination, where the destination in a sense denies the origin. .. (examples removed DPB) .. The vanishing of differences is precisely inseparable from an ‘effect’ of which we are victims. Difference in the form of intensity remains implicate in itself, while it is cancelled by being explicated in extensity’ {p 228}. DPB Important! The explicitized effects of change brought about by implicit differences change the difference while the intensities per se remain implicit? This says that the differences are a kind of a packaging which is removed in extensities but the contents of which, its intensities, remain implicit nonetheless. GD It is unnecessary to imagine extensive mechanisms for the restoration of differences {cf. P 228}. DPB I can use this to point at the impossibility of changing the operations of a firm: ‘For difference has never ceased to be in itself, to be implicated in itself even while it is explicate outside itself’ {p 228}. GD The paradox of entropy is that it is an extensive factor, but an extension (or explication) which is implicated as such in intensity. It has the function of making possible the movement by which the implicated explicates itself. Intensity has three characteristics: 1) Intensive quantity includes the unequal in itself, a difference in quantity which cannot be cancelled out: ‘Intensity is the uncancellable in difference of quantity, but this difference of quantity is cancelled by extension, extension being precisely the process by which intensive difference is turned inside out and distributed in such a way as to be dispelled, compensated, equalised and suppressed in the extensity which it creates’ {p 233}. 2) Intensity affirms difference, making difference an object of affirmation. 3) includes the other two: an implicated, enveloped or ‘embryonised’ quantity. Intensity is implicating and implicated in itself, where implication is understood as a perfectly determined form of being: ‘Within intensity, we call that which is really implicated and enveloping difference; and we call that which is really implicated or enveloped distance’ {p 237 emphasis of the author}. DPB If something is implicated and it envelops something else it is difference (different from that), if it is enveloped it is distance (distant from that). When we say that the eternal return is not the return of the Same, or of the Similar or the Equal, we mean that it does not presuppose any identity. On the contrary, it is said of a world without identity, without resemblance or equality. It is said of a world the very ground of which is difference, in which everything rests upon disparities, upon differences of differences which reverberate to infinity (the world of intensity). The eternal return is itself the Identical, the similar and the equal, but it presupposes nothing of itself in that of which it is said’ {p 241 emphasis of the author}. DPB This seems the same as Wolfram suggesting that the universe is a CA. This is a description of the great miracle: when everything is fluid anf unequal then why are there any coherences anyhow?

It is because nothing is equal, because everything bathes in its difference, its dissimilarity and its inequality, even within itself, that everything returns – or rather, that everything does not return. What does not return is that which denies eternal return, that which does not pass the test. It is quality and extensity which doe not return, in so far as within them difference, the condition of eternal return, is cancelled. So too the negative, in so far as difference is thereby inverted and cancelled. So too the identical, the similar, in so far as these constitute the forms of indifference’ {p 243 emphasis of DPB}. DPB But is remains in play as long as it does generate difference. And it can have as we learned from chaos theory.

A whole flow of exchange occurs between intensity and Ideas, as though between two corresponding figures of difference. Ideas are problematic or ‘perplexed’ virtual multiplicities, made up of relations between differential elements. Intensities are implicated multiplicities, ‘implexes’, made up of relations between asymmetrical elements which direct the course of actualisation of Ideas and determine the cases of solution for problems’ {p 244 emphasis of DPB}. DPB VOILA!.‘How is the Idea determined to incarnate itself in differenciated qualities and differenciated extensities? What determines the relations coexisting with the Idea to differenciate themselves in qualities and extensities? The answer lies precisely in the intensive quantities. Intensity is the determinant in the process of actualisation. It is intensity which dramatises. It is intensity which is immediately expresses in the basic spatio-temporal dynamisms and determines an ‘indistinct’ differential relation in the Idea to incarnate itself in a distinct quality and a distinguished extensity. .. However, it remains literally true that intensity creates the qualities and extensities in which it explicates itself, because these quelities and extensities do not in any way resemble the ideal relations which are actualised within them: differenciation implies the creation of the lines along which it operates’ {p 245 emphasis of the author, emphasis in bold of DPB}. DPB GD uses the concept of dramatise to explain the existence or formation of an egg as a stage for the world to develop. This is related to the question about the connotations: how are they determined? And then it goes on to make the connection with individuation. Finally! ‘How does intensity fill this determinant role? In itself, it must be no less independent of the differenciation than of the explication which proceeds from it. It is independent of the explication by virtue of the order of implication which defines it. It is independent of differenciation by virtue of its own essential process. The essential process of intensive quantities is individuation. Intensity is individuating, and intensive quantities are individuating factors. Individuals are signal-sign systems’ {p 246 emphasis of DPB}. ‘Individuation emerges like the act of solving such a problem (the appearance of an ‘objective’ problematic field DPB), or, – what amounts to the same thing – like the actualisation of a potential and the establishing of communication between disparates. The act of individuation consists not in suppressing the problem, but in integrating the elements of the disparateness into a state of coupling which ensures its internal resonance. The individual thus finds itself attached to a pre-individual half which is not the impersonal in it so much as the reservoir of its singularities.’ {p 246 emphasis of DPB}. ‘Individuation is the act by which intensity determines differential relations to become actualised, along the lines of differenciation and within the qualities and extensities it creates’ {p 246}. The pre-individual singularities are unaware of the individual. GD Individuation precedes differenciation and every differenciation presupposes a prior intense field of individuation. ‘As a result they (differential relations DPB) then form the quality, number, species and parts of an individual in short, its generality’ {p 247 emphasis of DPB}. ‘All differences are borne by individuals, but but they are not all individual differences’ {p 247}. DPB Important This is the basis for the idea that memes are dispersed throughout society, and they do not only belong to the firm. This is also the idea that individuation is a kind of behavioral identity.

Intensity or difference in itself thus expresses differential relations and their corresponding distinctive points. It introduces a new type of distinction into these relations and between Ideas a new type of distinction’ {p 252}. GD Ideas and relations are more than coexistent distinct and they enter states of simultaneity and succession. But intensities are implicated in one another, are enveloping an enveloped such that each expresses the changing totality of Ideas namely the ensemble of differential relations. ‘Individuality is not a characteristic of the Self but, on the contrary, forms and sustains the system of the dissolved Self’ {p 254}. DPB Important, because this conversely opens the possibility that a firm has an individuality. It can have a system that is a dissolved Self which sustains the individuality. But what means the individuality of a firm?

GD The more complex a system, the more values peculiar to implication (involvement, entanglement, confusion DPB) appear within it. Their presence allows a judgement of the system’s complexity. The values of implication are centres of envelopment. The function of these centres is defined in these ways: ‘First, to the extent that the individuating factors form a kind of noumenon of the phenomenon, we claim that the noumenon tends to appear as such in complex systems, that it finds it own phenomenon in the centres of development. Second, to the extent that sense is tied to the Ideas which are incarnated and to the individuations which determine that incarnation, we claim that these centres are expressive, or that they reveal sense. Finally, to the extent that every phenomenon finds its reason in a difference of intensity which frames it, as though this constituted the boundaries between which it flashes, we claim that complex systems increasingly tend to interiorize their constitutive differences: the centres of envelopment carry out this interiorisation of the individuating factors. The more the difference on which the system depends is interiorised in the phenomenon, the more repetition finds itself interior, the less it depends upon external conditions which are supposed to ensure the reproduction of the ‘same’ differences’ {p 256}. DPB description of complex systems.

Speaking of evolution necessarily leads us to psychic systems. For each type of system, we must ask what pertains to Ideas and what pertains to implication-individuation and explication-differenciation respectively’ {p 256}. DPB I think this summarizes the whole text so far. Check against these terms! GD I is the psychic determination of species (eg human being as a species), Self is the psychic organization. The Self and the I explicate each other throughout the history of the Cogito {cf. P 257}. ‘Individuation is mobile, strangely supple, fortuitous and endowed with fringes and margins; all because the intensities which contribute to it communicate with each other, envelop other intensities and are in turn enveloped. /moet dit erbij?/ The individual is far from indivisable, never ceasing to divide and change its nature. It is not a Self with regard to what it expresses, for it expresses Ideas in the form of internal multiplicities, made up of differential relations and distinctive points or pre-individual singularities. Nor is it an I with regard to its expressive character, for here again it forms a multiplicity of actualisation, as though it were a condensation of distinctive points or an open collection of intensities’ {pp. 257-8}. GD It is an error to look at this lack of determination and relativity as incompleteness of individuality or interrupted individuation. ‘It is Ideas which lead us from the fractured I to the dissolved Self. As we have seen, what swarms around the edges of the fracture are Ideas in the form of problems – in other words, in the form of multiplicities made up of differential relations and variations of relations, distinctive points and transformations of points. These Ideas, however, are expressed in individuating factors, in the implicated world of intensive quantities which constitute the universal concrete individuality of the thinker or the system of the dissolved Self’ {p 259}.

Death is inscribed in the I and the Self, like the cancellation of difference in a system of explication, or the degradation which compensates for the processes of differenciation’ {p 259}. DPB Important: the cancellation of the differences in a business process every time a product is sold and paid, or a loan is taken and repaid or an effort was made and salary received, &c. But also it is relevant for the firm ceasing to exist: an inherent immanent end of the difference. ‘Every death is double, and represents the cancellation of large differences in extension as well as the liberation and swarming of little differences in intensity’ {p 259}. DPB This is emergence and its opposite (inmergence?). DPB Important. This is useful for the explanation of a death that is not necessarily a thermodynamic death, or it is not explained in thermodynamic terms. Instead it is about the macro- to micro, the degradation of a unit a its scale to smaller unities different from it at smaller scales. ‘Desired from within, death always comes from without in a passive and accidental form‘ {p 259}. ‘On the one hand, it is a ‘de-differenciation’ which compensates for the differenciations of the I and the Self in an overall system which renders these uniform; on the other hand, it is a matter of individuation, a protest by the individual which has never recognized itself within the limits of the Self and the I, even when these are universal’ {p 259}.

Conclusion

Difference is only thinkable when tamed with the four collars of representation: identity in he concept, opposition in the predicate, analogy in judgement, and resemblance in perception. ‘Every other difference, every difference which is not rooted in this way, is an unbounded, uncoordinated and inorganic difference; too large or too small, not only to be thought but to exist’ {p 262}. DPB but these are requirements of representation, not of what is. And small or large differences are irrelevant from the perspective of them. Why are they out of bounds for an existence? ‘Ceasing to be thought, difference is dissipated in non-being. From this it is concluded that difference in itself remains condemned and must atone or be redeemed under the auspices of a reason which renders it livable and thinkable, and makes it the object of an organic representation’ {p 262}. DPB Difference in itself can only be when it is thought. Else it enters the sphere of non-being. Difference in itself must adapt such that it can become the object of the organic.

Luhmann Explained

Luhmann Explained (from Souls to Systems) . Hans-Georg Moeller . Open Court Publishing Company (Carus Publishing) . 2006 . ISBN13 978-0-8126-9598-4 . ISBN10 0-8126-9598-4

Preface

Luhmann’s basic claim is that society does not comprise of humans. This goes against the common opinion (conventional wisdom) that the individual is the pivot and society is civil; this is often seen as scandalous and antihumanistic. However, the objective of this book is to show that Luhmann’s theory explains the current reality well. Human beings are in this way denied a central role in society, but not because of a lack of respect for their material being, but because they are such a complex ‘assemblage’ that they are difficult to understand in terms of a single concept: ‘Luhmann’s theory should be read, I believe, not as a denial of human experience, but as an attempt to sort out and do justice to the extreme multiplicity, or, to put it more dramatically, the existential division of such experiences

[p ix]

. The project of modernity can be seen as attempt to reunite the Cartesian split between body and mind; Luhmann gives up this experiment and grants every aspect of human experience its own right of existence; in this sense he is more postmodern (whatever this may mean) than modern; but his ‘antihumanism’ is not a replacement of ‘human nature’ with systems. ‘Social systems theory does not describe reality as it “essentially” is, but as what it has actually become – and it could have come out otherwise’ [p x]. And he points out how unlikely the current outcome is: it is not in any way necessary: the strange functionings we are all part of are transitory and temporary, and not ‘essential’ nor ‘substantial’(DPB: I have used the word ‘substantial’ many times to point at the ‘organization’ of a firm, or the body of an organism &c.).

Introduction

The present book will highlight its (Luhmann’s social theory) unique relevance in regard to current social and political issues’ [p xi].

Part I

A New Way of Thinking about Society

1. What Is Social Systems Theory?

(a) Systems Theory

There are more complaints about being treated as a number. Economically all that matters is money. Politically there is perceived a lack of true democracy, in the sense of rule by the people. Organizations and multinational corps via political parties taking their donations gain influence over governments and out of the hands of citizens. Technology and mass media occupy more of people’s space and time; people feel marginalized bu sophisticated machines. Bio-engineering reduces the importance of people’s reproductive faculties and further dehumanizes them. People feel a need for ethics (professional, religious) to come to the aid of human values. Paradoxically all of the above developments are received with enthusiasm also: the end of deceases, the increase of intellect and the realization of human potential and, lastly (by the development of the markets) the increase of prosperity and freedom for all. These positive, optimistic and negative, pessimistic outlooks can be found in the same person; perhaps this is because both feelings are “humanist”. But the gap between present day society and what is conceived as a “human” world is large; pessimistic people may have a nostalgic inclination to change the world back to a more human version; optimistic people may want to change the attitude. The task of Social Systems Theory is do away with the traditional view of a human society that is used as a reference by both: society can no longer be understood as a human one, but it does not blame society (as the cultural pessimists do). ‘.. nor does it celebrate the dehumanization of the humane as the greatest human perfection’[p 5]. The starting point of social systems theory is that society cannot be analyzed on the basis that it is humane, or that it is an assembly of people. This seems odd, perhaps because we are used to traditional / Old European descriptions of society (a group of people with a common way of life) instead of our current actual experiences. This started with Plato and did not change much thereafter: a group model and communication between human beings, an anthropocentric approach to society. The change from the human centered approach to the social systems approach is to describe actions of people not as human interaction in the context of a community but as events in a function system (democratic, economic, mass media). From this follows a basic assumption: ‘human beings do not and cannot communicate – only communication can’ [p 6]. The change is that society is not described on the basis of its members (people or a community) but based on its events (what actually happens). The events are political, economic, and mass media communication: language is not a necessary requirement, ballots, money &c. can do the job (although language and semiotics have influenced social systems theory). But do these events not invariably point at one single member (e.g. vote, transaction, mass media consumption)? Physically yes, but individual people can take part in a number of communications simultaneously; these communications are handled by ‘instances of them’: therefore the nexus of communication cannot be the individual person. Their mental individuality is preserved because people mentally switch up and down between communications, but the individual communications do not and separate streams occur flawlessly and seamlessly. From the perspective of the communications the individuals are not an integrated part of the events of communication. In this sense people are an external condition for communication and not an internal sine qua non for it. When people talk then communication communicates: they can connect their communication to the communication of others but not themselves to the others themselves. Social systems theory distinguishes systems of communication (social systems), systems of life (organisms, brains), and systems of consciousness (minds); each of them is in the environment of the others; each of them is individual (human body, mind, communication) and singular (national economies are parts of the ‘economy’). Individuality is now a systemic individuality: people can be part of (are divided in) segments (namely one body, one mind, one or more communication system(s)) that form separate individualities. Neither of the individuals can claim to be the ‘essential’ element or the ‘true’ individual aspect of a human being: these systems are not in a hierarchical relation and hence they cannot exert control over the other: what aspect do you perceive if you ‘see’ that person over there? ‘Once more: this by no means denies that the human being has a body and a mind outside of communication – it is rather to absolutely confirm this, and to say that human beings exist as much bodily as they exist mentally and socially – but rather that none of these three realms can claim to include the other two. .. While minds, bodies, and communications can be “individual”, a human being cannot. The “human being” does not exist as a singular entity. According to systems theory, the traditional notion of the “human being” is a simplification of the actual complexity of human existence’ [pp. 10-11]. DPB: tnhis reminds me of the discussion with ML about the ‘role’ of people and her question: What kind of entities are your people: psychological, or social? Though people are referred to as unity’s or individuals who are supposed to communicate; but neither bodies nor minds can communicate; what is uttered is different from what is perceived: ‘Communication systems and mental systems are operationally separate. The “human being” can be reduced to neither one of them. Thus, social systems theory holds it that if “we” want to understand how society functions or operates, we cannot reduce it to such an extremely broad and “metasocial” notion as that of the “human being”’ [p 11]. Social systems theory tries to explain the growth of a social system using the same systems and concepts as biological organisms: ‘Systems theory diverges from such classical models (demiurge, first moves, creator god) and replaces the notion of external agency or “input” with the notion of self-construction. Reality is no longer a created one (neither a created one nor a created one) but a constructivist complexity. Every system produces itself and thereby its own reality. The world ceases to be a general “unit” or “oneness”. Reality is not an all-embracing whole of many parts, it is rather a variety of self-producing systemic realities, each of which forms the environment of all the others. There is no common “world” in reality, because reality is in each instance an effect of “individual” systemic autopoiesis. Reality is transformed from created oneness to constructed difference

[pp. 13 – 14]

. Varela describes: ‘This is the core of autonomy. This is also exactly what is meant by operational closure. My shortest definition is: The results of systemic operations are once more systemic operations. This is the case in many areas. (Biological) autopoiesis is only one example. Other examples are language, and, possibly, families, firms, etc. (1997, 148-9)

[p 14]

. Varela strongly suspects that autopoiesis is not merely a biological process but that it has a more wide meaning. Living systems each produce their systemic reality; what happens in their environment can produce a response but only in the boundaries and operational means of the system: There is neither a direct input nor an immediate output. ‘Social systems theory borrows not only the concept of autopoiesis from biological systems theory, but also the concept of operational closure. The theory views social systems as “operationally closed” because, like biological systems, they are self-producing “organisms” of communication that consist of the connecting of system-internal communication with system-internal communication’ [p 15]. Once established, the autopoietic system can only proceed by its own operational means: ‘It cannot import other means without losing its systemic integrity and its “membrane” and thus its reality’ [p 15]. The introduction of the concepts of autopoiesis and operational closure into the social theory entails a paradigm shift: ‘.. (assuming operational closure and autopoiesis) .. it also breaks with the epistemology of the ontological tradition that assumed that something of the environment enters the understanding and that the environment is represented, mirrored, imitated, or simulated within a cognizing system. In this respect, the radicalism of the new approach can hardly be underestimated (Varela 2002a, 114)’ [p 16]. DPB: this is I think exactly what I have tried to explain. And what John Holland has tried to model. I think what is meant in the above is that there is no mapping in the sense of a logical connection (as a map, a mirror image, imitation or simulation) between the reality (outside) and the cognitive system (inside); the boundary distinguishes what gets computed inside the system and what occurs outside. But the quote above means that anything goes in regards to the rules defining the anticipatory powers of the cognitive system concerning the uncertainties offered by the environment. ‘How a system is real depends on its own self-production, and how it perceives the reality of its environment also depends on its self-production. By constructing itself as a system, a system also constructs its understanding of the environment. And thus, a systemic world cannot suppose any singular, common environment for all systems that can somehow be “represented” within any system. Every system exists by differentiation and thus is different from other systems and has a different environment. Reality becomes a multitude of system-environment constructions that a re in each case unique’ [ p 16]. DPB: this last part is very important because it explains how systems namely firms are never twice the same. Operational closure means that systems can be open to one another, but not operationally so. Biological operations in a cell are only open to other biological operations, psychological operations in a mind only to other psychological operations in that mind and communicative operations only open to communicative operations in that system: ‘If you want to formulate it radically, you may say that cognition is only possible because there are no relation, no operative relations to the environment’ [p 17, Luhmann Theories of Distinction, p 93]. The question: Who sees the environment more correctly? has hence become obsolete in systems theory. Autopoietic systems (body, mind, communication) are operationally closed and thus open towards each other. They are also structurally coupled: communication can only occur where there is a body and a mind; a mind can only exist if there is a body. This dependency is called a structural coupling: ‘One cannot imagine that a consciousness could have evolved without communication. Similarly, one cannot imagine that there would be meaningful communication without consciousness. There must have been a kind of coordination, that, because it relates to the different forms of autopoiesis, lead, on the one hand, to an increase of complexity within the realm of possible mental contents and, on the other hand, within the realm of social communication. It seems to me that this mechanism of coupling is language (Luhmann Theories of Distinction, p 122)’ [p 19]. Structural coupling means that systems shape each others’ environments such that they both depend on the other for the continuation of their autopoiesis and this results in an increase of their structural complexity. ‘The structural coupling between the brain as a living system, the mind as a psychic system, and society as a communication system seems to be of a specific structure with the mind somehow in-between the two other systems. .. It seems that the mind is some kind of filter between the brain, on the one hand, and communication, on the other

[p 20]

. DPB: this reminds me of the idea that if the environment of some system were fully random than o brain (or mind) would have been required. The brain (an d the mind) serve to identify and make sense of and deal with (anticipate) patterns in the environment. And hence the development of cognition develops with the development of the pattern in the environment that is also a developing cognitive entity. They are both individuating as cognitive and thinking entities using each other as ‘practice material’.

(b) Social Systems

Social systems theory recognizes psychic and biological systems as their environment; it uses terminology from biology; but social systems do not really ‘live’, they do communicate. Society is metaphorically described as an ‘organism’ and in terms of ‘consciousness’. Social systems theory rejects the idea that society has a biological or a psychic grounding: life and consciousness are not a part of society and they operate outside society’s ‘boundary’ or ‘membrane’; communication has its own autopoiesis; society does not consist of human bodies or minds, but of communication events (money, language, gestures, &c.). ‘Orderly communication, in which we can first expect to be understood by others and second to understand them, emerges from double contingency. Not anything, but any communication goes on, but it goes on only if and when it is able to establish some kind of order, when the problem of double contingency on both sides of the “understanding” of that communication is solved. Communication that is not mutually understood will not continue’ [p 22]. DPB: this is exactly what I have tried to model in my Logistical Model: the party at either ‘end’ of the communication must perceive the utterance for it to become part of the communication. But what the perceived utterance in fact ‘is’ is unimportant: it is defined as a communication by the fact that it is being uttered and it is being perceived, and hence by the fact that the communication is not ended by a lack of either. This is also exemplified by an economic transaction: only if the buyer buys whatever is on offer is the transaction complete and the communication continues uninterrupted. Communication is then a unity of announcement, information and understanding (Mitteilung, Information, und Verstehen): ‘Communication only continues and grows if it establishes certain patterns that allow for it to continue in that certain way along with that certain order. All emerging patterns of communication (of announcement, information, understanding) – or social order – can be explained as a solution to the problem of double contingency. What is communicated and how it is communicated is totally contingent: there is no basic a priori condition for communication’ [p 23]. DPB: I have situated these communication events in situations. What I have left implicit is that the communication ‘wants’ to proceed one more event (and one more) and whatever is expressed only has the function as a stepping stone onto the next unknown event that bears some relation to the current, but is oblivious to the next: it is a road to nowhere. The equation of AIU (MIV) should only lead to the next event in a chain of events that only afterwards becomes clear, and no more is required of this threesome. ‘Once communication goes on, however, how it goes on is contingent upon these patterns that have been established’ [p 23]. DPB: this reminds again of Oudemans’ restrictions: at every state there are attractors and repellers for the next possible states. Once a system has developed an economy then that pattern is binding and it is only possible ‘.. to communicate economically by communicating economically. Nobody can buy anything with noneconomic communication’ [p 23]. In social systems theory these patterns of communication constitute society: ‘Society consists of social systems, of certain communicational “organisms” that emerged and have established their own specific types of operations’ [p 23]. DPB: interestingly the claim that these patterns áre social systems is left unsaid / implicit. I have claimed this on the basis of memetics: that these are selfish. Now I need to rephrase that into a claim that includes communication, social systems and taking into account individuation. The question is to what extent I can keep the memes alive? And to what extent I will need them, because to an increasing extent I feel that they are a kind of a support mechanism to explain and connect expression and perception (in my model); perhaps it is the same as communication as is it intended by Luhmann? Luhmann calls the individual communication systems function systems. DPB: I think Heylighen calls them aspect systems, which I prefer, because a function system is too intentional a term and aspect is more neutral. I also am not sure that they are really different (as in separable) systems: I am rather fond of the idea that a landscape of Jobs (are these the same as communication events?) exist where all kinds of ideas are undergoing operations. These can be part of more than one system: to which system they are decided to belong depends only on the observer: she decides which aspect system this specific Job belongs to. Now it gets tangled up if the aspect or function systems are called subsystems of society: ‘They are “subsystems” of society. Each function system has its own social perspective and creates its own social reality. They are all, so to speak “subrealities” of a general social reality. Still, they are not, strictly speaking, “parts” of a “whole”: society does not become less “whole” when a system ceases to function and it does not become more “whole” when a new on emerges’ [p 24]. DPB: it does makes sense if they, as they develop, also their reality develops with them as a proper cognitive system. But the “subsystems” are not integrated to form some kind of a super-system. In this sense society consist only of subsystems without a hierarchical relation between them or between them and a super-system. Now each of the function systems observes the other subsystems from its own perspective, unmediated. The function systems communicate based on their “codes”, namely the distinctions that identify them; these codes are further detailed in “programs”. DPB: but isn’t this upside down: form a body of details there emerges a distinction? Or is the distinction at the basis of all of the detail that specifies a subsystem? For the legal subsystem, the code is legal/illegal, and what is the distinction at the basis of the economy: economically true of false: ‘bought and sold’? The function systems procreate their own functioning and their own social function (‘Funktion’); the function of a social system can also be distinguished for its efficacy (‘Leistung’), namely how it contributes to the other social systems. ‘Modern function systems have developed into communicational “organisms that communicate with more effective and diverse tools than simply language. They have developed their own media. A medium is, simply put, that which can take on form in communication, and in the case of many function systems these media are called by Luhmann (on the basis of Talcott Parson’s terminology) “symbolically generalized communication media” (symbolisch generalisierte Kommunikationsmedien)’[p 26]. For example it is difficult to buy something or to serve a punishment with pure language, and hence additional measures are required: media. Media are capable of increasing the inequalities between the function systems if the symbolic expression of the one performs better than the set of the other: ‘Society does not expand lie leavening; it does not symmetrically grow in size, complexity, and differentiation as supposed by the nineteenth-century theories of progress (which could suppose this because they understood society as merely an economic system). Modern society rather increases the complexity of some systems and lets others wither. (The Society of Society 1997a, 391-92)’ [p 28] (bronverwijzing lijkt niet te kloppen). DPB: the medium is no part of my model, but it should be. This looks a lot like the medium of Heylighen, namely the Stigmergic medium in which the organisms exist and use it as an externalized memory. But also: why is language a medium and not just another evolving social system that has connections with other such function systems; in that sense it could have a role like some of the others (economy, science, religion &c) touching on more than one other function system? The media contribute to the dynamics of their systems. Communication systems have no ‘essence’, there is no natural order, nor unchanging stability: ‘All systems continue their autopoiesis, and thus they all “develop”. It seems that a central aspect of this development, especially in the conditions of a modern society, is the adequacy and efficacy of a system’s symbolically generated communication medium. These media seem to be decisive factors when it comes to gaining “social space” [ p 28]. Awkward media such as faith experience stiff competition with power or money or legislation, and hence contribute to the marginalization of ‘its’ function system. Function systems do not ‘cover’ the whole of society; some events do not fit in any one of them; for the formation of these trivial or temporary system-environment distinctions emerge: for that to happen it suffices that there is a double contingency. ‘In the terminology of social systems theory such short-lived “anarchic” social systems that do not fit into any of the established functional realms can be called “interactions” (Interaktionen). Interactions typically operate on a “face-to-face” level and presuppose physical presence (see Baraldi, Corsi, and Esposito 1997, 82-85) [p 30]. DPB: I have called the changing of a meme a Situation and on completion of the changing of memes I have called an Interaction; no physical presence is required, it can even be the result of a broadcast or an old newspaper article or a post on-line, whatever. As it seems to be intended here it is a waste bin of emerging distinctions such that they die out because the communication ceases to continue, similar to mine; what is different they should not match any of the existing ‘grand’ systems and apparently have no room to exist: ‘A casual conversation in the elevator begins and ends physical presence. Once the two people are back in their offices, they will continue to communicate in the function systems of law (if they are lawyers) or in the function systems of education or science (if they are professors). There they will communicate in a more systemic manner’ [p 30]. Luhmann calls these interactions ‘function-free’: I find this to be too serious (re just-so stories) and also it smells of reduction: now that we know that these sub systems exist we can start laying stuff on them / conversations in elevators are not systemic, but this depends on the view of the observer. ‘While interactions are the communicational sea on which the function systems float, there is another type of social system that is more closely intertwined with the function systems. This type of social system is small-scale in comparison with social subsystems, but large-scale in comparison with interactions – it is the increasingly important “organizations” (Organisationen)’ [p 31]. DPB: why is this another type? Can’t this just be the same type? They have developed along with the development of communicational subsystems of society: Politics>parties, Education> Schools, Economy> firms, Legal>courts, &c. Organizations are not necessarily confined to one subsystem and vice versa. ‘A central characteristic of organizations is membership. Organizations include people by accepting them into themselves. In order to enter a university, a sanatorium, or Al Qaeda, one has to somehow qualify for membership, for instance, by grades, a diagnosis, or a common enemy’ [p 31]. ‘Organizations can also be called “systems of decision”. What an organization does depends on its decisions. Their communicative life is mainly one of decisions. .. And the decisions of an organization are typically made in the context of further decisions. The autopoiesis of an organization thus becomes an autopoiesis of decisions – one decision generates endless decision-making (just think of serving on a university committee or making a managerial decision in a company). Luhmann says in regard to organizations: “As a result there comes into being an autopoietic system that is characterized by a specific form of operations: it produces decisions by decisions. Behavior is communicated as decision making’ [pp. 31-32]. DPB: an important intermezzo here is that the communication maintain itself autopoietically and so it has to keep going. That in itself is sufficient to not break the chain of communications, of decision making, and keep the organization intact and going. The importance of organizations increases as well as their power, as they occupy more and more ‘communicative space’ within various function systems. The entities (patterns) that can be distinguished are: functional systems, organizations and interactions; another might be social / protest movements.

Society is operationally closed from biology and psychology. And in the same way functional systems are closed from one another in their intrasocial environment. And if society is functionally differentiated then the functional communications cannot just connect to any other communications, but rather to their ‘own’ functional ‘strand’ (e.g. economic communications to economic communications &c.); per subsystem can autopoiesis only be maintained by communications of the same subsystem. By virtue of their codes, functions, media &c, have social subsystems come differentiated into systems with incompatible discourses: a quote from the Bible can in general no longer counter a scientific argument, one cannot represent oneself in a court of law. ‘In a modern society, attempts to reject functional differentiation are not easily accepted nor are the likely to succeed. .. The conditions of functional differentiation do not favor attempts to merge operations of different systems or attempts to steer the operations of one system by operations of another

[p 33]

. One example in between is of a religious politician participating in two functional systems: too fundamentalist or too political. A second example is the failure of the communist system in eastern Europe: the economic communication still functioned as such and political communication as such, but they could not be made to overcome their operational closure and connect between them. The economy could only avail of political data; the same can occur in religious states, where the political system can only have religious information about itself. In both cases the autopoiesis of the economic and the political system respectively are not maintained or with difficulty. ‘It may be important to note that neither social systems theory in general nor Luhmann in particular intends the theory of the operational closure of functional systems to speak in support of a “market economy” or capitalist propaganda that hails the beneficial effects of a “free” economy’ [p 35]. But functional systems cannot control one another. DPB: but they can integrate other autopoietic systems or they ‘interpenetrate’ one another in a kind of a co-evolving, lizard-glass sense. ‘Moreover, like communist politics, capitalist democracies tend to deny the systemic gap between the economy and politics. They create the illusion that political communication about the matters actually “helps” the economy. Like communist regimes, democratic regimes counterfactually pretend that their political communication about the economy actually somehow “steers” economic development’ [p 35]. But although the function systems are operationally closed they are capable to influence each other; the function systems are each other’s environment; they are closed and separated from the environment by a membrane (boundary) distinguishing them from it; and because they are distinct from their environment they can self-reference as well as hetero-reference.; anything can be religious, legal, economic, political, scientific &c and in addition any of them them can be about any of the others. ‘Operational closure does not prevent other-reference (hetero-reference); it is rather a condition for “making sense” of the other systems’ [p 37]. DPB: Heylighen talks about sensemaking a lot (which articles?). I like it because it reminds me of ‘distinction of patterns / pattern (re)cognition’. Social subsystems can enter into ‘structural coupling’: their autopoiesis is operationally closed yet in contact with the other system, in the case of the economic and political systems: ‘The coupling between politics and economy is primarily established through taxes and tariffs. This does not alter the fact that all monetary dispositions are carried out as payments within the economy. The disposition can, however, be conditioned politically and in this case it will not be oriented to profit-making. For which purposes a nation’s budget is used then becomes a political issue, and when much (or little) money is available, this will irritate the political system. Still, the spending of money itself is subject to the market rules of the economic system (nothing becomes more or less expensive because it is paid for with tax money) and it has significant consequences for the structural development of the economy when the state quota of the money flow increases (The Society of Society 1997a, 781)’ [p 37]. DPB: had er meer van verwacht, beetje vaag verhaal van Luhmann hierboven, zie beter dit: ‘Systems such as politics and the economy can be “connected” in such a way that the operations of one system more or less continually “aim” at the operations of the other system’ [p 37]. Structural coupling in this sense does not violate the operational closure but it makes particular interrelations between the autopoietic processes. DPB: Is this not what Maturana calls ‘orienting’? ‘Structural coupling establishes specific mechanisms of irritation between systems and forces different systems to continuously resonate with each other. The two concepts of irritation and resonance are used by social systems theory to explain how operationally closed systems “interact”’[p 38]. This is fully in line with the arguments of the autopoietic theory.

In the case of “extra-social” coupling between communication and psychic systems, the common medium of language provides for the structural coupling between individual minds and society. This structural coupling allows for both systems to develop a higher complexity. People will accordingly develop mental structures that match the complexity of their society. The growth of social complexity is structurally coupled with the increasing mental complexity of the environment of society’ [p 38]. And this goes for any possible combination between social systems and the psyche. DPB: this is important because the minds of the people working at some firm will develop in terms of structural complexity contingent on the complexity of the firms the are employed by. In this sense subsystems cannot directly steer one another but via stable links they can irritate one another into the exhibition of a specific kind of behavior. It is not automatic that when a system irritates another it will itself not be irritated also by the changed behavior of the other system:’That social systems are interrelated primarily through structural coupling means that no system can dominate another; no system can exert influence without itself being influenced’ [p 39]. DPB: pure autopoietic theory. But this will have to be a very important part of my thesis: how firms react to outside irritations, to internal changes &c. ‘Systems theory is a theory of contingency, not one of liberty’ [p 39-40]. And importantly (even if only for my understanding of the coherence of the whole theory: ‘Systems theory describes society not on the basis of an underlying unity but on the basis of difference. Society is not made up of small units that constitute larger units, it is rather based on differences that constitute more differences. System theory is a “theory of distinction” (see Luhmann 2002b). Luhmann says: “The thesis was that a system is not a unit, but a difference, and that one thus ends up with the problem that one has to imagine the unity of a difference (2002b, 91). Society is not a unity – it is a difference, consisting of differences. Systems theory is, strictly speaking, not a theory of systems, but of system-environment distinctions’[p 40]. This difference is the core of the social systems theory, not some essential thing at the core: ‘A social system is what it is, not by virtue of its inner structure, but by how it distinguishes itself from its environment’ [ pp. 40-41].

(c) History

Luhmann claims that there are four main types of social differentiation: Segments (descent), Stratified (caste, class), Functional (different roles of individuals in (functional) subsystems), Center-Periphery (core group vs others). ‘Looking back in history, and also at non-European societies, Luhmann discerns four types of social differentiationbut he does not claim that this list is complete or indicative of any general law behind social evolution. Social evolution does not “progress” to “better” kinds of differentiation; and the fact that certain types of stratification are sometimes replaced by others does not mean that the earlier types are inferior to the later ones’ [p 41]. The existence of hybrids is more the rules than the exception; DPB: this presupposes the existence of essences in regards of these differentiations. The primacy of differentiation means that one group can regulate the application of another group. ‘The function systems are what they are by being “equally” distinct from one another. Of course, this does not mean that subsystems are totally “independent” of each other. Structural couplings still tie systems together, but the function systems do not gain their identity by being a certain element within an established order of rank’ [p 46]. DPB: but this remark is redundant, because never is anything ‘established’ and hence never is anything an element in an order of rank. I find that the faintest inkling of essentialism pervades the theory here. Conversely the differentiation in society and more specifically the individual’s position in it determines ‘who she is’: e.g. an aristocrat at all times. In a functionally differentiated system a person cannot locate herself wholly in one of the subsystems, nor even identify herself primarily with one of the subsystems: ‘She cannot carry one systemic identity into another: The differentiation of one subsystem into one particular function means that this function has priority for this system (and only for this system) and gains precedence over all other functions for it. Only in this sense, one can speak of functional primacy (Luhmann The Society of Society 1997a, 747-48)’ [p 48]. And in addition can a subsystem only operate on the basis of its own function only: ‘Every function system can only perform its own function. No one can in the event of a crisis or on a continuing or supplementary basis sit in for another one .. (Luhmann The Society of Society 1997a, 763)’ [p 48]. And in a situation of functional differentiation a society is not free of class distinctions: ‘Functional differentiation does not mean that a society is free of class-distinctions (and neither that society is without center/periphery distinctions), it simply means that class (or center/periphery distinctions) are no longer equivalent with social order’ [p 49]. ‘Humans are no more equal today than they were in the Middle-Ages – but social systems are. Since society does not consist of human beings but of social systems, an absence of a systemic hierarchy cannot be equated with an absence of a hierarchy among people. Under the conditions of functional differentiation the inequality among people no longer corresponds to the inequality of social strata’ [p 49]. Functional differentiation has begun to take place after the Middle-Ages (sixteenth to eighteenth century) and it still does, at an ever more intense rate. Postmodernism is an attempt to explain this intensification that, however, takes place within the same ‘domain’, but in a more modern form, and hence it is de facto a description of modernity: ‘Functional differentiation has developed from humble beginnings to into a grand structure, a giant social “organism” of global scale and extreme functional intensity’ [p 50]. Modernity and postmodernity are attempts to describe society by defining its semantics: ‘The jargon of both academic and common speech are expressions of the semantics of a society. Both represent the “sense” a society ascribes to itself and to the issues it deals with. Obviously these semantics change’[p 51]. DPB: I find this interesting because it the refers to the sense-making of systems by ‘wording’ it, or rather by expressing the pattern they seem to perceive and translating the patterns for others to see also, even far befor ethey are actually named and incorporated into the society’ s jargon, and reserached by the academia and injected into its jargon &c. ‘Social systems theory has, of course, a semantics too – a semantics that describes society and its structures. This semantics tends to be retrospective: “The structural change of society is beyond the observation and description of its contemporaries. Only after it has been completed and it becomes practically irreversible, semantics takes on the task to describe what now becomes visible”(Luhmann 1989, 8). It is exactly this task that social systems theory takes on’ [p 52]. DPB: this reminds me of hyperobjects. It is impossible for any one individual, not for any organization smaller than the whole to distinguish the behavior of the subsystem from the background.

(d) Globalization

Given that society is no longer differentiated regionally: the functions transcend geographical borders and they are global; only the political subsystem is tied to a geographical location. The possibility of an integration or a aggregate of the functional systems was lost when the concept of God was lost on humanity: that was the last entity where the functions could have been dissolved into a larger whole: ‘Global society consists of a plurality of systems that are both universal and particular (Luhmann The Society of Society 1997a, 930-31). Global society exists as a multiplicity of functional subsystems, but it does not exist as a multiplicity of societies. .. There is no seconf global (DPB functional) system – and if there was, it could not be communicated with. The global system is one system but, again, it is not a harmonious whole. .. The global system consists of subsystems of communication, not of people. Taking part in its operations provides inclusion in a system’ [p 54]. DPB: this reminds me of the Jobs: applied to that concept, the above implies that once the people are involved or engaged with some set of ideas then they are included into it and their identity comes to depend on it. But this depends on the sphere of the ideas, namely to which functional system the ideas themselves belong. If a Job has an economic signature then the person engaged inn the Job, with regards to the economic function, is engaged with such and so specific economic idea (or rather an event). When she engages with an idea in the political sphere then she is included in that idea. And as a consequence the identity of the person is a ‘patchwork’ of the ideas from the different but otherwise between them equally important functional systems. And an important effect of the globalization of the systemic functions is that: ‘The emergence of all kinds of regional separatism and “fundamentalism” can well be explained as an effect of the globalization of functional differentiation. Th expansion of political, economic, and other social structures meets with all kinds of regional peculiarities and resistance. Function systems “neglect” regional, religious, or cultural identities’ [p 57]. In this sense fundamentalism is a “demonstration of non-irritability”: ‘These movements display a pose of immunity against the effects of functional globalization’ [p 58]. But the effect is exactly the opposite: ‘Once more – functional globalization allows every Muslim to be a Muslim and every Serb to be a Serb, but only as long as they accept that their religion or ethnicity is ultimately neglected by the function systems’ [p 58]. But the people belonging to these factions won’t easily relinquish that and: ‘On the one hand, one can ask: how do you expect operationally closed function systems not to neglect race, religion , and region? And, on the other hand, one can ask: how do you expect “fundamentalists” not to neglect the systems of law, politics, and education? And: how else can their neglect be demonstrated than by sabotaging the function systems? Sabotage is the neglect practiced by those neglected by “globalization” [p 59]. In addition to neglect and counter-neglect social exclusion is produced: ‘ .. And this would mean that some human beings will be persons and others only individuals; that some are included into functions systems for (successful or unsuccessful) careers and others are excluded from these systems, remaining bodies that try to survive the next day… (Luhmann 1997b, 12) [p 59]. Function systems aim at all inclusion (of human beings); they neglect other social systems apart from the other function systems, which they have to deal with an the basis of equality. ‘While the function systems are, in principle, all-inclusive – and while this all-inclusiveness of globalization is celebrated by “rightist” propagandists and demanded by “leftist” critics (who are not against globalization as such, but only an evil and unjust globalization) – they produce, in fact mass-exclusion. .. The exclusion from one system, for instance, the exclusion from the economy because of a lack of money, easily leads to exclusion from other systems’ [p 61]. DPB: this reminds of the ‘cabin in Alaska’ example, where one goes off-grid to leave all function system, but to what extent is it possible to leave them all? So the statement above is that if one is excluded of one the relation with the others is damaged also; if one wants to leave them all, then what happens? The point is that although in principle there is no limit to be fee and equal in the function systems, in practice it is easy to end up with less money or power than others and as a consequence to be excluded from that system and, as a consequence of that to be excluded from other function systems too. ‘It seems as if functional differentiation produces massive social exclusion that reduces the lives of many people to a purely bodily existence that is primarily concerned with bare physical survival. .. Functional differentiation cannot simply be steered or changed by good intentions. Society is much too complex and polycentric for such illusions. No person can steer a society of autopoietic function systems. Systems steer themselves’ (Luhmann 1997c) [pp. 62-63].

2. What Is Real?

(a) Making Sense, Making Reality

Psychic systems and social systems share language as a medium; they also share the “universal medium (Universalmedium)” “sense (Sinn)”. The definition of “sense” from the Oxford English Dictionary (on-line March 2018) is: “a feeling that something is the case”, and more specifically: “a keen intuitive awareness of or sensitivity to the presence or importance of something”. ‘Society and minds are continuously “making sense” – they are “sense-constituting systems (sinnkonstituerende Systeme)”. Minds make sense of the world and themselves, and so do social systems. What we think and perceive has a certain sense – and even if it is nonsense, it is not non-sense. Making nonsense is also making sense’ [p 65]. DPB: the definition from the March 2018 on-line Oxford English Dictionary of ‘to make sense’ is ‘be intelligible (“able to be understood, comprehensible”), justifiable (“be a good reason for”), or practicable (“able to be done or put into practice successfully, able to be used, useful”)’, for example ‘it makes sense to start saving early for higher education’, ‘the policy made economic sense’. The phrase or term sense-making makes it possible to categorize minds and social systems into the same category; the concept is different from concepts such as cognition, thinking, anticipating &c, which are often associated with activity of individual people, but not with social systems. ‘We cannot think and perceive without operating on the basis of sense’ [p 65]. DPB: first there is sense; and once there is sense, then, on the basis of that, there can be thinking and perception! DPB: this reminds me of the attribution of connotations to ideas; in that way the ideas are in a way embedded in the world-view of the individual; very colloquially speaking it is said that ‘they are assigned a place’; is this the same as being ‘framed’ in the sense that an idea is put into some context of other ideas and compared to that and, even if temporarily, its relations to these other ideas are fixed; this fixation can be undone and replaced by another, but this gets increasingly difficult if the entire thing of ideas and-cum-relations, namely idea_embedded, becomes more familiar for the individual; this happens in the Jobs. ‘In an analogous fashion, communication makes sense, too. If communication takes place – as the unity of announcement, information, and understanding – then sense is produced. As with minds, even nonsensical communication makes some sense. If tis does not make sense then commmunication ceases to be communication’ [p 65]. DPB: this is the definition of communication: it lasts while the exchange of signs continues and so if it stops because the signs no longer make sense (they are now mere signals) then there is no longer communication, and hence it stops to exist. ‘making sense couples minds and communication at an even more general or “universal”level: communication makes sense, and this sense irritates minds and makes them think. Conversely, what we think makes sense, and communication resonates with the sense produced in our minds. If communication processes complex sense, our minds will be forced to cope with this complexity and to therefore increase the complexity of their sense-making’ [p 65]. DPB: this reminds me in a visual sense of throwing paint onto something unknown so as to make sense of it by by distinguishing its contours and perhaps even pry some reaction loose from it, if one is so lucky; the paint being the ideas attempting to make sense out of the bloody thing; once the paint sticks and the thing is cladded in color then a pattern appears that can now be named &c.; this is the function if you like of the just-so stories representing the ideas thrown at the thing, that by their color explain what the thing is, but only for their part. The above quote of Luhmann also reminds me of my Jobs: this is the linking pin between the workings of memes, namely in their environment of memeplexes and memes external to those, and, on the other hand, of the structures of the mind with which these memeplexes interact; these I have referred to as Jobs: the nexus of exchange between individual people’s minds and memes. That is what I believe Luhmann describes here. Not only the mind, but communications systems can be intentional; both create a reality based on a distinction between themselves and the external world and a relation between them: ‘Mental and communication systems create a reality by locating themselves within a “horizon of sense”. Sense, and the sense-horizon, is the “product of the operations that use sense – and by no means a quality of the world thanks to a creation, a donation, or an origin” (Luhmann The Society of Society 1997a, 44, referring to Deleuze 1969)’ [p 66]. DPB: sense in this way produces sense and a sense-horizon; before sense there was nothing; the amount of sense in the world increases, but related to what? Psychic and communications systems create a framework using the medium of sense, and locate themselves in it; and hence do we, by making sense of the world, make sense of ourselves, and so does communication [p 66]: ‘This is similar to a ship that finds its position and direction by locating itself within the horizon of the sea. Of course, this horizon continuously changes. Through its motion, the ship continuously relocates itself within a horizon and thus has the horizon change with it. The horizon – the ship’s environment – is a direct product of the ship’s own operations, of its own movements. Sense is therefore technically defined by Luhmann .. first as the “unity of the difference between the actual and the possible” ( Baraldi, Corsi, Esposito 1997, 170-3). .. A ship locates itself within its horizon – but thereby realizes that it can move. The ship is not bound only by its actual location; its horizon is a horizon of possibilities. It could also be elsewhere. Sense-making is this interplay between the actual and the possible. What we think makes sense within a horizon of possibilities. Without a context of sense, thoughts cannot make sense. Similarly, communication without a context without a context of sense cannot make sense. Our minds and communications operate within a sense-horizon like a ship operates on a body of water. These operations take place on the basis of a distinctiion between what is actual and what is possible. Secondly, and in connection with the previous definition, sens can also be defined in terms of the distinction self-reference / other-reference: cit. ..’ [pp. 66-7]. There is a distinction between the sense-maker and that which makes sense for the sense-maker; this is the distinction between the ship and the horizon; ‘It makes sense / to me’; the two distinguishing but interconnected dimensions are actual / possible and self / other. ‘And this last distinction is somehow “reflected” within the system itself. Sense-making systems make sense by making sense of the difference between themselves and their environment, by making sense of the difference the “it” that makes sense and the “I” that makes that sense. By making this distinction, the system makes a re-entry. It re-enters the distinction it just made’ [p 67]. The system can now reflect on itself in its environment and it can even reflect on itself as an environment for itself (the self as an it and a self):’The difference system / environment occurs twice: as the difference produced by the system and as the difference observed within the system (The Society of Society 1997a, 45). Autopoietic and sense-constituting systems construct themselves and their horizon though their own operations. Making sense is equivalent to making reality, both self-referential and other-referential. By distinguishing itself from its environment a system establishes itself and the world around it’ [p 68]. DPB: I think this is an important quote. It reminds me of individuation: while the system is in the process of making sense of the world it is itself becoming (becoming more coherent) and in so doing they can make more sense to other systems. A summary of Luhmann’s constructivist theory of reality is: ‘If one accepts this theoretical disposition, one can neither assume that there exists a world at hand (vorhanden) consisting of things, substances, and ideas, nor can one designate their entirety (universitas rerum) with the concept of a “world”. For sense-systems the world is not a giant mechanism that produces states out of states and thus determines the systems themselves. The world is rather an immeasurable potential for surprises, it is virtual information that needs systems to produce information, or more precisely; to ascribe to selected information the sense of being information (Luhmann The Society of Society 1997a, 46)’ [p 68]. DPB: he world is not a vat of things and relations that need only to be explored (nothing is ’vorhanden’, at hand); instead: ‘According to systems theory, the sense and essence of the world do not precede the being of systems: the being of systems rather precedes the sense and essence of the world – to put it in Sartrean terms. The world’s sense and essence is what the autopoietic, sense-processing systems make it to be’ [pp. 68-9]. Not the world determines what makes sense, but the systems determine what does, thereby determining its reality: ‘Sense can only be processed when the world is regarded as information’ [p 69]. Sense-making, observation, and production of information are cognitive tools of both psychic and communications systems. Observe = produce cognition = produce reality. ‘That reality results from cognitive construction, that is results from observation, does, of course, not make it less real – a reality constructed by observation is not less real than one that is “at hand” prior to observation. It just make reality different, more complex and plural’ [p 69]. So as reality emerges when observed by an observer, the observer emerges when observing the observed: ‘The cognition of the world not only constructs observed, it also constructs the observer. The observer may observe operations – but at the same time is also an operation: “other than as an observation the observer cannot exist. The observer is a formation that constitutes itself by linking operations to each other (Luhmann 2002a, 143)’ [p 70]. DPB: this reminds of the concept Marta uses for memes in the conception of a Luhmannian universe: that which remains the same in a flow / a sequence of differences. ‘”The question how systems are able to produce cognition within an environment can then be reformulated as the question how systems can uncouple themselves from their environment” (1988b, Cognition as Construction, 13)’ [p 71]. In this way uncoupling between system and environment establishes their distinction, and hence paves the way for cognition, and hence for the possibility of reality.

(b) Second-Order Cybernetics

Reality is a cognitive construct associated with observation: as a consequence descriptions of reality are descriptions of observation. Observation is an integral part of reality; there is no place where all that is real is located and observation is no longer simple, namely a generating element of reality. The focus is now on the observing of observing of reality and not simply on observing of reality alone. That is second-order observing, also second-order cybernetics. ‘Second-order cybernetics is concerned with the reality-construction of observing systems – and here the expression “observing systems” has a double meaning: second-order cybernetics observes systems that are themselves systems of observation, it is observing systems that are observing systems. When second-order cybernetics uses the expression “observing systems”, the term “systems” is grammatically both an object and a subject

[p 71]

. DPB: and so the observing systems are observed; they observe because they are observed. Systems in the theory of second-order cybernetics are autologically and paradoxically included in it: ‘The subjective and the objective sides of the observation become equally valid and mutually constitutive’ [p 71]. DPB: if there is no observation, there is no second-order observation, there is no distinction, there is no cognition and there is no reality. Only from the first observation could there have been reality. Only from the first observing (spotting?) of the emergence of a firm does it exist in reality. Observation is a formal term: ‘..“First of all, something that causes problems over and over again has to be pointed out. One can say it a hundred times without avail. The observer is not necessarily a psychic system, not necessarily consciousness. The observer is defined purely formally: to distinguish and to indicate. A communication can do this too” (Distinctions 2002a, 147)’ [p 72]. The second-order observation is a first-order observation of a first-order observation simultaneous; complexity of observation of reality is gained, but at the loss of ontological certainty about it. Higher level observations cannot transcend this pattern, they remain first-order observations of fist-order observations of &c. ‘.. every observation, regardless of order, has its so-called blind spot: .. When handling a distinction you always have a blind spot or invisibility in your back. You cannot observe yourself as the one who handles a distinction, instead you have to make yourself invisible when you want to observe. .. The observer has to make him/herself invisible as the element of the distinction between the observer and the observed(Luhmann Distinctions 2002a, 147)

[pp. 73-4]

. As an illustration: the second-order observer can observe that the first-order observer cannot observe herself as the second-order observer can; the first-order observer sees what’s in front but not what is behind her back; the blind spot signifies her particular perspective; when she turns around to look, there is a new blind spot behind her. But this is true for all observers: every one has a blind spot, and hence every observation creates a blind spot, and hence reality depends on blind spots [p 74]. ‘Social systems observe – and thereby, of course, construct reality – by observing how others observe. Functional differentiation plus second-order observations are two main characteristics of the present’ [p 76]. An important example of this is the interplay between politics and the mass-media, another is the interplay between science and the mass-media in the sense of publications.

3 What Happens to the Human Being?

(a) Beyond Humanism

The “humanist” concept of the human being will vanish [Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses, final paragraph]; human beings are not the oldest nor the most constant that human knowledge has dealt with: ‘Antropocentrism is by no means a given in the enterprise of understanding and cognition’ [p 79]. The social systems theory of Luhmann is in this same sense non-anthropocentristic: not to erase the human being, but to go beyond the conceptual limits of the overly human approach popular for a few centuries. Traditional humanism is too simplistic to explain the complexity of reality. Luhmann explains the notion of a human being in three autopoietic realms: biological, psychic and social (see chapter 1). ‘Various traditional philosophies then discussed the so-called mind-body problem – how a singular entity could consist of two parts. Social systems theory does not offer a new and easy solution to this problem, it rather suggests that “human reality” is even more complex: we do not only have to deal with the mind and the body – we also have to take into account communication. And in the face of such multiplicity it might be wise to give up the attempt still to “singularize” the human being

[p 80]

. None of these three systems is shown to be dominant and social systems theory does not attribute essences or cruces to one: ‘And since the human being cannot be essentially defined, it does not make a lot of sense to use it as a starting point for a theory. This is the reason why social systems theory tries to wipe out the humanists’ one-dimensional portrayal of the human being and replace it with a more complex model of reality’ [p 81]. The social systems theory identifies the three autopoietic and operationally closed systems, such that the mind is the interface between reality and the communications system: ‘No “outside” information can enter communication without first being processed by the mind’ [p 81]. In regard to the meaning of the three realms for social systems theory is the relation mind-communication more relevant than the relation body-mind: ‘Minds and society depend on and independent of the other. They depend on the other’s existence for the continuation of their own autopoiesis, while, because of their operational closure, they are independent as no direct determination or interference is possible. ‘They (the two systems) can only actualize and specify their own structures and thus ca only change themselves. They use each other for reciprocal irritation of these structural changes. Systems of communication can only be stimulated by systems of the mind, and these in turn are extremely attracted to what is conspicuously communicated by language (DPB: ‘via’ would have the term of my choice here). My argument is as follows: the independence of each closed system is a requirement for structural complementarity, that is, for the reciprocal initiation (but not determination) of the actualized choice of structure (Luhmann 1994a ?? p 380)’ [p 82].

(b) Problems of Identity

Minds and society (communication) are structurally coupled. Therefore they co-evolve. This is possible because they exist in the common media of language and sense. This conception leads to a specific conception of the human identity or individuality: attaining a human identity requires co-evolution involving operations of the mind and of communications; and hence can that process be described from the perspective of the autopoiesis of the one or that of the other: there is no singular view. Identity and individuality are not singular objects, but they exist in both the mind and in society. ‘In the case of the mental systems, individuality identity emerges as a result of self-socialization; in the case of social systems, individuality, and identity are part of an important semantics of the self-description of society and are connected to the inclusion of “persons” in society. .. “the autopoietic system of society that operates on the basis of communication makes its own complexity available for the construction of psychic systems”; and conversely, inclusion means that “an autopoietic psychic system that operates on the basis of consciousness makes its own complexity available for the construction of social systems” (Luhmann 1989 Ecological Communication, 162)

[p 83]

. DPB: this is the explanation of Jobs: I had explained the fluidity (complexity) of memes or memeplexes that fall as a mist over the landscape of individuals and shaping them, but I had not at the time (I think) explained that the individual people on the landscape of people are more than neutral substrate, but they are themselves shaped by the ongoing influence of the communication taking place in society. At a later stage I have explained this, namely in the Theory and also in the Logistic Model, where through the operations people are familiarized with the ideas they encounter in society and the more frequent the encounters, or the more their connotations suit the existing structure of their minds as it has developed as a result of the previous encounters, the more the people become familiar with them and the easier they will reproduce them. Every mind is unique and in that way each mind will resonate in their unique way with their environments and especially with their social environments with which they are structurally coupled (Parson: they interpenetrate). ‘Mental systems autopoietically develop themselves and can only develop an understanding or consciousness of themselves by way of self-socialization’ [p 83]. DPB: the mind is damaged by the encounters with (principally) the social system and vice versa. The point above is that the mind is closed and perceives only vague signals for them to interpret as signs with a meaning; only they can damage themselves based on the signals they perceive from the social systems they have encounters with; Luhmann calls this phenomenon self-socialization; ‘socialization is a “do-it-yourself” project’ [p 83]. DPB: I reckon the concept of autopoiesis has not fully permeated throughout my thesis, and as a consequence I don’t believe that the signals / signs dichotomy has been sufficiently incorporated; there might still be (will surely be) traces of penetration of signals from external sources as signs into the mind. How the consciousness of an individual is structured is in the end decided by the consciousness of the individual; ‘.. mental structures are “the result of an individual system history” of the mind (Luhmann Theories of Distinction 2002a 137)

[p 84]

. But the psychic system is operationally fully independent and cognitively fully dependent: ‘The language and the sense (Sinn) of individuality link or couple our perceptions of our individualities to society. Each individual consciousness has its own particular systemic history, its own individual mindset – but in each case this history and resulting mindset are informed by the available “cultural supply” (Luhmann 2002a Theories of Distinction, 137)’ [p 84]. And vice versa do individual minds damage the social systems around them: ‘On the other hand, communication systems ascribe individuality to “persons”. This is how they are able to resonate with the psychic complexiity in their environment. .. Inclusion is the term for the manner in which social systems can recognize persons. By inclusion, social systems assign persons with a social position so that there is a framework “in which they can act in conformity with expectations, or, to put it more romantically,: in which they can feel at home as individuals” (Luhmann The Society of Society 1997a, 621). Successful inclusion takes place when society is able to prepare molds for “individuals” to fit in’ [p 84]. How social inclusion develops depends on the evolution of the differentiation of social systems: social evolution and the unfolding of history result in a variation of the “cultural supply”. Human individuality is a product of semantics and language that couple psychic and social systems. In a stratified society (up to appr. 18th century) the stratum (family, household &c.) is the social locality where an individual becomes an individual, including rank and attributes ‘.. “in the sense of its socially respected characteristics”’ [p 86]. In a stratified society socialization takes place within the house where one’s social life is, resulting in a fixed, inviolable, and hence an indivisible social status (ref. literal meaning of individual), but not yet a uniqueness: the individual was shaped by birth and divine creation, but not yet original as differentiated from all the other individuals thus positioned. When the stratified societal structure came to change into a functional structure, the direct inclusion of old was replaced by a form of exclusion: ‘The “general” was no longer outside of the individual and inside society and religion, but was moved into the individual itself. .. Individuality no longer means indivisibility, but uniqueness. The individual is now supposed to be an individual by being different from all others – by being a “subject”’ [p 87]. As from this point on the individual is expected to identify itself in regard to its individuality and this means: ‘ “.. in regard to that which distinguishes itself from everybody else. Self-observations and self-descriptions can no longer (and if still, then only externally) rely on social positions, affiliations, inclusions” (Luhmann Ecological Communication . 1989, 215)’ [p87]. Functional differentiation for an individual means differentiation into the various subsystems of society; their boundaries mark the social differentiation; the individual cannot be entirely at home with any of them: ‘Whatever the individual makes of himself and however society contributes to this: it has its standpoint in itself and outside of society. The formula “subject” symbolizes nothing else. Thereby the individual is external to all function systems. It can no longer participate (Luhmann Ecological Communication 1989, 212)’ [p 88]. The individual has now left society but it can partially re-enter, namely with particular roles. This is problematic, because 1. by being unique individuals cannot be unique and 2. by characterizing one as not x, one has to choose what one is from a source of not x, that is socially accepted and general, and hence not unique and 3. it is no longer possible to be an ‘in-dividual’, in the sense of an indivisible entity, because one is party to multiple function systems; one risks to fall apart into multiple selves. To overcome this risk the subjective individual has the choice to become an homme copie, an “imitational person.” ‘“This means: to admit from the first the failure of the programme of individuality and to establish one’s principle of life on the opposite> To be able to be different then means: to be just like someone else” (Luhmann 1989 Ecological Communication, 221). In living a “copied existence,” one borrows one’s originality from others. Just like in the world of fashion, one becomes special by copying what others present as being special

[p 89]

. This programme of individuality may lead to a multiple self or an imitational person. But this is due to the multiplicity if the functional systems (differentiation) and the difficulties to choose one’s role from them: father or employee &c. ‘If, in accordance with the semantics of modern society we become persons by being subjects that take on a variety of functions, what does this mean in “real life?”

[p 91]

. We go through careers, assume positions and develop a history with each of the functions we are active in; to state one’s class does not suffice and one has to explain one’s history and ensuing position in each functional system (married twice, children, successful politician, not particularly wealthy, terrible cook &c). ‘And what is above all decisive is that in modern society the career (..) has advanced to become the most important mechanism for the integration of individuals and society (Luhmann The Society of Society 1997a, 742)’ [p 92]. The concept of a career is wide (all function systems) and deep (an unsuccessful career counts also). But although careers can be based on psychic characteristics, they are social and not psychic: they connect people to society, but they do not necessarily connect people to themselves; that is a job for subjectivity, namely how people select their partial identities from what is available. ‘The semantics of subjectivity – that flourished after the American and French revolutions – allows the retaining of some self-respect. It is a fine addition to the structural reality of the functional differentiation and supplies us with dignity’ [p 95]. Social systems theory does not see communication as a result of human action (contrary to theories of action), but instead it sees human action as a result of communication: ‘.. ; and it (DPB: social systems theory) describes “human action” as designated by communication systems’ [p 97].

4. What Can Be Done?

(a) Limits of Activism and the Conformism of Protest

Social systems theory does not deny the impact of social theory and social activism; the impact as in the case of Marxism can be immense: ‘But it does not believe that such an impact can be predicted or decided by a theory or the political groups that claim to represent it. In a society based on functional differentiation, social developments cannot be imposed by one system on another. Society as a whole cannot be directed. Function systems are operationally closed and function autopoietically’ [p 101]. DPB: and the same holds true for the economy and for organizations, see ch 1 above. They in other words cannot be changed by people, with regards to movements with an objective to make changes to society: ‘Society is addressed “as if it was not a system”(Luhmann 1986a Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, 20), as if it could be generally changed if only people would start to think and act better. Luhmann sees a role of systems theory in “disciplining the accusations towards the address of society” (Luhmann 1986a Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, 20). The accusations against society are, according to Luhmann, based oon an inadequate understanding of how society functions, of how society can change itself, and of how the own social nature of the activist movement itself’ [p 102]. Concerning the Green movement in Germany, in summary: proposed changes in function systems result in changes in the function systems themselves and not necessarily in the ecology. So called protest movements do not oppose society, but they contribute to its functional differentiation by increasing its complexity and so they they are in accord with it: ‘Modern “protest” movements are possibly among the best adapted and systemically conformist developments in society’ [p 108].

(b) Negative Ethics

Movements frequently use a type of communication called moral discourse; this usually indicates the existence of a conflict; under normal circumstances function systems do not require this mode. Luhmann sees this as an ethical task, ethics being treated as the reflection on morality: his ethics aim at explaining morality from the nonmoral perspective of society (hence the negative ethics in the title). Luhmann states that the religious paradigm is lost, academic ethics have failed and he is skeptical with regards to the finding of new a paradigmatic ethics; he states that philosophy should stop looking for “the” reasons for ethics: ‘He says: “Ethics can’t provide reasons for morality. It finds morality to be there, and then it is confronted with the problems that result from this finding” (1989 Ecological Communication, 360)’ [p 111]. But it is possible to provide a theory that describes how a morality works within a functionally differentiated society. Morality is associated with social and hence communicative operations; in that light morality must be seen as ‘a specific type of communications for processing information on esteem of disesteem’ [p 111]; esteem is similar to approval (distribution of some achievement in a limited context such as sport) but extended to the entire person; it distributes esteem or disesteem among persons in the sense of systems theory in the function systems: all other function systems can add moral code (good / bad) to their operations: a moral code can be attributed to the concrete operations of a particular system. Used in this way a moral code polarizes; it also suffers of ‘l’englobement du contraire’, or the ‘interdiction of self-exemption’: once the distinction is made, one identifies oneself with the positive side of it. ‘One should, Luhmann says, be very cautious with morality and “only touch it with the most sterile instruments’, since it is a “highly contagious substance” that easily infects communication (Luhmann Ecological Communication 1989, 359)’ [p 113]. Systems theory can say: there can be no ethical propositions, positive ethics cannot be expressed, what is good shows itself as good in practice, and there is no correspondence between good theory and good practice. The exercise to identify a positive ethics in the sense of a rational and universal morality has turned out futile. ‘Ethics could rather concentrate on studying the empirical communicative effects of moral discourse in society under the conditions of functional differentiation’ [p 114]. If it is used in broadcasts and performances it should be supplemented with a warning like: ‘This product is full of morality and may therefore lead to unwanted communicative overengagement, possibly resulting in damage to both personal and social health’ [p 114].

(c) Subtle Subversion

Society cannot be steered by people, moral discourse does not change it; society changes itself autopoietically. Social systems theory is itself a social system (within the science function system) and so it itself can only change itself autopoietically. ‘Like any other scientific theory, social systems theory also somehow “makes a difference” but is can only do so immediately within science because it has to wait for its irritation to change the science system and its social environment, namely, the other function systems’ [p 115]. DPB: above all this reminds me of the billiards game ‘tien over rood’ where points can be scored either by playing the white ball at the targeted ball via a third ball in between, or via the side of the table. Anyhow there can unsurprisingly not be direct influence on society. And equally impossible is it to steer in a direct sense the behavior of an organization such as a firm. But the above quote says something about the success in terms of the changes that a theory for firms that is based on these theories (or that isn’t based on them for that matter) can be expected to bring about. This expectation has to be modest: the best it can do is to stir the minds of scientists (or other readers), who then in turn stir the minds (or irritate as Luhmann formulates it) of the people that carry the meme (or are, as per Luhmann, included in the communication of) the other function systems and of subsystems such as organizations including firms. ‘With social systems theory, like with all other communication, society is no longer exactly what it was before, but how society resonates with social systems theory (DPB: or any theory) is eventually up to society – and not to this theory’ [p 115]. And so social systems theory is skeptical about the expected results of its explanations but it can hope to clarify some facts better such that the behavior of society can be better understood by those associated with it: ‘It tries to enlighten society .. about the limits of rationality in a society of function systems’ [p 115]. This expression is modest and it shows that other attempts are prone to pompousness; Luhmann hopes for more, namely that the discomfort the theory produces will have disruptive effects. Humanist semantics still shows a blind faith in our nonhumanist society. DPB: this I like: ‘Society tends to comfort itself – and this self-comfort is supported by critical theories and protest movements – that while some aspects are not “humanist” enough, it could make itself more human, if only, for instance, the right policies were adopted’ [p 116]. DPB: but imagine what a load of spare time virtually everyone would have if these half-baked attempts at improving society were abandoned. Where this theory truly challenges the existing semantics at its foundations, the cries for more democracy, emancipation, human rights &c. only confirm the existing traditional and rather hopeless semantics. If society is indeed structured in function systems then people cannot rule and cannot be free, and hence democracy and liberation are meaningless concepts. ‘Social systems theory is quite radical in its distrust of these traditional semantics that are shared by the political system, by the mass media, by education, by protest movements, and so on. And its effects will be discomforting if it is able to irritate society so much that these semantics lose their credibility. It is potentially more subversive than many of the current protest or human rights movements regarding the distrust it has of the currently dominant social self-descriptions’ [p 117].

PART III Mass Media

5 The Mass Media as a System

This less traditional subject of his theory exemplifies the nontraditional and “radical” character of his thought. While there is no hierarchy or domination between systems, Luhmann concedes that there appears to be an “unequal growth of function systems” (1997a Society of Society?, 391). Some systems can gain ground in some state (of them and of the other function systems) while others may lose relevance to even fade away completely; the present state of the mass media is of the category rising star. It emerged with the emergence of speech, writing, printing press and its distribution accelerated with the emergence of radio, TV, and internet. It is well suited to demonstrate the modern aspects of the social systems theory: ‘..its nonhuman, global, polycontextural, and radically constructivist features. In addition to this, the mass media may demonstrate more drastically than any other systems a certain facet in the meaninglessness of contemporary sense-production’ [p 122]. DPB: this means that sense is being made of patterns perceived by the communication systems, but there is no meaning in the sense that is made. But to make sense is a double concept (it makes sense to me): the thing observed makes no sense or I am not able to make sense of that thing I am observing. DPB: it was / is not my intention to read all of this. The relevance of the concept for my research is in the way that the function systems are spread over the population to include human beings in their ranks. Because only with the messages of the evangelies of the capitalist system (the belief in the idea of progress) can individuals be included in the ranks and hence be motivated to behave such that this kind of economy appears with this kind of firms as a part of it. And so I will start to read Part III, but I may not complete it ad refer to it for further reference. ‘Luhmann defines the mass media as follows: “the term ‘mass media’ includes all those institutions of society which make use of copying technologies to disseminate communication” (Luhmann 2000a The Reality of the Mass Media, 2)

[p 122]

. DPB: this definition to an increasing extent includes corporations, because newspapers and websites use their disseminations via press releases often without further research or critical questions; this makes the firm effectively inclusive to (member of) the function system of the mass media. An essential element, however, is a lack of interaction among those co-present can take place between the sender and the receivers; interaction cannot take place because of the interposition of technology. DPB: this reminds me of the concept of coevalness, whereby human beings are denied a common experience, and hence a distance exists between the observer and the observed that itself becomes a difference and is treated as a difference of their time-lines. Also it reminds me of the way that interactions take place in my Logistical Model: I have treated direct communications and other kinds such as written or recorded in the same way: they can all have some effect on the participants and in this way they can manage to make changes to the memes in people’s minds. I have assumed that there is no fundamental difference: they are all signals entering (or not) the mind of the person to there be assigned a meaning (or not) through associations with other ideas. Luhmann makes a distinction between private communications (one-on-one e-mail &c.) and public communications (visiting a publicly accessible website &c.). But the fact that there is technology in between the sender and the receiver is no reason for Luhmann to decry the inauthenticity of these communications (like Heidegger and Baudrillard apparently do); rather the technology now enables the copying of information on a large scale without the need for physical presence or contact; this separation makes it impossible to centrally coordinate the transmission (at a presentation I can leave something out that I didn’t want a particular person to hear or I can overrule him by e.g. shooting him, but in a mass communication I cannot). Luhmann does not ascribe specific importance to the particular technologies involved: the technology is merely the environment of the communication, not the beast itself: ‘Technological developments therefore cannot produce revolutions in communication’[p 124]. DPB: but I would argue that they could accelerate revolutions in other function systems: revolutions can only be brought about by the function systems themselves, but irritations can occur at a larger scale and more frequently. Mass media make communication global. ‘Like all other function systems – but even more noticeably – the mass media system is, in principle, laid out for all-inclusion and does not recognize geographical borders. It is everywhere at all times’ [p 125]. If mass media is to be understood as a function system it must have a code: in this case it is information / noninformation: information is what it selects to broadcast, noninformation is what it selects not to. Mass media observes its intrasocial environment and constructs information by selecting and producing it. The information is public to all, it is general even if it is restricted for some, it is fully open to those for whom it is not (rated movies). Mass media information is not specific information, ‘.. rather about that “which is known to be known”, it is about that “one has to assume that everyone knows (or that not knowing would entail a loss of face and is therefore not admitted to)” (Luhmann 2000a The Reality of the Mass Media, 20)’ [p 126]. Mass media in this sense constitutes what we know about the world in which we live, and specifically our society. The ‘mass’ refers to the multiplicity of included others we share the information shared by the mass media with: ‘If we had only private or professional knowledge, it would be difficult to talk to a stranger about our common reality. Thanks to the mass media, we share a world’ [p 126]. DPB: and this information that is shared with the mass of others includes information about commonly held beliefs; this includes the idea of progress and people’s belief in it. And hence the mass media play a role in the constitution of the idea and the keeping up / fresh / remembered of the rules (memes), the ‘required’ motivations and the proper enactment if those rules. The relation to time is: ‘Information cannot be repeated; as soon as it becomes an event, it becomes non-information. .. If information is used as a code, this means that the operations in the system are constantly and inevitably transforming information to non-information. The crossing of the boundary from value to opposing value occurs automatically with the very autopoiesis of the system (Luhmann 2000a The Reality of the Mass Media, 19-20)’ [p 127]. And as a consequence this transition puts time pressure on the system. DPB: the surprise is taken out, the randomness reduced, the order increased, organization irreversibly increased, time flows in the direction of the increase of irreversibility. Once the information is divulged by the mass media, everyone will irreversibly know about it, and as a consequence time in practical terms flows in the direction of the release of new information. This mode of operation is specific for mass media as a function system: no other is known to transitions its one side to its other irreversibly (apart from some cases in the economic realm maybe: once paid, something immediately becomes unpaid for the next owner). The issue is maybe not that the system experiences pressure of time, but that time is created there; in terms of counting of events: the events in the mass media are many and of a high frequency compared to other function systems and as a consequence from those other systems time may seem to pass fast in the world. In special cases, such as advertising, repetition is in order, because it just shows how important this product is to show people it time and again. Roles of news, entertainment and advertising: ‘self-organization of folly’, ‘to provide people with no taste with taste’, and ‘the stabilization of a relation of redundancy and variety in everyday culture (Luhmann The Reality of the Mass Media2000a, 50)

[p 131]

. This appears to be a also the description of the role of the mass media in general as a function system: to in fact supply society with norms and choices. ‘Advertising is thus crucial for establishing our society as “a kind of best of all possible worlds with as much order as necessary and as much freedom as possible. Advertising makes this order known and enforces it” (Luhmann The Reality of the Mass Media2000a, 50)

[p 131]

. Another function (apart from the one mentioned above) of the mass media is: ‘.. the impact on social dynamics, the speeding up of time. Luhmann says: “It might be said, then, that the mass media keep society on its toes. They generate a constantly renewed willingness to be prepared for surprises, disruptions even. In this respect, the mass media “fit” the accelerated auto-dynamic of other function systems such as the economy, science, and politics, which constantly confront society with new problems” (Luhmann The Reality of the Mass Media2002a, 22). The mass media system accelerates the speed of society by continuously providing new irritations. It provides new information – and then converts the same information to noninformation

[pp. 134-5]

. The systems provides two timelines: one in the future where new information is uncovered and another in the past where obsoleteness is produced. DPB: I am not sure that these are two timelines, perhaps it functions like a kind of a metabolism, first selecting and producing new information and then digesting it (chewing it up) to give it over to obsoleteness. ‘By producing new information, the mass media system also produces old noninformation. The other function systems cannot ignore this production of time

[p 135]

. ‘Luhmann suggests that the mass media can be ascribed the general function of providing society with a universally available memory. And by memory he means, more specifically, the generation of familiarity and its variation from moment to moment (Luhmann The Reality of the Mass Media2002a, 101)’ [p 135]. DPB: familiarity is a term I have also used but in a more narrow perspective, namely to explain how a person can ‘get used’ to particular signals and record them in her memory in association with other such ideas; but always as a matter of repetition of information, perhaps together with the association powers with others: ‘The memory is for Luhmann never a storehouse or stock, it is, quite to the contrary, a continuously operating production of actuality

[p 135]

. DPB: this is exactly how I have modeled it in the Logistical model: in situation (bad name?) and interactions, memes are adapted and they are recorded in memory of persons as per their familiarization; in this way their memory is continuously changing and never the same! More than just memorizing events, the mass media is capable of forgetting of not only what they didn’t select in the first place, but also of what they have selected but have now converted to the other side of noninformation; as a consequence the mass media constructs memory largely through forgetting and not through recollection. ‘By the mass media, society is informed about itself in a general way, a universally valid reality is constructed’ [ p 136]. This is a distinction from the individual realities of all the function systems, but in a general way of memorizing, a kind of a background reality and also not all of reality is comprise in there, not is it based on consensus. The medium that the mass media deal with and produce is the public opinion; this means a set of nonconsensual and nonpersonal data or ratings; it is not a shared or agreed opinion or an opinion of “the people”. The mass media system is concerned with its autopoiesis, the continuation of its operations by providing connectivity; ‘The medium of public opinion is very efficient in this respect. It never grows tired; you can always connect it with itself. A poll can be done and redone – it is usually slightly different the next day, and even if it is the same as yesterday, this is still information! Today’s public opinion is the basis tomorrow’s and the continuation of yesterday’s: “The respectively current public opinion … is as the result of previous communication the condition ofor future communication” (Luhmann The Society of Society 1997a, 1104)’ [p 138]. DPB: this reminds me of the concept of individuation: there is sufficient similarity in the differences to be comparable and there is sufficient difference in the similarity to be in a state of forever becoming. Luhmann is aware of this because he refers to Deleuze (see far above). ‘Public opinion is, after all this, neither the mere fashion of opinions as it was believed in the seventeenth century nor is it the medium of rational enlightenment or the “puissance invisible” which were expected in the eighteenth century to leave tradition behind. It is the medium of the self-description and the world-description of modern society. It is the “Holy Spirit” of the system, the communicative availability of the results of communication (Luhmann 1997a The Society of Society, 1108)

[p 138]

. Public opinion is a communicative medium becomes possible through the development of the mass media into an autopoietic global function system. With the production of a memory, there arise the need for a “currency”. The memory must take shape, it must assume a form. It is the medium for general reality to manifest itself. Public opinion is this communicative medium that is produced within the mass media system. It is the ‘stuff’ of society’s general self-descriptions; it is the basis for tomorrow’s reality: ‘With public opinion, mass communication can revolve around itself and continue its on-going self-reproduction. Public opinion transforms itself in eternal spirals’ [pp. 138-9].

6 Beyond Manipulation

7 The Reality of Mass Media

There is not such thing as a reality; reality is not distorted by the mass media; mass media instead construct reality; how do the mass media construct reality? DPB: this is potentially a useful concept also for the how the of a firm constructs its reality. The people associated with the firm are the producers and the users of information concerning the firm. This reminds me of the section in the manuscript that describes and illustrates the corporate discussions: from which leased car to choose up until the quality of the salad bar and who is dating whom. This is the reality of a firm under permanent construction! It is impossible to give a full account of anything, just as it is impossible to make a one-on-one map of a geographical area. An account is a structured de-complexified reduction of reality: ‘A structured and nonchaotic reality is based on the reduction of complexity, on selection, on systemic observation. Memory is based on forgetting. A coherent reality – be it the reality of a life or a war – can only be constructed from a certain perspective and this perspective has to be itself highly structured in order to be able to present a well-structured picture

[p 150]

. DPB: this reminds of the remark of Wolfram that the processes in nature that create reality should be just about as complex as the processes that have produced our powers of perception enabling us to make sense of those processes in nature. It also reminds of the law of requisite variety: the complexity of the controller must be similar to the complexity of the process it controls. The question is: how do the mass media, or in fact how do all observing systems(!!!), construct reality? : ‘And the question must “autologically” take into account that its answer will itself be a construction / observation

[p 150]

. But mass media does not construct all of reality: ‘The mass media construct a “public” reality. But this reality is not more or less real than the reality constructions of other observing systems’ [ p 150]. DPB: this information processing is all there is; the mass media attempt to embrace all of the world’s events, the function systems process the information produced in there and firms process information produced there. ‘The Reality of the Mass Media’ (title of Luhmann’s book) is grammatically ambiguous and this reflects the “operational constructivism” that underlies the systemic concept of reality: ‘The (mass, brackets DPB) media are the grammatical subject and object of this expression. If the mass media are the grammatical object, then reality is the subject, and thus the reality of the mass media is simply the reality that they “objectively” constitute. As a grammatical subject, the mass media “subjectively” produce a reality – they present us with with a reality that is their production or “object”. What is meant by the expression in the first sense are the operations proper to the media: the broadcasting and printing as it is performed (Luhmann The Reality of the Mass Media 2000a, 3). What is meant in the second sense is the reality that “appears to them, or through them to others, to be reality” (Luhmann The Reality of the Mass Media 2000a, 4)’ [p 151]. For the first approach above, first-order observation is enough, as if we were dealing with facts. For the second approach, a second-order observation is required. DPB: All the ‘ingredients’ I use in the Logistical Model are presented here also: is the concept of reality relevant for my subject at all?: ‘We must observe the mass media as an observing system that produces both its own reality and the reality of what it observes by its observations’ [p 151]. DPB this reminds me of the operators epsilon and beta and the question of they are one and the same: ‘Construction of reality always implies the reality of construction’ [p 151]. DPB this approach integrates the notions of construction and reality and that seems to me to be the same as the reciprocity of the operation of one system (say the mind, or communication) that expresses something and the operation of another system (say communication, or the mind) of making sense of the same thing. The belief in progress associated wit the capitalism or market economy infuses continuous change into the communication of the mass media, and hence no stability. This kind of construction/observation ongoing presents society with a new reality as opposed to a former version of reality: ‘With different types of construction, different realities emerge’ [p 152]. Examples are a religious, capitalist, traditional &c. construction leading to different realities.

8 Individuality and Freedom

Individuality is an important element in social reality constructed by the mass media. Events and communication are attributed to individual agency. ‘The construct of the “cognitively more or less informed, competent, morally responsible human being” helps the function system of the mass media constantly to irritate itself with regard to its biological and psychic human environment ( Luhmann 2000a The Reality of the Mass Media, 74)

[p 158]

. But human being are too systematically split (re functional differentiated systems) to be presented as one individual. But through structural couplings with other function systems as well as with the human mind system, by presenting persons as individual agents, they give the minds something to think about, namely about social inclusion and self-socialization. The persons appearing in the mass media increase the complexity of social and psychic systems. Luhmann uses terminology from psychology to explain structural coupling between the mind and the mass media, especially the notion s of schema and script: ‘Schemata allow for cognitive selection. With their help, cognition can both sort out what it takes note of and what is does not. They provide a framework with which information can be categorized and ordered. These schemata are not fixed, they can be varied and altered, they are not so much readymade images but patterns for the construction of images. .. Schemata are not the storehouse of cognitive impressions, but rather the cognitive tools for the production of information (DPB: tools for thought) – and thus for the performance of cognitive autopoiesis. Luhmann assumes that “the structural coupling of mass media communication and psychically reliable simplifications uses, and indeed generates, such schemata. The process is a circular one. The mass media value comprehensibility. But comprehensibility is best guaranteed by the schemata which the media themselves have already generated” (Luhmann 2000a The Reality of the Mass Media, 100)’ [pp. 158-9]. Minds and communication are coupled by meaning and language, in addition minds and mass media are coupled by cognitive schemata [p 152]. DPB: the concept of schemata reminds me of the concept of memes, the tools for thought; I believe that they are not only relevant in the sphere of the mass media or their interface with the mind, but have a wider application, for instance in the way people think about economic issues. ‘Schemata are rather the “thermostats” that link the mind and the mass media together’ [p 159]. DPB: they are at the same location as my operators E and B. And indeed via familiarization, they can become a mold of association that are used for decisions in the future. I find the thermostat comparison strange because they can only give a reading and not an action. Is that the intention here? ‘In order to be a modern personality we have to have a personality that goes beyond our functional identities. .. one has to be something “unique” as well. One has to have an identity, a history. One has to be as special and unique as everyone else is. The mass media display all these uniformly unique characters – and the mind resonates with these schemata. And in turn, of course, the mass media resonate with the mental individuality schemata. .. Luhmann explains: “When individuals look at media as text or as image, they are outside; when they experience their results within themselves they are inside. They ghave to oscillate between outside and inside. .. For the one position is only possible thanks to the other – and vice versa”(Luhmann 2000a The Reality of the Mass Media, 115). When structurally coupled with the mass society through the mass media – we are both inside and outside of society. The schemata have these two extremes – our psychic existence outside of society and our social existence within it’ [p 160]. DPB: this last part outside / inside reminds me a lot of the Logistical Model in regards to the making sens of the environment and then influencing the environment with the amendments of memes &c.

Part III: Philosophical Contexts

This section is a short summary of the main influencers of the work of Luhmann: Kant, Hegel, Husserl and Marx, according to Habermas and also according to the number of references in his texts. Mueller finds the work of Luhmann closest to the work of Hegel (influenced by it or borrowed from it, although he doesn’t admit it); and as such it is more of a philosophy of consciousness than a philosophy of social systems.

Kant

Radical constructivism, however, begins with the empirical assertion: Cognition is only possible because it has no access to the reality external to it. A brain, for instance, can only produce information because it is coded indifferently in regard to its environment, i.e. it operates enclosed within the recursive network of its own operations. Similarly one would have to say: Communication systems (social systems) are only able to produce information because the environment does not interrupt them. And following all this, the same should be self-evident with respect to the classical “seat” (subject) of epistemology: to consciousness. (Luhmann Cognition as Construction 1988, 8-9)’ [pp. 167-8]. Luhmann’s system theory is rooted in Kantian epistemology: What is cognition and how does it operate? But if cognition is a matter of consciousness then how can it relate to what it recognizes? Kant no longer occupies himself with the general structure of the world, but with the structure of cognition and how it operates and conceives of a world. And as a consequence, to understand reality we must first understand cognition. This idea introduces constructivism into epistemology. According to Kan, the realization of reality is an effect of cognitive construction but it makes sense to assume that the world still is as it is and the transcendental structure of cognition is relevant. Luhmann radicalizes this by assuming that reality consists of its own realization (over and above the idea that the realization of reality is a way of relating to reality). ‘Cognition is no longer simply a way of relating understandingly to a reality. Here reality emerges as cognition’ [p 168]. Cognition is however not seen as ideal or the self-realization of a higher consciousness, but instead it has no “essence”: ‘It can operate, for instance, ”materially” in the form of biological life, mentally in the form of thoughts, or socially in the form of communication’ [p 169]. There is no rule for how this can come about: ‘Cognitive systems establish themselves by operational closure. By differentiating themselves operationally, they construct themselves by establishing a difference between themselves and their environment. Cognition is based on the establishment of this difference – it does not happen in spite of this difference, but because of it’ [p 169]. DPB: this is a connection with the concept of individuation, where a shape or a contour is distinguished from a scatter of possible enemies (or food, or spouses) and that process of distinction (while being distinguished) is the process of cognition and it also is the process of individuation. As it comes to individuate, it comes to cognize. And this can only take place because a distinction is made between self and the environment, and hence because the system is operationally closed. And this process has been called “thinking” and I am also fond of the term “computation” in this sphere, meaning the processing of information. In the context of my research it means the processing of the information belonging to the social system, namely communication, and the processing of information belonging to the psychic system, namely belonging to the mind. These systems are operationally closed, and hence closed to the exchange of information by one another, but yet they influence the other indirectly. Differences of Luhmannian and Kantian theory: 1. Cognition can take any operational mode and hence is not an act of consciousness 2. Cognition constructs itself empirically in a different way from process to process, and there is no a priori transcendental structure of cognition 3. No complete description of all cognitive processes is possible because they evolve and hence new modes emerge 4. Reality is not singular but instead a complex multiplicity of system / environment constellations 5. A description of reality is itself a contingent construction within a system / environment relation [pp. 169-170]. With regards to the subject /object distinction (and its replacement with system / environment): ‘The subject “constructs” reality by transcendental unification through self-reference. The system does this by differentiation. The conceptual framework of system / environment is not only radically constructivist but also radically differentialist”’ [ p 170]. Consciously cognizing subjects are replaced with systems of observation that make distinctions (‘make splits’) into the world constituting a multiplicity of system / environment relations. In addition to the abolishing of the subject as an element of pure reason as above, Luhmann also criticizes its use for ethics and social theory: ‘The term “subject” does not designate a substance that, by its pure being, shoulders everything else, the subject is rather self-referentiality itself as the foundation of cognition and action. .. ‘ [pp. 170-171]. In other words: subjectivism should also not be use in social studies. DPB: the approach of Luhmann reminds me of my Logistical Model namely there is no subject, but a mutual evolution of the thought processes and the individuation processes. This comes about via the temporary existence of a connection between psychic and communication systems. Their connection, a Job or a Bubble, is the ‘owner’ of the operators that make the self- end hetero references, because only if the utterance was sent and received is it ain fact a communication and can it damage the mind such that the mind can damage the communication. What bothers me is Husserl’s concept of intersubjectivity, it sounds good, why can it not work? And also: it was mentioned in relation to the concept of coevalness.

Hegel

Hegel imports concepts of consciousness into social theory, ‘.., Luhmann rejects any general type of cognition for systemic autopoiesis – it may be consciousness, but is can also be communication, life, or perhaps, something else’ [p 173]. Luhmann’s shift from subject to system implies a shift from unity to multiplicity and from identity to difference (also compared to Hegel). Luhmann claims that his theory is able to include itself within itself. There is some level of self-inclusion in Hegel’s theory when the subject becomes fully self-reflective: ‘But Hegel, at least in Luhmann’s view, forgot to include himself, the perspective of the theory of subjectivity, into the story. He failed to take into account that the epistemologist is himself within the labyrinth of cognition. Hegel .. did not really achieve an “autological” theory of observation’ [ p 175]. ‘Luhmann’s theory is a “supertheory” because it fully includes itself within itself. But this self-inclusion leads to the breakdown of any declarations of finality, completion, or foundationalism’ [p 175].

Marx

Luhmann agrees with Marx that Hegel’s focus on consciousness such that social structures can be emancipated from being mere effects of spirituality. He, like Marx, believes that society has its own forces, that cannot be seen as a function of nonsocial forces; but he finds that Marx does not distantiate himself sufficiently from the same one-sidedness as Hegel, but with a focus on modes of production instead of a focus on consciousness. So as Hegel identified consciousness as the basis principle of all society, so Marx identified modes of production; and so both can be seen as fundamentalists or ontologists; both have not been able to introduce difference into their theories; and in the same way as Hegel, Marx has also not been able to include self-reflectivity into his theory autologically: ‘”Marx himself, however, seems to have been unable, just as Hegel, to account for his own theory within his own theory” (Luhmann 1997a Social Theory, 1080, n. 350) ’[p 177]. Neither theory was in this sense really a supertheory. Luhmann found Marx’s insight groundbreaking that the economy is not some law of nature but a social construct; in this way he could introduce the constructivist ideas already present in Kant and Hegel, into his theory of social construction: ‘With Marx, it became possible to conceive of society as an autopoietic, self-constructing mechanism that operated on its own accord, rather than under the unchangeable laws of some trans-social realm’ [p 178]. Marx was focused on the economy; this denies the influence that the function systems can have on one another; and so social theory had to be broadened to other areas also. In addition Luhmann does not agree with the “humanist upholstery” that Marx applied to his theory. ‘There is a thorough discomfort about normativity and morality in Luhmann that are, for him, not only simple-minded, but may quickly lead to intellectual and, more dangerously, social totalitarianism’ [p 180].

Husserl

Luhmann explicitly takes over structural and methodological aspect of cognitive and constructivist theory as well as Husserl’s terminology to use for his own conceptual apparatus. Husserl had already detected some principal features of autopoiesis, but failing to appreciate it, because of his epistemological idealism: ’Luhmann therefore wants to apply Husserl’s terminology not in explaining only the “characteristics of consciousness”, but also for “the emergence of order in general” (Luhmann Modern Sciences and Phenomenology (Die neuzeiten Wissenschaften und die Phänomenologie) 1996b, 50)’ [p 182]. He is interested in how the cognitive construction functions amongst other nonconscious systems, particularly social systems, namely society; he is interested in the ‘making sense’ of systems and rejects the ‘transcendental subject’. Luhmann translates Husserl’s terminology into systems language: ‘Intention is nothing but the positing of a difference’ (Luhmann 1996b Modern Sciences and Phenomenology (Die neuzeiten Wissenschaften und die Phänomenologie), 31)’

[p 182]

. No longer a mental interest, ‘Intention’ is now a primal operation. DPB: this reminds me of the description of Oudemans: at some state there is a difference and then that state determines which attraction or repulsion there is to establish the next state. Based on and because of its intentionality can a system make a distinction and differentiate between itself and its environment; a cognizing system can differentiate between itself (its operations) and that which it cognizes outside of itself: ‘Intentionality paves the way for a distinction between a system and its environment. Only through this difference can a system identify itself by distinguishing itself from what it observes’ [p 183]. This difference between self-reference and other-reference establishes the membrane, namely the boundary between the system and the environment. And this holds not only for conscious systems but for all self-referential systems, including social systems. In a likewise manner Luhmann defines sense as the unity of the difference between actuality and possibility to be applied to all sense-processing systems. Sense emerges in a context, it needs a horizon and it is always connected to something else that makes sense; the circular closure appearing as the ultimate horizon of everything connected is the world. According to Luhmann it is not possible for something nonsocial such as minds (or humans) to form the social and as a consequence he rejects Husserl’s intersubjectivity (see remark above, this is why, it is easy).

Habermas

14 Postmodernity, Deconstruction and Techno-Theory

Luhmann was mainly interested in post-modernism (at least the movement) when it indicated a loss of trust in the traditional (modern) self-descriptions; the overturn of modernity is not a structural but a semantic turn. A concise description of post-modernity is: ‘..renunciation of claims to unity and transition towards radically differentialist concepts (1997a The Society of Society, 555)’ [p 194]. Through deconstruction as a second-order observation Luhmann connects his theory with Derrida’s (and de Man) theories of deconstruction. ‘Luhmann finds that deconstruction recommends “the reading of forms as differences, to look at distinctions without the hope of regaining unit at a higher (or later) level”, and it “is deconstruction of the ‘is’ and not the ‘is not’”, because it deconstructs the assumption of presence, of any stable relation between presence and absence, or even the very distinction between presence and absence” (1993a, Deconstruction as Second-Order Observing, 766)’ [p 195]. All statements of an ‘is’ are based on distinctions and, as a consequence, presence is a construct of differentiation; it never actually gains self-identity; every presence if the result of an observation that is different from it; deconstruction can observe the observation that observes the presence; it observes (as per a second-order observation) the construction of the ‘is’, and hence the deconstruction of this construction. Any deconstruction can be the subject of further deconstruction (it applies to itself) and there can be no final unity that does away with difference. Luhmann refers to Deleuze’s concept of ‘sens’ as an antecedent for his use of ‘Sinn’ (at the expense of Husserl).

15 Conclusion: From Metanarrative to Supertheory

So as for Hegel, religion was a thing of the past, so for Luhmann philosophy was a thing of the past also. Religion (and philosophy respectively) were in waiting to be ‘sublation’ (‘Aufhebung’). Luhmann did not consider himself a philosopher but a social scientist; he in fact tried to elevate the entire project of philosophy. ‘A supertheory reflects on the fact that that it and its validity are its own product – and is therefore absolutely contingent. What a supertheory says has to make general sense to it. But this sense itself is not general, it is contingent upon the theory that is constructing this horizon of sense in the first place. A supertheory is a theoretical endeavor, and there is nothing more to it. What it says is relevant only theoretically, only within its confinements. .. Supertheory does little outside of theory. With supertheory, the world does not become morally better, more rational, or spiritually complete. It only becomes more distinct’ [p 201].

Appendix A: The Society of Society

Pages 24-35 from Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt/Main Suhrkamp 1997), translation by Hans-Georg Mueller.

In the current conception of society the assumptions are found that societies: 1. consist of concrete human beings and their relations 2. are constituted or integrated by consensus between human beings, their correspondence of their opinions and complementarity of their goals 3. are regional and territorially limited units 4. can be observed from outside. PS: that there was a problem with this was clear in sociology from the start, Durkheim says: ‘la société n’est pas une simple somme d’individus, mais le système formé par leur association représente une réalité spécifique qui a ses charactères propres’ (Durkheim, 1927, Les règles de la méthode sociologique, 8th edition, 127). PPS: even today many researchers refer to the human being as the basic unit for society. The assumptions above (1 / 3) prevent the definition of the object of society: ‘Instead, the relation between the individual and society now becomes a problem. .., obviously not everything that individualizes human beings (if anything) belongs to society. Society does not weigh exactly as much as as all human beings together, and its weight also does not change with every birth and every death’ [p 231]. It is not consensus that keeps society together: ‘This body of teaching, however, collapses when one asks more persistently how consensus, in a psychologically realizable sense, should be possible at all, and also how a sufficiently harmonized direction of coordinated expectations should be attained in this way’ [p 232]. DPB: this is exactly the crux: what is the organization that turns out to form a society by the coherence of the behavior that people appear to exhibit?

Appendix B: Cognition as Construction

Erkenntnis als Konstruktion (Bentelli Bern, 1988), translation Hans-Georg Mueller.

Distrust an assertion if it is amplified: why radical constructivism? ‘No matter if one preferred solutions of transcendental theory or dialectics, the problem was: how is cognition possible in spite of having no independent access to reality outside of it. Radical constructivism, however, begins with the empirical assertion: cognition is only possible because it has no access to reality outside of it’ [p 242]. The mind and communication can produce information because they are operationally closed: ‘Similarly one would have to say: communication systems (social systems) are only able to produce information because the environment does not interrupt them. And following all this, the same should be self-evident with respect to the classical “seat” (subject) of epistemology: to consciousness’ [pp. 242-3]. DPB: the above reminds me of a definition of information stating that the more surprise/newness it holds the more information it contains; the limit sits at randomness, which holds the most surprise (the information has no pattern, it is irreducible). Suppose that systems produce information while they are cognizing and suppose that more information is produced if the difference between the system’s states and the systems in the environment is larger. Difference between consecutive states of (behavior of) self or between self and the systems in the environment supposes comparability (the relation is less than random), and hence difference supposes a minimum of similarity between states of one system as cognized from another system. If there is too much difference for the systems to be comparable, then, as a consequence, individuation is impossible (a connection does not occur). If a change takes place in the environment (of the observed system), then an increase of difference is induced, and hence an increase of the amount of information produced by the system while it is making sense of the change in the environment; eventually the changes occurring and hence the amount of information can get so big that all similarity is lost and there is no longer a difference; and this represents again randomness. Rephrase: the information in the system and the behavior of the environment is unclear. ‘Constructivism could achieve a novelty effect if it would pursue the question of how uncoupling (in other words: indifference, closure) is possible

[p 243]

. DPB: interesting choice of words. The distinction between the system and the environment can cater for uncoupling by closure in the light of the differentiation of systems and it can cater for observation of observing systems (2nd order cybernetics).

II

It is (perhaps naively) assumed that all cognizing systems are real systems. In light of the above, the question how systems can cognize can be reformulated to how can they uncouple themselves from their environment. Self-isolation does not imply freedom of choice of operations, the opposite is the case, namely a coercion. Closure is only possible as an effect of the operations of the system itself and by the production of its own operations ‘within the network of their recursive anticipations and recourses’ [p 245]. This ‘going on’ is called autopoiesis by Maturana and other things by other philosophers: ‘Systems theory, however, makes it possible to formulate the result with particular clarity. No system can operate outside of its own borders, and neither can a cognizing system’ [p 245]. Luhmann assumes a concept of observation based on distinction and indication: cognition is manufactured by the operations of observation and recording of observations (descriptions), including the observation of observations and the description of descriptions. A distinction is made and an indication is made accordingly. ‘Everything that can be observed is the observer’s own accomplishment (Eigenleistung), including the observation of observers. Thus there is nothing in the environment that corresponds to cognition, since everything that corresponds to cognition is dependent on distinctions within which cognition indicates something as this and not that. .. There is not even an environment in the environment .. The distinction between system and environment is itself an operation that guides cognition. This course of reflection does not allow for any conclusions in regard to the irreality of the environment. It also does not allow for the conclusion that nothing exists besides the cognizing system. .. Indications such as “reality”(matter, ultimate reality) or “world” are, for cognition, themselves based on distinctions. They formulate the unity of that which is distinguished by a distinction – or, if you wish, their spirit’ [pp. 246-7].

II

An operative epistemology conceives of cognition as a kind of operation it can distinguish from other operations. As an operation, cognition happens or not depending on whether the autopoiesis of the system can be continued with such operation or not. The most important consequence of this approach is that it makes no difference whether cognition produces truth or errors’ [pp. 247-8]. DPB: this reminds me of the definition of communication (Luhmann, Logistical Model). Many authors find that it is intentional, I find it must be just-so. This statement above allows for cognition to ‘work with’ just-so stories; it produces whatever, not necessarily truth alone. Neither consciousness systems nor communications systems are divided into (or work in some other way with) true/false distinctions. Initially an autopoietic system works indifferently in regard to a true/false divide and now a binary code can be imposed: but who does the imposing? An observer observes A (distinguishes A from something else) , but he must observe other observers to find out whether it is true that A is. As long as epistemology relates itself to the concept of autopoiesis to explain cognition, it can claim for itself the status of external observer, given that it admits it is itself ruled by the same physical/chemical/biological/psychological conditions as the conditions it observes. [p 250]. DPB: this is my claim to lead my arguments back to laws of physics! I have no possibility to do that extensively, but now I can refer to this claim here! But: it changes with the sociological concept of cognition because there is only one society, only one comprehensive system of communication. Now there is no escaping (to another system) and the observer is trapped in the same system as the observed. DPB: this is why I am not particularly taken with the idea of communication as one system, divided into the functional systems; I find this is artificial. Anything individuating can become a system with some density and there is no need for an ultimate unity of communication, or is there? In the above (Luhmann) system all externalization can only be explained as a system differentiation: ‘Only with the sociology of cognition does a radical, self-inclusive constructivism become possible’ [p 250].

IV

The radical in radical constructivism can only be explained historically. The role of distinctions could only be played by religion: ’God is beyond all distinctions, .. In him, everything that transcends distinctness coincides insofar as it transcends distinctness – i.e., that which cannot be conceived as greater, as smaller, as quicker, as slower (coincidentia oppositorum)

[p 251]

. Everything else stems from a ‘contract’ with God, and hence is is distinguishable, and, in doing so, God makes himself comprehensible (in his incomprehensibility); ‘and that truth, although finally incomprehensible, consists for human beings in the correspondence of their distinctions with those of things’ [p 251]. DPB: God made the distinctions in this way and human beings can learn them by heart. To know God in his incomprehensibility, one had to observe his doings directly but in addition observe his observers, the devil as a first source of critique, and his self-observation also: ‘The escape route came fatally close to the assumption that God needed creation and the damnation of the devil in order to be able to observe himself, and it lead to writings that Nicolaus (Cusanus) believed unprepared minds with their weak eyes had better not read’ [p 251]. As a consequence the partner for radical constructivism is not traditional epistemology, but traditional theology.

V

One would now like to know how distinguishing and indicating is possible as a unitary but two-component operation’ [p 252]. DPB: this question reminds me of the problem of the ‘principal’ of the operator working between the psychic system and the communication system in the Logistical Model. ‘This leads one to the already anticipated insight that strongly limiting conditions have to be contributing’ [p 252]. DPB: what does this mean to say? Does this refer to that issue with the owner of the operators, namely that if and only if something is uttered as well as perceived by human beings can it be (become) part of the realm of communications? And conversely does it mean to say that if and only if it is perceived and (re-)uttered by human beings can it become part of their minds? ‘What presumably plays a role is that it is just about possible – at least in the realm of the sense operations of consciousness and communication – to view a twoness as a oneness, or, put differently; to see contrasts’ [p 251]. DPB: This supposedly means that if and only if the uttered thing and the perceived thing, up to that point two things, become one thing from there on. But what is meant with the seeing of contrast? If time is taken into account and if the system is complex, then sensitive dependence on initial conditions plays a role in its oscillations (between operations E and B to and between mind and communication). ‘This also, of course, presupposes the uncoupling of the system, namely, its own time (Eigenzeit) for its own operations while there is doubtless a simultaneous environment

[p 252]

. DPB: this reminds me of my position with regards to time as the counting of events. Events are the differences between the system and the environment, as far as they go noticed by the system, and hence they are irreversible, because they cannot become ‘unnoticed’. Time is a result of the counting of the events and not an independent parameter. Luhmann sees time differently, namely an Eigenzeit, time of the thing itself and perhaps even time of the environment where things run simultaneously. This position makes me think of the role of the operations inside the system in the production of irreversibility and hence of the production of time: this is different from the difference in the unfolding of events in adjacent systems. ‘This refers again to the necessity of memory, namely, on the one hand, to an ongoing consistency check along with the activation of the respectively appropriate structures, and, on the other hand, to a schema of observation that interprets occurring inconsistencies as distinctions in time or space and thus stretches them apart’ [p 252]. This leads to an ever more detailed specification of unlikely but necessary (Luhmann says possible) evolutionary processes that produce cognition. The environment presents to a system contrasts from its changes as persistent and hence allows for repetition (while the corresponding identifications are of course up to the system); the identification is a condition of the identification of the being and not of the being itself; the cognizing system can deal with the object (tolerating the observation) even if that has changed. ‘And, even more astonishingly, the cognizing system can, insofar as it has language, use constant terms to indicate something that is conceived as inconstant – for instance, the word “motion” to indicate motions. In other words, it does not have to simulate the changeable through its own change’ [p 253]. The hypothesis now emerges that ‘the differentiating of a cognizing system in any case leads to situations that are ordered simultaneously but no longer rhythmically synchronic with the environment; and this can only be achieved when there are also discontinuities in the environment from which the system can distinguish its own operations’ [p 253]. DPB: each system clicks away according to its own operations and as a consequence there are differences between the systems; these differences are not necessarily congruent synchronic because they only depend on the operations of the individual systems themselves; their behavior is of course conditional to of the irritations that they are dealt out by their neighboring systems. In addition the differences in the reality conditions of the reality perceptions: cognizing systems can compare the signs reaching them from different sources such as sound and visible location in such a way that they can make distinctions and identifications. ‘Cognition is therefore not possible in a “random” environment, but only in one that is suitable for cognition. This, however, does not justify assuming any “adaptation” of cognition to reality’ [p 255].

VI

There are at least some clues indicating that a reality that remained unknown, if it was totally entropic, would not enable cognition to take place’ [p 255]. But cognition itself cannot by itself bring this distinction because it would paradoxically have to be part of its own exteriority. DPB: this is the problem with the operators E and B between perception and behavior also: to whom do they belong, of what are they a part? Cognition is internal and does not know anything external to it that would correspond to itself: cognition does not have a model of the outside world that maps the world to its own operations. ‘We wish, without making a definite decision, to suggest three further concepts, which may very remotely resemble the teaching of the trinity. We wish to speak of the world in order to indicate the unity of the difference between system and environment. We wish to speak of reality in order to indicate the unity of the difference between cognition and object. We wish to speak of sense in order to indicate the unity of the difference between actuality and possibility’ [p 256]. The negation of the world lies in the world, the negation of reality is a real operator and the negation of sense makes no sense if it makes no sense. Luhmann goes on to state that cognition is an extremely unlikely type of operation, but I believe the contrary is true: this is very common and not unlikely at all, because every multiplicity of things from ‘the beginning of times’ has no other option than to make do with whatever else there is, by making sense of it, and such that from an early form of cognition it develop to what it is now, &c. ‘Additionally, it has to be noted that the aforementioned distinctions system/environment, cognition/object, and actuality/possibility display an obvious asymmetry. There is connectivity only on one of their sides; and they allow re-entry only on one side in the sense of Spencer Brown’s logic, i.e. re-entry of the distinction into what is distinguished. In this way the world can only be a concept for orientation within the system, a concept that re-enters the difference between system and environment into the system. In this way the difference between cognition and object is a distinction that is immanent to cognition; and the assumption that reality has to be something that entails both sides is, correspondingly, based on the very practice of cognition. And finally, in this way the difference between actuality and possibility only makes sense if it is practiced in actu, i.e., if the momentarily practiced operation refers to a horizon of other possibilities (and here it does not matter if these are real possibilities or possibilities that are only thought of or that can be only fictionally imagined)’ [p 257].

VII

One has to distinguish between psychic and social systems, between actually operating consciousness and communication. Both systems can make use of language to articulate thought as well as communication. For both systems a build-up of complexity to the degree we are familiar with becomes possible only through language. Both systems, however, operate as closed systems under entirely separate operational (autopoietic) and structural conditions. There is not the slightest operational overlap, because the recursive networking with other operations of the respective system imposes entirely different conditions of connectivity on everything that functions as an elementary operation within a system’ [p 258]. DPB: Luhmann designates a special position to language as a go-between for social systems and psyche ‘It is no system at all. Its efficacy lies in the structural coupling between consciousness and communication’ [pp. 258-9]; I find this artificial and I believe language is one of the social systems, evolving in an environment of peers, of which the closest (most frequently dealt with) are the mind and communication. ‘Language keeps its central function with respect to the ongoing structural coupling of psychic and communicative operations. It fascinates consciousness. .. During communication, one can also rely on the notation capability of psychic systems, on their memory’ [p 259]. DPB: this is not a very strong quote; there is more, but it appears descriptive and it does not exactly pinpoint how language is exactly that different from another social system, but has its own special position. ‘All these considerations demonstrate the importance of a structural coupling between psychic and social systems that is compatible with gains in complexity. It can only be explained by language’ [p 259]. DPB: I am not convinced it can only be explained by language; (the generative rules of) processes in nature including the processes of the mind and the processes that generate language are sufficiently complex to explain the gains in complexity of their respective (and coupled) behavior.

Appendix C: Beyond Barbarism

Niklas Luhmann Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik. Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der Modernen Gesellschaft, vol. 4 (Frankfurt/mAIN: Suhrkamp, 1999), 138-50), translated by Hans-Georg Mueller.

Should old ‘word-shells’ be discarded? Barbarian &c. are used to express disgust and to lend objectivity to the expression. Savages experience the world in a sensual way (as a variety of the diverse), barbarians have subscribed to reason; they grant primacy to reason over variety and individuality of all the phenomena. ‘Barbarians are those who have only one iron left in the fireplace’ [p 261].

II

III

Moreover, the absorption-system of the old-style corporations no longer exists, instead there are modern organizations based on membership decisions, that is to say on the inclusion of few members and the exclusion of all others’ [p 265]. As opposed to these membership organizations of corporations, the function systems (politics, religion, economy, science, law &c.) are in principle open to all.

IV

Barbarism has thus disappeared. ‘Culture is initially simply a doubling of all artifacts, including texts. Besides their immediate usage, artifacts gain a second meaning as documents of a culture. Pots are on the one side pots, but on the other side they are also signs of a specific culture that distinguishes itself by its kind of pots from another culture. And what is true for pots is also true for religions’ [p 268]. DPB: this reminds me first of the ‘other meaning’ of culture, similar to the chapter 14 of the management handbook. This illustration of the concept of culture can be connected with my use of Cargo religions such as John Frum &c. Also this is a way for behavior (and the memes that are at their foundation) to discriminate between them as a matter of Darwinian variation (or perhaps rather to enable selection to take place: now there is something to choose from). How can there be inclusion of there is no exclusion?

V

In modern supply-society, freedom is not restricted by coercion, but rather structured by supply in such a way that the enacting of freedom can no longer be attributed to the self-realization of the individual. One buys for a good price, watches the advertised films, chooses a religion or not as one likes – just like the others. Even God is a supply-God. He offers, and the model is of course Pascal’s wager, his love so impressively and so independent of moral judgments that the refusal would be meaningless or, theologically speaking, would fulfill the definition of sin. This demonstrates that culture and social conditions have made the enacting of freedom so asymmetrical that the individual is only left with meaningless decisions – or with protests that do not change anything’ [p 271].

Glossary of Terms

Blind spot (Blinder Fleck): when we observe something we establish a point of view, there is thus something else behind our back we cannot see. Cognition presupposes conditions that cannot be themselves cognized. The world cannot be seen as a whole, seeing is determined by nonseeing.

Connectivity: ‘Connectivity of operations is the for the self-establishment of an autopoietic system. Operations of the same kind have to be capable of connecting to each other so that a network of operations arises. In communication systems, communication has to be able to be continued. If not, the system stops reproducing itself and thus ceases to exist’ [p 217].

Constructivism: all cognition is construction. This term can be contrasted with realism, namely that reality is as it is and it can be represented as such. Constructivism means that “reality” is produced by construction by the observer.

Contingency: this means that things could have been different. Observations and distinctions, cognitions and selections are contingent: they are not dictated by human nature, but by (social) evolutionary processes and so they could have been different. The function systems are a result of distinctions but these in turn have evolved and have no essence.

Environment: that in which a systems exists other than itself: complementary with the term system. But an environment is specific for thát system and so there are as many environments as there are systems.

Information: 1. one of the moments or “selections” that constitute communication and 2. information/noninformation is the basic code of the mass-media.

Irritation: orignaly Irritation, meaning distraction to perturb, perhaps better translated as perturbation. This term is used to avoid deterministic cause-effect sequences.

Observation: an act of distinction and indication.

Operation: ‘Operations are what systems consist of; operating is what systems do. Different types of systems consist of different types of operations’ [p 223]. ‘Operational closure goes along with cognitive openness. By being operationally closed and differentiated from its environment, a system can have cognition of its environment. Once a system has reached operational closure, it can observe the environment in its own terms’ [p 223].

Re-entry: the re-entry of a distinction into what is distinguished.

Self-reference and Other-reference: ‘A system that has distinguished between itself and its environment and, by way of re-entry, has copied this distinction into itself, can, quite naturally, distinguish between itself and its environment. It can therefore refer to itself or to its environment when communicating (if it is a communications system)’ [p 224].

Semantics: this is the term for the specific ways in which society produces meaning or how it makes sense of things.

Structural coupling: this term (Maturana) is used in later work to replace interpenetration (Parsons).

Unmarked space: like the term ‘blind spot’ (Spencer Brown) this term also expresses the idea that when something is observed something else remains unobserved. In order to focus, other things have to be left out of sight.

The Way we are Free

‘The Way we are Free’ . David R. Weinbaum (Weaver) . ECCO . VUB . 2017

Abstract: ‘It traces the experience of choice to an epistemic gap inherent in mental processes due to them being based on physically realized computational processes. This gap weakens the grasp of determinism and allows for an effective kind of freedom. A new meaning of freedom is explored and shown to resolve the fundamental riddles of free will, ..’. The supposed train of thought from this summary:

  1. (Physically realized) computational processes underpin mental processes
  2. These computational processes are deterministic
  3. These computational processes are not part of people’s cognitive domain: there is an epistemic gap between them
  4. The epistemic gap between the deterministic computational processes and the cognitive processes weakens the ‘grasp of determinism’ (this must logically imply that the resulting cognitive processes are to some extent based on stochastic processes)
  5. The weakened grasp leads to an ‘effective kind of freedom’ (but what is an effective kind of freedom? Maybe it is not really freedom but it has the effect of it, a de facto freedom, or the feeling of freedom)?
  6. We can be free in a particular way (and hence the title).

First off: the concept of an epistemic gap resembles the concept of a moral gap. Is it the same concept?

p 3: ‘This gap, it will be argued, allows for a sense of freedom which is not epiphenomenal,..’ (a kind of a by-product). The issue is of course ‘a sense of freedom’, it must be something that can be perceived by the beholder. The question is whether this is real freedom or a mere sense of freedom, if there is a difference between these.

‘The thesis of determinism about actions is that every action is determined by antecedently sufficient causal conditions. For every action the causal conditions of the action in that context are sufficient to produce that action. Thus, where  actions are concerned, nothing could happen differently from the way it does in fact happen. The thesis of free will, sometimes called “libertarianism”, states that  some actions, at least, are such that antecedent causal conditions of the action are not causally sufficient to produce the action. Granted that the action did occur, and it did occur for a reason, all the same, the agent could have done something else, given the same antecedents of the action’ [Searle 2001]. In other (my, DPB) words: for all deterministic processes the direction of the causality is dictated by the cause and effect relation. But for choices produced from a state of free will other actions (decisions) are possible, because the causes are not sufficient to produce the action. Causes are typically difficult to deal with in a practical sense because some outcome must be related to its causes. This can only be done after the outcome has occurred. Usually the causes for that outcome are very difficult to identify, because the relation is  if and only if. In addition a cause is usually a kind of a scatter of processes within some given contour or pattern, one of which must then ’take the blame’ as the cause.

There is no question that we have experiences of the sort that I have been calling experiences of the gap; that is, we experience our own normal voluntary actions
in such a way that we sense alternative possibilities of actions open to us, and we sense that the psychological antecedents of the action are not sufficient to fix the action. Notice that on this account the problem of free will arises only for consciousness, and it arises only for volitional or active consciousness; it does not arise for perceptual consciousness‘ [Searle 2001]. This means that a choice is made even though the psychological conditions to make ’the perfect choice’ are not satisfied, information is incomplete or a frivolous choice is made: ‘should I order a pop-soda or chocolate milk?’. ‘The gap is a real psychological phenomenon, but if it is a real phenomenon that makes a difference in the world, it must have a neurobiological correlate’ [Searle 2001]. Our options seem to be equal to us and we can make a choice between various options on a just-so basis (‘god-zegene-de-greep’). Is it therefore not also possible that when people are aware of these limitations they have a greater sense of freedom  to make a choice within the parameters known and available to them?

It says that psychological processes of rational decision making do not really matter. The entire system is deterministic at the bottom level, and the idea that the top level has an element of freedom is simply a systematic illusion… If hypothesis 1 is true, then every muscle movement as well as every conscious thought, including the conscious experience of the gap, the experience of “free” decision making, is entirely fixed in advance; and the only thing we can say about psychological indeterminism at the higher level is that it gives us a systematic illusion of free will. The thesis is epiphenomenalistic in this respect: there is a feature of our conscious life, rational decision making and trying to carry out the decision, where we experience the gap and we experience the processes as making a causal difference to our behavior, but they do not in fact make any difference. The bodily movements were going to be exactly the same regardless of how these processes occurred‘ [Searle 2001]. The argument above presupposes a connection between determinism and inevitability, although the environment is not mentioned in the quote. This appears to be flawed because there is no such connection. I have discussed (ad-nauseam) in the Essay Free Will Ltd, borrowing amply from Dennett (i.a. Freedom Evolves). The above quote can be summarized as: if local rules are determined then the whole system is determined. Its future must be knowable, its behavior unavoidable and its states and effects inevitable. In that scenario our will is not free, our choices are not serious and the mental processes (computation) are a mere byproduct of deterministic processes. However, consider this argument that is relevant here developed by Dennett:

  • In some deterministic worlds avoiders exist that avoid damage
  • And so in some deterministic worlds some things are avoided
  • What is avoided is avoidable or ‘evitable’ (the opposite of inevitable)
  • And so in some deterministic worlds not everything is inevitable
  • And so determinism does not imply inevitability

Maybe this is how it will turn out, but if so, the hypothesis seems to me to run against everything we know about evolution. It would have the consequence
that the incredibly elaborate, complex, sensitive, and – above all – biologically expensive system of human and animal conscious rational decision making would actually make no difference whatever to the life and survival of the organisms’ [Searle 2001]. But the argument cannot logically be true and as a consequence nothing is wasted so far.

In the case that t2>t1, it can be said that a time interval T=t2-t1 is necessary for the causal circumstance C to develop (possibly through a chain of intermediate effects) into E. .. The time interval T needed for the process of producing E is therefore an integral part of the causal circumstance that necessitates the eventual effect E. .. We would like to think about C as an event or a compound set of events and conditions. The time interval T is neither an event nor a condition‘ [p 9-10]. This argument turns out to be a bit of a sideline, but I defend the position that time is not an autonomous parameter, but a derivative from ‘clicks’ of changes in relations with neighboring systems: this quote covers it perfectly: ‘Time intervals are measured by counting events‘ [p 9]. And this argues exactly the opposite: ‘Only if interval T is somehow filled by other events such as the displacement of the hands of a clock, or the cyclic motions of heavenly bodies, it can be said to exist‘ [p 9], because time is the leading parameter and the events such as the moving of the arm of a clock is the product. This appears to be the world explained upside down (the intentions seem right): ‘If these events are also regularly occurring and countable, T can even be measured by counting these regular events. If no event whatsoever can be observed to occur between t1 and t2, how can one possibly tell that there is a temporal difference between them, that any time has passed at all? T becoming part of C should mean therefore that a nonzero number N of events must occur in the course of E being produced from C’ [p. 9]. My argument is that if a number of events lead to the irreversible state E from C then apparently time period T has passed. Else, if nothing irreversible takes place, then no time passes, because time is defined by ‘clicks’ occurring, not the other way around. Note that the footnote 2 on page 9 explains the concept of a ‘click’ between systems in different words.

The concepts of Effective and Neutral T mean a state of a system developing from C to E while conditions from outside the system are injected, and where the system develops to E from its own initial conditions alone. Note that this formulation is different from Weaver’s argument because t is not a term. So Weaver arrives at the right conclusion, namely that this chain of events of Effective T leads to a breakdown of the relation between deterministic rules and predictability [p 10], but apparently for the wrong reasons. Note also that Neutral T is sterile because in practical terms it never occurs. This is probably an argument against the use of the argument of Turing completeness with regards to the modeling of organizations as units of computation: in reality myriad of signals is injected into (and from) a system, not a single algorithm starting from some set of initial conditions, but a rather messy and diffuse environment.

Furthermore, though the deterministic relation (of a computational process DPB) is understood as a general lawful relation, in the case of computational processes, the unique instances are the significant ones. Those particular instances, though being generally determined a priori, cannot be known prior to concluding their particular instance of  computation. It follows therefore that in the case of computational processes, determinism is in some deep sense unsatisfactory. The knowledge of (C, P) still  leaves us in darkness in regards to E during the time interval T while the  computation takes place. This interval represents if so an epistemic gap. A gap during which the fact that E is determined by (C, P) does not imply that E is known or can be known, inferred, implied or predicted in the same manner that  fire implies the knowledge of smoke even before smoke appears. It can be said if so that within the epistemic gap, E is determined yet actually it is unknown and  cannot be known‘ [p 13]. Why is this problematic? The terms are clear, there is no stochastic element, it takes time to compute but the solution is determined prior to the finalization of the computation. Only if the input or the rules changes during the computation, rendering it incomputable or irrelevant. In other words: if the outcome E can be avoided then E is avoidable and the future of the system is not determined.

.. , still it is more than plausible that mental states develop in time in correspondence to the computational processes to which they are correlated. In other words, mental processes can be said to be temporally aligned to the neural  processes that realize them‘ [p 14]. What does temporally aligned mean? I agree if it means that these processes develop following, or along the same sequence of events. I do not agree if  it means that time (as a driver of change) has the same effect on either of the processes, computational (physical) and mental (psychological): time has no effect.

During gap T the status of E is determined by conditions C and P but its specifics remain unknown by anyone during T (suppose it is in my brain then I of all people would be the one to know and I don’t). And at t2, T having passed, any freedom of choice is in retrospect, E now being known. T1 and t2 are in the article  defined as the begin state and the end state of some computational system. If t1 is defined as the moment when an external signal is perceived by the system and t2 is defined as the moment at which a response if communicated by the system to Self and to outside, then the epistemic gap is ’the moral gap’. This phrase refers to the lapsed time between the perception of an input signal and the communicating of the decision to Self and others. The moral comes from the idea that the message was ‘prepared in draft’ and tested against a moral frame of reference before being communicated. The moral gap exists because the human brain needs time to compute and process the input information and formulate an answer. The Self can be seen as the spokesperson, functionally a layer on top of the other functions of the brain and it takes time to make the computation and formulate its communication to Self and to external entities.

After t1 the situation unfolds as: ‘Within the time interval T between t1 and t2, the status of the resulting mental event or action is unknown because, as explained, it is within the epistemic gap. This is true in spite the fact that the determining setup (C, P) is already set at time t1 (ftn 5) , and therefore it can be said that E is already determined at t1. Before time t2, however, there can be no knowledge whether E or its opposite or any other event in <E> would be the actual outcome of the process‘ [p 17]. E is determined but not known. But Weaver counter argues: ‘While in the epistemic gap, the person indeed is going through a change, a computation of a deliberative process is taking place. But as the change unfolds, either E or otherwise can still happen at time t2 and in this sense the outcome is yet to be determined (emphasis by the author). The epistemic gap is a sort of a limbo state where the outcome E of the mental process is both determined (generally) and not determined (particularly) [p 17]. The outcome E is determined but unknown to Self and to God; God knows it is determined, but Self is not aware of this. In this sense it can also be treated as a change of perspective, from the local observer to a distant more objective observer.

During the epistemic gap another signal can be input into the system and set up for computation. The second computation can interrupt the one running during the gap or the first one is paused or they run in parallel. However the case may be, it is possible that E never in fact takes place. While determined by C at t1 not E takes place at t2 but another outcome, namely of another computation that replaced the initial one. If C, E and P are specific for C and started by it then origination is an empty phrase, because now a little tunnel of information processing is started and nothing interferes. If they are not then new external input is required which specifies a C1, and so see the first part of the sentence and a new ’tunnel’ is opened.

This I find interesting: ‘Moreover, we can claim that the knowledge brought forth by the person at t2 be it a mental state or an action is unique and original. This uniqueness and originality are enough to lend substance to the authorship of the person and therefore to the origination at the core of her choice. Also, at least in some sense, the author carrying out the process can be credited or held responsible to the mental state or action E, him being the agent without whom E could not be brought forth‘ [p 18]. The uniqueness of the computational procedure of an individual makes her the author and she can be held responsible for the outcome. Does this uphold even if it is presupposed that her thoughts, namely computational processes, are guided by memes? Is her interpretation of the embedded ideas and her computation of the rules sufficiently personal to mark them as ‘hers’?

This is the summary of the definition of the freedom argued here: ‘The kind of freedom argued for here is not rooted in .., but rather in the very mundane process of bringing forth the genuine and unique knowledge inherent in E that was not available otherwise. It can be said that in any such act of freedom a person describes and defines herself anew. When making a choice, any choice, a person may become conscious to how the choice defines who he is at the moment it is made. He may become conscious to the fact that the knowledge of the choice irreversibly changed him. Clearly this moment of coming to know one‟s choice is indeed a moment of surprise and wonderment, because it could not be known beforehand what this choice might be. If it was, this wouldn‟t be a moment of choice at all and one could have looked backward and find when the  actual choice had been made. At the very moment of coming to know the choice that was made, reflections such as „I could have chosen otherwise‟ are not valid  anymore. At that very moment the particular instance of freedom within the gap  disappears and responsibility begins. This responsibility reflects the manner by  which the person was changed by the choice made‘[pp. 18 -9]. The author claims that it is not a reduced kind of freedom, but a full version, because: ‘First, it is coherent and consistent with the wider understanding we have about the world involving the concept of determinism.  Second, it is consistent with our experience of freedom while we are in the process of deliberation. Third, we can now argue that our choices are effective in the world and not epiphenomenal. Furthermore, evolution in general and each person‟s unique experience and wisdom are critical factors in shaping the mental processes of deliberation‘ [p 19]. Another critique could be that this is a strictly personal experience of freedom, perhaps even in a psychological sense. What about physical and social elements, in other words: how would Zeus think about it?

This is why it is called freedom: ‘Freedom of the will in its classic sense is a confusion arising from our deeply ingrained need for control. The classic problem of free will is the problem of whether or not we are inherently able to control a given life situation. Origination in the classic sense is the ultimate control status. The sense of freedom argued here leaves behind the need for control. The meaning of being free has to do with (consciously observing) the unfolding of who we are while being in the gap, the transition from a state of not knowing into a state of knowing, that is. It can be said that it is not the choice being originated by me but  rather it is I, through choice, who is being continuously originated as the person that I am. The meaning of such freedom is not centered around control but rather around the novelty and uniqueness as they arise within each and every choice as one‟s truthful expression of being‘ [p 20]. But  in this sense there is no control over the situation, and given there is the need to control is relinquished, this fact allows one to be free.

‘An interesting result regarding freedom follows: a person‟s choice is free if and only if she is the first to produce E. This is why it is not an unfamiliar experience that when we are in contact with persons that are slower than us in reading the situation and computing proper responses, we experience an expansion of our freedom and genuineness, while when we are in contact with persons that are faster than us, we experience that our freedom diminishes.

Freedom can then be understood as a dynamic property closely related to computation means and distribution of information. A person cannot expect to be free in the same manner in different situations. When one‟s mental states and actions are often predicted in advance by others who naturally use these  predictions while interacting with him, one‟s freedom is diminished to the point where no genuine unfolding of his being is possible at all. The person becomes a  subject to a priori determined conditions imposed on him. He will probably experience himself being trapped in a situation that does not allow him any genuine expression. He loses the capacity to originate because somebody or something already knows what will happen. In everyday life, what rescues our freedom is that we are all more or less equally competent in predicting each other‟s future states and actions. Furthermore, the computational procedures that implement our theories of mind are far from accurate or complete. They are more like an elaborate guess work with some probability of producing accurate predictions. Within such circumstances, freedom is still often viable. But this may  soon radically change by the advent of neural and cognitive technologies. In fact it is already in a process of a profound change.

In simple terms, the combination of all these factors will make persons much more predictable to others and will have the effect of overall diminishing the number of instances of operating within an epistemic gap and therefore the  conditions favorable to personal freedom. The implications on freedom as described here are that in the future people able to augment their mental processes to enjoy higher computing resources and more access to information will become freer than others who enjoy less computing resources and access to information. Persons who will succeed to keep sensitive information regarding their minute to minute life happenings and their mental states secured and  private will be freer than those who are not. A future digital divide will be translated into a divide in freedom‘ [pp 23-6].

I too believe that our free will is limited, but for additional and different reasons, namely the doings of memes. I do believe that Weaver has a point with his argument of the experience of freedom in the gap (which I had come to know as the ‘Moral Gap’) and the consequences it can have for our dealings with AI. There my critique would be that the AI are assumed to be exactly the same as people, but with two exceptions: the argument made explicit that 1) they compute much faster than people and the argument 2) left implicit that people experience their unique make-up such that they are confirmed by it as per their every computation; this experience represents their freedom. Now people have a unique experience of freedom that an AI can never attain providing them a ticket to relevance among AI. I’m not sure that if argument 2 is true that argument 1 can be valid also.

I agree with this, also in the sense of the coevalness between individuals and firms. If firms do their homework and such that they prepare their interactions with the associated people, then they will come out better prepared. As a result people will feel small and objectivised. They are capable of computing the outcome before you do hence predicting your future and limiting you perceived possibilities. However, this is still a result of a personal and subjective experience and not an objective fact, namely that the outcome is as they say, not as you say.

Mafia Culture

Blok, A. . The Mafia of a Sicilian Village, 1860-1960 – A study of violent peasant entrepreneurs . . 1974 . Waveland Press, Inc. . Prospect Heights Illinois . 1988 . ISBN 0-88133-325-5

The idea is that memes are the ideas that replicate: they are the basis for selective pressures. And so once a meme is interesting enough it gets replicated by its host. In this way it is successful and fit. It can’t be said to be useful for the person replicating it or for society in general or for some group in particular. It just happens to be accepted or believed, communicated and replicated and it survives. However the case may be: the memes we encounter today are the products of many years of ‘experience’ and in that sense they already have been selected by the evolutionary forces. Their ancestors have been around in some shape or form, initially basic but ever more sophisticated and competing for human attention, they have been around ever since human beings communicate. In theory those would be the ones providing some evolutionay advantage to their hosts, but there is no need for that. The prevailing memes can be about anything: if they are damaging to their host, they should not be too quick about it. Some examples were given of memes concerning the economic lives of people at this point. They can all be said to be useful for the host up to some point and so to identify their workings, an inventory was made of the memes that must be in play in a traditional sicilian village in the period 1860-1960.

A pivotal characteristic of mafia is the private use of unlicenced violence as a means of control in the public sphere. Many people are involved in it or with it and it is still widespread, but it is not a centralized or single organisation. However the case may be: mafiosi exist and the sum of their actions associated with the use of violence is known as the mafia: mafia exists but The Mafia doesn’t. Mafioso or ‘ntisu (he who is listened to).

The reason why Sicily is ungovernable is that the unhabitants have long ago learned to distrust and neutralize all written laws (alien laws in particular) and to govern themselves in their own rough homemade fashion, as if official institutions did not exist. This arrangement is highly unsatisfactory (the inhabitants themselves endlessly lament their fate) because it cures no ills, in fact makes them worse, promotes injustice and tyranny, leaves crimes unpunished, does not make use of Sicilians’ best qualities, and has kept the country stagnant and backwards in almost every way. It consists of a technique, or art, which is second nature to all Sicilians, both the decent hard-working, honorable Sicilians, and the criminal minority, which includes the Mafia, that of building up one’s personal power, and of acquiring enough power to intimidate or frighten one’s competitors, rivals, or enemies, in order to defend one’s honor and welfare at all times [Barzini 1972: 75-6 in Blok 1988 foreword p xiv].

M1: Distrust the law and any alien forces. Govern thyself.

M2: Defend your honor and welfare. Expand your power to intimidate your competitors and rivals.

The existence of the mafia hinges on a set of economic and political arrangements and so to discover the drivers of its mechanisms is about the locating of the connections between those two elements and the prevalence of private violence.

Fundamental framework of social life: landless / landpoor laborers, rentiers (owners of land) and managers (running the estates and oversee strongarm men hired to protect the property). The managers maintained the rentiers’ incomes from their property and their local power. In return they received liberty to exploit the local workers for their own ends. The landlords used their own private forces to ward off outside interference from rivals and the state and to protect their managers. The produce is to a large extent exported and some level of large-scale organisation is in place and so to label the sicilian society as backwards doesn’t explain the state of afffairs. Blok calls this system rent-capitalism. An important piece of the puzzle is that the laborer spends a lot of time traveling between his job(s) and between his own scattered plots of land (itinerant lifestyle). As a result of this and the insecurity caused by a lack of state control, protection could be offered to the laborer in exchange for a tribute, added to the burdens of direct exploitation (low wages and high leases and taxes). But the population pressure was high enough to keep the wages low and underemployment prevalent, the communication between villages was limited and so the laborers were not in a position to organize themselves, emigration was difficult and protection by the state was limited.

M3: (peasant). Me and my family must survive. Get work at any price wherever and whenever.

The origins of the emergence of the mafia lies in the liberalisation of the lands as a consequence of the dispossessions of the church, breaking up of common lands, abolition of feudal landownings and so on. This lead to the acquiring of large estates and stretches of land by a few bourgeois joining old aristocrat families, preventing farmers joining in and state intervention regarding genuine land reform. ‘The mafiosi were creatures of the landlords; they began as armed retainers, and ended up as exploiters with considerable autonomy‘ [Blok 1988 p. xviii]. ‘While on one hand, mafiosi heightened class tensions though their control over land, they checked open rebellions and sustained revolts in several ways: by force; by keeping a hold on outside influence; by opening avenues for upwardly mobile peasants; and by turning outlaws and bandits into allies‘ [Blok 1988 p. xviii].

M4: (peasant). The security and welfare (and honor) of a mafioso is safeguearded. Get a job as a mafioso.

M5 (peasant) A mafioso is selected because of his outstanding cruelty. Show exceptional cruelty.

The mafiosi are protected by the landlords mightier then them; they in turn have fabricated some agreement of non-intervention with the regional authorities. This system rests on patronage without complete control: in case the national state collapsed then the non-intervention agreement is rendered useless and space opens for other power structures. If the protectors are replaced by the government than the autonomy of the mafiosi decreases and the effect of that for the populace depends on the concrete relative characteristics of the mafia and the state. The amount of force depends on the amount of autonomy that the parties have managed to ssecure for themselves.

The system producing mafia is both cruel and curious. Like governments, the beneficiaries of the system, directly or indirectly, tax the producers of the wealth – the agricultural workers. Like many governments, the system permits each of the operators to scoop some of the proceeds from the flow towards the top. It depends on government to stand far enough away not to interfere with the flow of proceeds, but close enough to assure that neither rivals nor the people at the bottom will block the flow. Unlike most governments, however, the system has no accountability, no visibility, no means of representation for those under its control. So the mafia system is more curious and more cruel than the government itself.’ ‘The murders, thefts and mutilations its operators use to maintain their control- to ‘make themselves respected’-are only the most lurid manifestations of its evil’ [Blok 1988 p xix-xx].

M6 (mafia): the more invisible the less accountable. Remain as little visible and representing as possible.

In that regard, one might imagine a continuum running from anarchy to banditry to mafia to routine government. The defining feature of that continuum is the extent to which control over the use of force is concentrated in a single organization. That implicit continuum connects Blok’s analysis to phenomena far more general than mafia or Sicilian villages. What he calls state-formation, other people have often tried to deal with as ‘political development‘ [Blok 1988 p. xx-xxi].

State-formation is not immanent, unidirectional or a displacement of the traditional by the modern nor universal (namely not historically specific) but it is international (namely occurring in a network of neighbouring or otherwie dependent states). The processes that Blok identified in Sicily are fairly standard State-formation processes: consolidation of the controol of over the use of force, elimination of rivals, formation of coalitions, extension of protection, routinized extraction of resources. Had one mafia network managed to extend its control over Sicily, then it would have been closer to a public rather than a private authority, a State rather than a movement.

Poised between landowning elite and peasants, between city and countryside, and between central government and the village, they sought to control and monopolize the links between these various groups and segments of society‘ [Blok 1988 p. xxviii].

M7 (mafia): There is a profit to be made by exploiting violence in the vacuum between the peasants and the landowners. ??

Land is the basis for social and political life in Genuardo: the majority of the population did not own or have power over suffficient land to live on. The only way to survive is to come to terms to those who do own it or have access to it. This was increased because in the new structure of landownership, the feudo (classical estate) was replaced with the latifondo: the mechanism of the common grounds were now no longer in place and all land was on lease. These lands were part of the rivalry of the existing landownners and the new incumbants. This further impoverished the peasants, because they were now forced to pay a lease for the formerly free of charge commons. The latifondo were large, but their lands were leased out in smaller strips of land to peasant on short term leases. The estate was itself leased out to a gabelloto (leaseholder) who paid a fixed fee per annum or a amministratori (steward) who represents the owner and has an annual income. They are referred to as peasant entrepreneurs because they were of peasant stock and manipulating people and resources for profit.

Who are the entities engaged in this game and what are their tools for thought?

General (a.p. Barzini quote) held belief:

The reason why Sicily is ungovernable is that the unhabitants have long ago learned to distrust and neutralize all written laws (alien laws in particular) and to goven themselves in their own rough homemade fashion, as if official institutions did not exist… It consists of a technique, or art, which is second nature to all Sicilians, both the decent hard-working, honorable Sicilians, and the criminal minority, which includes the Mafia, that of building up one’s personal power, and of acquiring enough power to intimidate or frighten one’s competitors, rivals, or enemies, in order to defend one’s honor and welfare at all times[Barzini 1972: 75-6 in Blok 1988 foreword p xiv]

This orientation of peasants having a relatively high degree of independent control over their land is completely at variance with the attitudes of the dependent peasantry discussed in this book. For them, manual work was and still is looked dow upon, and those engaged in it – the contadini or vidani – are socially degraded‘ [Blok 1988 p48-9].

M8: manual labor is degraded for contadini or vidani. Advancing in the world (civiltà) means absence of manual work. To get a job that is free from manual work is better than a job involving manual work.

To bridge seasonal shortfalls, the peasants received loans from the gabellotti: they left the feudal system to enter a system of indebtedness.

The sharecropper (bringing own equipment ot the estate) was permanently indebted to the gebellotti because of these fees and tributes: 1) ¾ of the crops, 2) verbal contract 3) net / gross measurements when the gebelloto calculated payables and receivables 4) gifts to the gebelloto as tributes for protection to share out to whomever it may concern 5) high interest rates on loans 6) risks on production were with the sharecropper.

1) Peasants and shepherds as seasonal workers during summer and fall. They travel between estates and their own holdings. They need money to sustain their families and they can emigrate with considerable difficulty only. Some of them are retained by the managers as a mafioso or by other mafiosi as a collegue; thus a way up is offered to peasants skilled in violence and in so doing keeping restive peasants in submission. They have a tendency to dislike the land and the work on the land. Also they are looked down upon and seen as degraded: they are seen to have a lack of civiltà (as uncivilized). They are inclined to patriotism, xenophobia and rejection of any central rule.

M9 (peasant): To become a mafiosi means to have honor, no manual labor, more wellfare. Become a mafioso.

2) Land owners: bourgeois and aristocrats as employers and lessors. They live elsewhere, not on the estate. They want an income and no trouble. They retain a manager to manege the estate for them. They broker some agreement between the mafia and the regional governments. Aristocracy and bourgeois had no interest in farming and a didain for manual work. They were interested, apart from the landed status, in power and presige: noble titles via marriage and purchase and local government.

M10 (landowner): A life away from the state in a city is further removed from the business, concrete work, it has more civiltà and so that is to be preferred over a life on the estate. Life in the city, have a manager manage the estate.

3) Managers of the estates as retainers of strong-arm people. They gain an income from the management of the estate as well as from the coercion of low-level workers to work for them at some wage.

M11 (managers, lessees) get a lease of a part of the land on an estate: make a profit while the peasants will do the physical work. Make profit. Squeeze out the sharecroppers for more profit.

4) Mafia consists of peasants retained to enforce the will of the managers on the laborers regarding the interests of the estate and keep others out of the community as retained for strong-arm work. It is born from the tension between the central government and the land owners and the latter and the peasants. Mafia helped manage these related tensions. They move up in the world from low-wage worker (at the wrong end of the stick) to someone with a higher status and a somewhat higher income and more security (the right end of the stick). In exchange for their services protecting the intrests of the state, they are at liberty to raise tributes from the laborers. They are protected by the land owners from outside influences because of their agreements with regional authorities. They developed as entrepreneurs monopolizing the information channels with the outside world so as to keep the population isolated and uninformed. In case of a conflict the enforcement by campieri (private police) is in favour of the party wielding power and influence and incentivizing the executor and so the mafia follows the vested interests [p61]. They earn respect by their application of violent force that inspires awe and their capability to gain access to resources mainly land to their followers; there is competitive pressure on these powerful (and in an awe inspiring way respectful) jobs. Mafia at a higher level of society lends support ot government that is interested to abstain from too much interference in local communities’ businesses. ‘.. the Mafia demanded cmplete subordination, absolute obedience and ‘rispetto’ (respect). This last was even required in exterior forms and was understood particularly as a concretee recognition of the prerogative of ‘immunity’ belonging to the mafioso, not only in his person, but also in everything he had to do with or that he was pleased to take under his protection. In fine, evildoers had to leave the mafioso severely alone, and all the persons or things to which , explicitly or impicitly, he had given a guarantee of security. That is the meaning of the word ‘rispetto’ in this connection‘ [Mori 1933: 69-70 in Blok 1988 p. 146-7]. Damage to the ‘rispetto’ was seen by the mafia as an act of insubordination, an insult, not of material damage.

The means used by mafiosi is violent force. The violence and homicide in mafia circles however wasn’t a sign of social disorder. ‘The use of violence was encouraged and justified, though people were never aimlessly harmed or killed: violence was prescribed in those situations where people sought to get their claims to honor and power ultimately recognized‘ [Blok 1988 p 174].

M12 (mafiosi) When coercing people to do what they want, they make use of their ‘rispetto’. Act rigourously and violently at any inkling of a damage to the rispetto.

5) Regional and national government kept in the loop by the land owners. Some representatives receive a retainer to stay away from the area.

M13 (government representatives) the mafia enforces the law in some locality too insignificant for us. If we allow them that then they do our work for us. They may also help us to collect votes for our political careers. Get aligned witht hem.

6) The group of the bandits includes people that are not a part of the sysem that encompasses the mafia. They are social and so they are tied to other people. Bandits had to rely on protection from above to survive at all. The protection can be from kinsmen up to politicians and if they were not protected then they were hunted down by landlord’s retainers, the police or the peasants. And the more successful as a bandit, the better his protection is. They are important in this context if they assume a retainership for a landlord. That suppresses the peasants resistance in two ways: the bandit opposes it directly and it shows an avenue upward to power and respectability.

M14 (bandits) If you are not protected then will not get old. Get protected: the higher up the more protection.

The peasant movement arose because of: 1) socialist influence in intellectual circles in cities, 2) the draft brought people back to their village with new experiences and perspectives, 3) suffrage for those who cold read and write increased as more people had those skills 4) high emigration rates reduced the chances of revolution and helped traditional resignation.

The approach of the mafia: once a cosco (mafia clique) gets a foothold on an estate as a campieri, a leaseholder or supervisor of herds, they start making attempts to increase their wealth with additional activities: apart from revenues and levies they tried to rustle cattle and sheep.

M15 (mafioso) Any foothold is a start of a larger entrepreneurship. Get a foothold somewhere. Then extend the business.

The mafiosi can then ‘protect’ the cattle from being stolen for a payment. This protection is forced on people through force and violence. At some point the mafiosi felt so strong that they imposed a tribute, not only to peasants but also to landowners.

Once they are in as a campieri, they keep out the petty theft and the cattle rustling but too they are a burden to the manager and to the owner of the estate. Over time, the balance of power between the landowners and the mafiosi tipped to the latter.

Friendship in Italy, as in other mediterranean societies is intrumental rather than emotional. Each member of a dyad (combination of two things) is a sponsor for the other and acts as a potenital connecting link to others outside of the dyad. When they exchange favors they call each other ‘friend’ and they rely on the connotations of intimacy, trust and affection to cover the practical usefulness and sometimes exploitative nature of their interactions. However, if the instrumental element takes the upper hand then the relation is in danger of disruption.The term ‘friendship’ can refer to a relation of patronage in a client supplier relationship and this way can cross class lines.

M16 (all) friendship is instrumental. Get friendly, be useful. Use.

The personal armies in feudal times were different from the mafiosi after that. Similar is the reputation of toughness and very personal connections. The main difference is the social context in which the mafiosi operated versus the institutional context of the feudal henchmen.

Their violence wasn’t formal and therefore illegal from the perspective of the formal authorities; they accepted it for practical reasons. The state failed to monopolize the use of violence.

The mafiosi operated as middle men: they assumed positions of management of the estates and in this way controlled the efforts of the peasants, dependent on the land for the livelihood. They bought estates if they came up for sale, sold the land to peasants at a profit, coerced tributes from them after that and forced them to vote for their candidates in elections, thus brokering political influence. The politicians themselves were often owners of the estates that were managed by the mafiosi striving for a regional or national political position; and in this position they could protect the mafiosi from the law. This is a patron-broker-client network. Now they controlled the environment of the village because they had a control of the people in authority. They were poised between the peasants (were they came from, the so called little tradition) and the State (the big tradition). The relations within and in between the cosci were based on kinship, and in its absence, other similar relations developed.

M17 (mafiosi) work the mafia at all sides to expand the business. Have the peasants pay tributes, have the landowners pay tributes, have the politicians pay for votes.

Within the system of the mafia the younger mafiosi strived to achieve a better position in the hierarchy at the expense of higher ranking and older members. The killing of rival was an important ingredient for that, because of the career opportunities as well as the establishment and reinforcement of the reputation of ‘rispetto’.

M18 (mafiosi) gain ‘rispetto’ by eliminating rivals and have access to more work in the process. Eliminate rivals.

At a village level a small number of families monopolized control over the means of violence, the means of production, and the means of orientation, namely religion, knowledge and ideology.

M19 (mafiosi) Have more control to leave less room for deviations. Control all aspects of village life: the means of religion, violence and production.

Conclusion

Important elements of the rise of the mafia are: the gradual and violent rise of a rural middle stratum, the growing proletarianisation of the peasantry, the obsolescence of certain sectors of the landowning aristocracy.

Omertà: recourse to the legal authorities with regards to private matters is seen as a sign of weakness. It is a strong version of the sentiment that personal insult should be settled by duel to recover lost honor. Maffii psychology indicates many offenses in this category and that should be avenged by personal action or that of relatives or friends.

M20 (mafiosi) guard omertà. Deze is al eerder geweest.

The reign ended or lost momentum when empoyment rose via infrastructure projects, the number of laborers decreased because of emigration overseas and migration to the industrial north of Italy, decrease in competition for local resources (land is less important as a source of power, because people are less attached to land as a source of income) requiring cotrol by violence, and so the bargaining power of the peasants strengthened. Also within the mafia the power shifted away from the local strongmen to influence in the political sphere. As a result violence pays less.

The mafia in Sicily is a ‘mental condition’ pervading everything and all sorts of people on every level. The mafia ended up in the blood, in the most hidden structures of society. Above all, it is to be found in the atavistic distrust of the law and, for that reason, in the disregard of the law, which among Sicilians assumesthe characteristics of an epidemic voluptuousness. It is a mentality harboring in proprietors, peasants, magistrates, local authorities, the police, everywehere. It is impossible to identify, to dissect, to separate the collusion with the mafia. Because, as I have said, it enters in all the houses, though the door as well as through the window. Hence, the omertà, which is fortunately suffering its first flaws, the first cracks…. Do you know that the apparatus of the public forces to maintain law and order in Sicily is the most complete and the most extensive in Italy? But for the mafia it is of no use. As I have said before, it is a mental condition that bewitches, enchants, contaminates – you may choose the appropriate term for yourself – it instills everywhere also in those strongholds, like the Magistracy, that should be unassailable and vaccinated against the mafia‘ [Senator Donato Pafundi President of the Anti-Mafia Commission 1966 in Blok 1988 p. 227-8]. One of the major conclusions of the report of the commission issued in 1972 was that: ‘mafia by its very nature defies any remedy‘. All public bodies are rendered ineffective because all of them to some degree are intertwined with the mafia and their protectors.

Corruption and mafia are inherent elements of societies in a relatively early stage of formation of a nation-state.

What changes should take place that enable people to encourage a positive approach in all public servants or to carry though sharp measures against deviations.’ Attitudes towards the government and involvement in tasks in society on the part of the people who form it will only change with the changes in the society at large. .. It (to see corruption as something which is morally bad DPB) suggests that there are evildoers who can be punished.

We must expect, however, that people who act in particularistic and corrupt ways in not making clear a distinction between public and private affairs have few other options. They are part of societies in which the distribution of power is far more uneven than in certain nation-State societies where people can, quite apart from personal merits, afford to be ‘honest [Blok 1988 p. 229].

Involution means the overdriving of an established form in such a way that it becomes rigid through an overelaboration of detail [Geertz 1963:82 in Blok 1988 p. 83]

alle Begriffe, in denen sich ein ganzer Prozeß semiotisch zusammenfaßt, entziehn sich der Definition; definieerbar ist nur das, was keine Geschichte hat‘ [Friedrich Nietzsche. Zut Genealogie der Moral – Werke, Vol. II. Ed. Karl Schlechta. München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1966 p. 820]

DBC Pierre – Lights Out in Wonderland

This is a selection of some quotes of said author in the above novel. I found this to be useful for the development of my theory on the firm. Importantly in the novel some aspects are pointed out concerning the new relation between individual people and firms. Note that these are quotes from a novel: these can be useful in general and in this case (firm theory) in specific, because some novels have the capacity to shed light on new stuff.

Yes it’s over: profit won the game, but like an infection, killed its host. We were the host. Quality died out because we relinquished the right to filter our own choices; profit became the filter of all choice. Truth died out because we no longer filter true experience; media profit became the filter. The infection found every human receptor, bound to every protein of existence, sucking them dry to feed corporate tumours immunised against us by government. Now the host is a carcass, the market a bacterial enzyme. So adieu!’ [DBC Pierre Lights out in Wonderland fn p. 5]

Ah Customer Service. It falls to Dalí girl to work the gulf between a photograph of a glamour model in a telephone headset and a collections department not based at this address. She squirms because despite efforts to erase her common sense, culture has left a nodule of reason intact. That fragment of tumour makes her uncomfortable enforcing outrageous terms. Her employer should have picked up on that’ [DBC Pierre Lights Out in Wonderland fn p. 8]

David West is an origami person.* Spread, creased, and folded by culture into a clever likeness of a man, a napkin adornment without ideas beyond his own folds, unfolding others to crease then back in his own image’ [DBC Pierre Lights Out In Wonderland p. 15]

Free-market economics is an antiquated, smutty and careless box of tricks whose whimsical main flaw is clear even to a child. Still look how many adults fall breathless with lust to its promise – even though they must abandon empathy and moral judgment to embrace it. Their dirty secret puts all their intelligence to work throwing dust in the air around one glaring truth: that without trickery or eroding value, without extortion, manipulation, deceit or outright theft – profit will simply not perpetually grow’ [DBC Pierre Lights Out in Wonderland fn p. 20].

Remember this: there are no receptors left for cleverness in the public domain. You need never be more than slightly clever or slightly nice. Anything more will arouse suspicion and rage, and confound the software that runs the country. This is because society’s mechanisms are calibrated for stupidity and indolence – and not to be that way is now, by definition, anti-social’ [DBC Pierre Lights Out in Wonderland p. 29].

Stupid nature, which the church led us to admire as a perfect system, has crippled us as it cripples and kills everything through shoddy design’[DBC Pierre Lights Out in Wonderland pp. 31-2].

Capitalism is a limbo. Not a structure but an anti-structure. Driven not towards a defined end, but hovering over a permanent present, harvesting a flow of helpless human impulses. It builds no safe futures, leaves no great structures, prepares no one for roads ahead. And why would it? We don’t march through an age of civilization, but float between Windows and Mac, treading water’[DBC Pierre Lights Out in Wonderland p. 36]

The head of a pharmaceutical company admitted that only thirty percent of drugs work properly on thirty percent of people. And if you observe life you’ll see that he merely identifies the mean threshold of human success in nature. The drug company was a working model of the mathematics of expectation, endeavour, whim and fortune. Therefore abolish the notion of one-hundred-per-cent solutions to touted by culture. According to nature, thirty percent is a windfall’[DBC Pierre Lights Out in Wonderland pp. 43].

And if it was profitable it must be true´ [DBC Pierre Lights Out in Wonderland p. 64].

.. and highlights are the pixels of a life. We’re all witnesses together of the jumping fish, nobody else in the world is. The same pixel is added to each of our lives, ..’[DBC Pierre Lights Out in Wonderland p 79]

It has done this thinking that I am a food writer’ [DBC Pierre Lights Out in Wonderland p 104].

The Meme Machine

The Meme Machine – Susan Blackmore

 

My introduction

To cut a long story short – don’t worry I will summarize in some detail the train of thought hereafter anyway, because I am not going to get away with it just like that and you will miss nothing – Blackmore suggests to annihilate Dawkins’ hope for the human condition and Dennetts expectations (however small) about it: we cannot rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators (the gene), because there is no one to rebel. And it is exactly this realisation, according to Blackmore, that allows us to live a truly free life. Wow.

We humans in her view are susceptible to the thought that we are capable of thinking, hoping and expecting, but in fact she suggests we are ‘meme machines’. These thoughts above are memes themselves. Humans are biological computing machines, fit to run any utterable program. The programs fight or negotiate between themselves, in our heads, for attention. They may or may not be favourable to us humans, their hosts, where they live.

It is them, the memes, that live in our minds. And it is them that make us think we think, memorize, expect, and hope. We believe we do these things. But we don’t, not really. In other words: humans are susceptible to invasions of ideas and concepts that shape their thought and, henceforth, their actions. These memes have their own intention to survive. Like all natural processes they are ‘stupid’ processes, they don’t have a ‘will’, they just survive.

Let’s call large complexes of integrated and complex sets of memes, their subsets and their interrelations memeplexes. Then culture is an ‘ensemble’ of memeplexes, say related to work ethics, cooking habits, dinner etiquette, religions and their interrelations, economic behaviour, traffic regulations and customs and so on and so forth. In this world, humans are the computing machine that culture runs on. Cultural elements called memes are struggling to survive on a human substrate.

And conversely: if a human being actively enters any such cultural environment, by upbringing, by local or social circumstances, or for personal reasons or a profession, the memes in vigor in that environment at that time will have an influence on the thoughts of that individual. And consequently on his or her actions and behaviour, and lastly, on her or his own utterances, thus propagating the culture in his environment.

The linking pin between this train of thought and my research subject is that people, when dealing with a company or in fact any organisation, willingly give up some of their autonomy to have their behaviour increasingly steered by the culture in vigor in this (new) environment: by the ruling memes. In many cases company culture shows some traits resembling religious belief and in some cases to work at a company requires a faith bordering the religious. When defining company behaviour, I suggest that the leading principle be therefore not defined by the specific details of the people and processes it encompasses, but by the ‘ensemble’ of cultural elements that shapes it and defines its corporal behaviour. That is: behaviour that is autonomous and in a sense independent of the behaviour of the constituent human beings that are merely the computer that the company runs on.

The central thesis of my research project is this: companies are behavioural patterns in space and time steered by memes, through which material, people and information flow. Verder lezen The Meme Machine

Levitt over de Publieke Opinie

De onderwerpen in het boek Freakonomics zijn alledaags: er worden mechanismes in beschreven in alledaagse situaties. De aanpak is praktisch en niet een poging tot een allesoverkoepelende economische theorie. De definitie van economie die ik zelf heb geleerd is: ‘het gedrag van mensen op het snijvlak van vraag en aanbod’. Levitt gebruikt deze variant: ‘explaining how people get what they want‘. Zijn uitgangspunt is dat wat zich afspeelt tussen mensen weetbaar is. De uitkomsten zijn vaak intrigerend, omdat ze verrassend en tegenintuïtief zijn. De onderzoeker, de schrijver dus, laat zich niet meeslepen door de ‘communis opinio’, de publieke opinie.

Levitt citeert J.K. Galbraith over publieke opinie, in het engels conventional wisdom‘ als volgt: ‘We associate truth with convenience, with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being, or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable what contributes most to self-esteem. Economic and social behaviors are complex, and to comprehend their character is mentally tiring. Therefore we adhere, as though to a raft, to those ideas which represent our understanding’.

Ik wijd deze post aan dat boek, omdat die aanpak me aanspreekt: uitkomsten van welk onderzoek, model of theorie dan ook moeten minimaal iets beschrijven, verklaren, liefst voorspellen van de wereld om ons heen in praktische zin. Zie hieronder een aantal verkorte herkenbare voorbeelden, in het boek is ook de statistische onderbouwing opgenomen. Want hoewel ik veel vertrouwen heb in de ‘wisdom of the crowd’ heb ik dat niet in de publieke opinie.

Voorbeelden

Men denkt

De prikkel is

De feiten zijn

Wat veroorzaakt de vermindering van city crime na 1995? Wapenwetten, sterke economie, nieuwe aanpak van de politie, betere gevangenissen, veroudering Legalisering van abortus Na verloop van tijd minder geboortes uit arme eenoudergezinnen, minder potentiele criminelen
Zorgt een makelaar voor de hoogste prijs voor je huis? Kent de markt, kent de waarde van het huis, kent het gedrag van de koper, kortom betere kennis, beter geïnformeerd De makelaar verdient een % van de totale verkoopprijs Bijv. 6% 1/1 delen met de kopende makelaar en 1/1 delen met kantoor=1,5%. 10k verschil levert 150 euro op. Sneller verkopen beter dan een hogere prijs.
Passen leraren de cijfers van hun leerlingen aan? Een goede leraar=> hoge cijfers=>de kinderen doen het goed. Hij zelf ook. Eer en glorie, (financieel) voordeel. Ja: de leraar wil beter scoren door te verdoezelen dat hij zelf slecht is
Verloopt de Sumo competitie eerlijk? Eervolle en oude sport: winst wordt niet gekocht, verlies niet toegestaan Tournooien (66 worstelaars) bestaan uit 15 potjes. Als je er 8 wint blijf je in het circuit. Daar blijven en 100K bonus voor de tournooiwinnaar. Laatste tournooidag: 7-7 winnen vaak tegen 8-6 of 9-5. Die kunnen het tournooi niet meer winnen, dus laten de 7-7 winnen. Het volgende tournooi winnen ze zelf.
Zijn mensen betrouw baar? Mensen betalen trouw hun consumpties uit een onbewaakte counter. Wel bagel eten, toch niet betalen. Slecht betalen: mdw grote bedrijven, relatief slecht weer, ‘beladen’ feestdagen (X-mas), onprettige bedrijven, hogere rang
Waarom is de KKK lastig te bestrijden? Ondoordringbaar bastion. Eigen code. Lijkt gevaarlijk door geheimen. Geheim genootschap met eigen (gekke) rituelen, status voor leden. Als geheime informatie publiek wordt, verdwijnt het ‘elan’.
Waarom wonen drugdealers bij hun moeder? Crack dealers verdienen veel geld. In ruil nemen ze grote risico’s. De kans om veel geld te verdienen en voor succes en de eer. Kleine kans om legaal succesvol te worden. In slechte buurten is het aanbod van jeugd met weinig kansen groot. Zoals in alle sectoren is het inkomen van ‘werknemers’ in drugsbendes een fractie van dat van de top.
Hangt het succes van een kind af van de opvoeding? Een betere (en meer) opvoeding leidt tot een hogere kans op maatschappelijk succes voor de kinderen. Meer actie en activiteiten van de ouders leiden tot geslaagde kinderen. Het is niet wat de ouders doen, maar wat ze zijn dat leidt tot succes van de kinderen. Een ’tiger mom’ is niet effectief.
Bepaalt je naam je toekomst? Je naam heeft invloed op je toekomstig succes. De ouder geeft het kind een naam waarin zijn verwachtingen over de toekomst van het kind besloten ligt. Je naam bepaalt niet je toekomst.

Conclusies en relevantie

  • Incentives bepalen het gedrag van de ontvanger ervan. Niet noodzakelijk ook degene voor wie het voordeel was bedoeld.
  • De publieke opinie zit er vaak naast. Die heeft ook weer zijn eigen redenen om iets te vinden, maar niet (noodzakelijk) de werkelijkheid.
  • Grote effecten hebben vaak een kleine, subtiele origine.
  • Experts gebruiken hun informatie- en kennisvoorsprong voor hun eigen gewin.
  • Als X en Y zich hetzelfde gedragen, is er dan een correlatie of een causaliteit? In het eerste geval: is X de reden voor Y, Y de reden voor X of is Z de reden voor X en Y?
  • Mensen zijn niet goed in het inschatten van risico’s. Dingen die Nu gebeuren worden zwaarder ingeschat. Dingen die Afschuw wekken worden zwaarder ingeschat.
  • De aanpak van dit onderzoek relevant voor dat van mijn onderzoek, zoals in de eerste alinea beschreven
  • De uitkomsten geven betekenis aan de interacties tussen mensen: de incentive bepaalt de richting van het gedrag van de ontvanger en heeft dus invloed op de autonomie van de ontvanger. Die beslist niet langer autonoom wat haar goed dunkt maar volgt de prikkel van iemand die haar betaalt voor een bepaalde uitkomst.

Gebaseerd op het boek: Freakonomics – A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Sides of Everything, van Steven D. Levitt en Stephen J. Dubner.

De Piloten van Luyendijk

Deze post is een reactie op het recente en waardevolle boek van Joris Luyendijk: Dit Kan Niet Waar Zijn. Luyendijk analyseert als ’tot antropoloog opgeleide journalist’ en zonder kennis van financiële markten, het gedrag van mensen in hun professionele habitat: de financiële sector in Londen. Zijn eerste interview vraag is ongeveer deze: ‘hoe kun jij met jezelf leven na wat je de mensheid hebt aangedaan in de crisis van 2008?’. Zijn beeld na circa twee jaar onderzoek en 200 interviews is: een vliegtuig met problemen en een lege cockpit. Met de kennis die ik tot nu toe heb verzameld over complexe adaptieve systemen ga ik op zoek naar de missende piloten van Luyendijk. Verder lezen De Piloten van Luyendijk

Lane en Maxfield over Strategie in Complexe omstandigheden

Deze post gaat over strategieontwikkeling in complexe omstandigheden en is grotendeels gebaseerd op het artikel van David Lane en Robert Maxfield getiteld ‘Foresight, Complexity and Strategy’, 1996, opgenomen in SFI Proceedings: ‘The Economy as an Evolving Complex System’. Verder lezen Lane en Maxfield over Strategie in Complexe omstandigheden