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.
