Crisis and Change

One of the key and long-standing problems in conceptualizing the nature of society has been the relation between the micro and the macro. Recently though, a number of different disciplines have come to very similar conclusions concerning this problem. Represented by the likes of Deleuze, Latour, DeLanda, and network analysis in sociology, the emerging consensus seems to be to take, using DeLanda's apt description, a "flat ontology" wherein the micro and the macro lie on the same ontological plane. The macro, in this model, can be conceived as an extended section of the micro-based networks, or it can be seen as a locally-constructed 'image' that purports to model the macro dynamics of the social. In either case though, the irreconcilable division between the two levels has been effaced, resolving the typical theoretical problems associated with their division.

For all the theoretical interest of these problems, however, the real worth of a social theory needs to be found in its practical efficacy. It seems to me that a real weakness of much leftist thought today lies in its insurmountable distance from real world dynamics - and hence its inability to bring about concrete change in the world. (What we might call the 'problem of means'. The other major problem of leftist thought is clearly the 'problem of ends', i.e. what alternative do we have to capitalist democracies?) The problem of means is perhaps clearest in the utter failure of the mass movements against the Iraq war. But the current financial crisis also seems to be an instance of this problem - rather than using the absolute failure of capitalism as a prime moment to push forward a distinctly leftist vision for the world, Democrats and leftists have largely deferred to Paulson's plan. (Minor concessions such as limits on executive compensation aside, the plan as it stands seems to still be a $700 billion give-away to financial executives. Although as I write this, the plan also appears to have fallen through for the moment.)

Now in part this is a problem of ends - what should we push forward as an alternative to the proposed plan? But the ends needn't be revolutionary - universal health care, an increase in real wages for the lower and middle class, mortgage assistance for those being foreclosed - all these would be real gains for the leftist project. So the ends aren't the major problem, since we at least have some conception of what to aim for. Instead it seems to me to be a problem of means. Specifically, it's a problem of means with the theories that purport to offer a guiding vision for how to change the world. In other words, the problem doesn't lie with the sort of pragmatic, largely atheoretical politics of most politicians. They see an opportunity and they take it, using whatever resources happen to be at hand. But the grand theories of social change seem woefully inadequate to the current crisis - and precisely on a means level. This is a central question because opportunities like the current one are extremely rare - here we have the absolute and undeniable collapse of free market ideas, and a populace that is wildly unhappy with the current course. A sufficient theory of the means for political change would let leftists install their vision, and, as numerous path-dependency studies have shown, basically ensure that this leftist structure would last for another generation. Shock therapy doesn't have to be limited to Milton Friedman.

But looking to continental political thought, what theorist has offered anything capable of using this truly transformational moment for political purposes? Derrida and his ethical stance towards the undecidable seems more suited to trying to install hope in an age devoid of alternatives. When the time comes to implement and push for an alternative though, he has nothing to offer. Lacan and Zizek will talk about "clearing the social field" and revolutionary "Acts" that overthrow currently hegemonic ideologies, but what is to be done when objective dynamics carry out this overthrow themselves? It is apparent to all - even the most ardent free-market supporters - that free market principles have failed, and so the problem is not with ideology covering over the resolute failure of the economic system. (I haven't read Zizek's latest works, though, so perhaps he's offered some alternative? But Bartleby's "I would prefer not to" seems to succumb to all the same problems - again, the problem is not a matter of escaping or collapsing the reigning social system - it's a problem of how to act.)

Even Badiou's work, the current paradigm of decision and action, seems largely futile in the face of the financial crisis - in what way could this historical event be considered an event in Badiou's sense? What sort of universal truth does it reveal? The failure of capitalist policies is, presumably, something already well known by leftists - so what can this crisis add that hasn't already been inscribed in the structures of knowledge? Again, Badiou has an end - an ethics of truth that compels us to investigate evental sites - but the means in the absence of an event are underdeveloped. The problem, ultimately, is that this is a prime moment for political action and none of the continental political theories can take advantage of it.

Marxism, of course, is the major exception to this rule. Financial crises are its bread and butter and were predicted long ago by the analyses of people like David Harvey. But Marxism in its traditional, economically deterministic vision, is discredited. And the more culturally oriented variants seem to have lost precisely that aspect which made them so powerful - the economic questions and the resistance to capitalism as an alternative economic system. It is a common place today to note that capitalism is more than capable of integrating any culturally revolutionary subjects - in many cases, it even produces them, or at least actively incites novelty. So a resistance to capitalism and a viable alternative can't be found on a cultural level - it needs to operate on the economic structures of modern capitalism. (More than likely there is some Marxist theory out there that addresses modern capitalism on an economic level without falling into the problems of traditional Marxism. I'm very far from being an expert on Marxism, though, so I'd be interested to hear of such work...) So in my admittedly limited knowledge of contemporary Marxism, it seems as though the current analyses are inadequate to truly using the current financial crisis to further leftist goals. Again, it seems largely a problem of means - perhaps the traditional reliance on a designated revolutionary subject means that Marxism must be subject to the whims of that group? A vanguard group could of course incite them, but even then it seems as though mass politics has become ineffectual in our present age.

So what's the alternative? Well, returning to the topic I started with, it seems as though these sorts of network/assemblage analyses provide a potentially very productive way of thinking how concrete change is actually carried out. What would such an analysis entail? One of the key factors is to outline the system itself, to map it (and in the process, actually produce it as a concept) and highlight the actual networks and decisional hierarchies that are responsible for change. What is key to this mapping is to discern the precise pressure points that can be exploited for progressive causes. As Latour notes at one point in Re-Assembling the Social, one of the great benefits of this type of analysis is that it takes grand abstract concepts like 'capitalism' and makes them into actual, localizable networks. Contra Negri and Hardt, therefore, political action doesn't require collective subjects to mobilize at a global level equal to capitalism - in fact, capitalism itself is far from being a global monolith. Instead, a tiny handful of elites, a small group of powerful companies, and an even smaller amount of government officials are the key nodes in sustaining capitalism as a system. They are neither abstract nor deterritorialized entities - rather they are embedded within specific networks. What this type of analysis might suggest then, is to focus on one of the key players - Chris Dodd, perhaps - and use the confluence of election and crisis pressures to actively work towards forcing a leftist shift. his could entail multiple tactics - mass movement-type pressure, as well as a concerted blogosphere movement (which to some degree seems to be occurring), and the use of media-friendly individuals and events. To return to the micro/macro distinction I opened with, the strategic aim would be to create a macro-level image of what is required in this crisis situation - one that absolutely refuses to succumb to the pressures of financial lobbyists. But the only way in which this macro-level image becomes effective is for it to be created and diffused throughout the micro-level networks of everyday individuals.

[EDIT: Maybe I was wrong about the specific area to focus on. At least one report suggests a better spot than Dodd or Congressional leaders may be to focus the attention on the average Congress member:

"There is a seriously underestimated gap between the White House and Congressional leadership on one side, and the Congressional rank and file on the other; and that the media reports suggesting a deal was imminent by and large were being informed by the former, who are more committed to a quick deal; while the Congressional rank and file is more informed by being overwhelmed with thousands of calls from screaming constituents who are truly outraged over the prospect of a bailout of Wall Street fat cats. Vulnerable incumbents may not feel they can vote for anything resembling a bailout until after the election."]

Anyways, I didn't intend on writing so much about the financial crisis, particularly with how much (virtual) ink has already been spent on it. I actually wanted to write about how these types of network analyses function in conflict situations, but I'll save that for another post...

Artisanal Development and Institutions

In the world of development economics, one paradigm has been widely recognized as the model for development – the so-called Washington Consensus. This model operated throughout the 1980s and 90s as the dominant vision of how developing countries could achieve economic growth. It was dominant, however, not because of its intrinsic value as the best model (as I’m sure most readers know, it was and is widely criticized as being biased towards the groups that benefit from neoliberal policies), but rather dominant because it was the paradigm adopted by the institutions with the money – the IMF and the World Bank, most notably. For various reasons (political, theoretical, institutional, etc.) it was believed that the Washington Consensus provided the only model that would achieve economic growth (which would eventually lead, it was argued, to decreased poverty and increased well-being).

The drastic failure of these policies when they were implemented in Latin America and Africa, however, eventually made it clear to all that the Washington Consensus was incapable of living up to its expectations. It couldn’t even achieve the growth levels it promised, let alone the promised derivative rises in the standards of living. Despite some stragglers who retain that their strict neoliberal policies are correct, and it’s merely these “other” cultures who can’t live up to capitalism’s promises, it’s widely recognized today in development economics that the Washington Consensus is a failure (even in its augmented form, which adds institutional reforms to its original trade and financial reforms).

What has become a mystery, then, to development economics is how does development proceed? Now there have been a multitude of answers put forth to this question, but the one I want to focus on here is that voiced by Dani Rodrik (One Economics, Many Recipes; and see here for a Crooked Timber discussion of the book: PDF). To be clear up front, Rodrik’s long-term goal is economic growth, which is itself a debatable aim. Others have suggested a larger set of aspirations such as human development, freedom and overall well-being. For Rodrik, as with most economists, these goals require economic growth to first raise individuals out of absolute poverty, so the goal of growth is simultaneously the aim of providing the necessary conditions for these larger aims. We’ll accept this line of reasoning here, but solely for the purposes of remaining focused on Rodrik’s project, and not because we necessarily agree with it (at least as it's formulated by most economists).

Now, unlike most economists who are well aware of the economy’s influence and power in world affairs, Rodrik explicitly proclaims that economists must become more modest. Despite their usual pretensions to mastery, they don’t, in fact, understand how development occurs and any rigid belief that they do is likely to cause the terrible consequences seen in Latin America and Africa. The first point to be noted with Rodrik’s approach therefore, is that he refuses the position of an authority that would stand outside of the context it’s working with. There is no single universal model of development that must be implemented without regard for the specific circumstances. Or, in more philosophical terms, there is no single form of development that can be forced upon a passive material. Rather each (the development ‘model’ and the country it’s applied to) has its own particular form and substance that must be taken into account.

What can development economists say then? For Rodrik, there are principles that can be followed – such as protection of property rights, guaranteed contracts, competition, appropriate incentives, and sound money. The trick is that these principles don’t map onto a single set of institutions or policies. In certain cases, what may be needed for economic growth is the liberalization of trade, while in other circumstances barriers should be retained (e.g. to protect nascent industries – Rodrik shows that developing countries, contra the principle of comparative advantage, initially diversify their industries rather than focusing on a single competitive industry). In order to implement these economic principles (which form what we might see as a ‘topological essence’ that admits of a multiplicity of actualizations), the individual responsible for development must take into account the singular tendencies involved in the specific situation. In other words, the economist must become an artisan working with the immanent material and its singularities rather than an architect independently modeling and commanding. To bring out the potentials involved in the situation, in line with the economic principles, the economist must have local and contextual knowledge. The artisan must experiment, playing with always uncertain tendencies and their ultimately unpredictable consequences.

One of the concrete examples Rodrik gives of this experimentation is China’s transformation. When globalization proponents speak of its benefits, they often point to the fact that globalization has decreased the number of people living in absolute poverty (less than a dollar a day). While factually true, the vast majority of these people live in India and China, the two most populous countries in the world. India and China, meanwhile, achieved their economic growth not by following the Washington Consensus’ principles, but by creating novel institutions and novel policies. They, in other words, experimented with the immanent conditions posed to them, and directed these tendencies towards the principles which produce sustainable economic growth. In China, therefore, the problem was of shifting from a system without private property to one with. As the experiences in post-communist Eastern Europe and Russia showed, this is not an easy realignment – it’s not at all clear how the previously nationalized industries and land should be delegated to private individuals, leading in Russia’s case to widespread corruption and the creation of numerous oligopolies. In China, on the other hand, land was delegated to families on the basis of their size, and industries were placed under the control of “township and village enterprises” or TVEs. These TVEs generated income directly for the community and so there was an invested interest to keep them profitable and to keep them honest and accountable. These TVEs, therefore, functioned to provide some of the economic principles outlined earlier, yet they operated within a society that found individual property rights to be alien concepts.

In another example, China liberalized its agricultural production, but only at the margins. In other words, the planned quotas were kept intact, but any surplus product could be sold for the benefit of the producer. Again, the ingrained habits and customs of the local population are kept, yet through a novel institutional setup, their potentials are extended into new fields and incited towards economic growth. The key to all of this is that there is not a priori model that could be used to produce these novel institutions, as though it were a matter of adding economic principle A to institutional situation B to get effect C. Each situation is radically singular and requires local knowledge to create novel institutions and policies. They are artisanal rather than architectural.

As a final note of curiosity, I’d add too that these sorts of examples are precisely in line with Deleuze’s thoughts on institutions formulated in his first book, Empiricism & Subjectivity. Contra psychoanalysis’s vision of the Law as limiting, Deleuze sees institutions as providing the positive means for instincts and tendencies to be expressed. They are positive constructions that extend our capacities rather than limiting them. “The institution, unlike the law, is not a limitation but rather a model of action, a veritable enterprise, an invented system of positive means or a positive invention of indirect means.” (46) The TVEs and the marginal liberalization undertaken in China were examples of this sort of positive institution that made possible new habits, new desires, and new material relations – one, moreover, that avoided that dire consequences involved far too often in the economic transitions of developing and post-communist societies.

Matter & The Syntheses of Time

Despite the amount of secondary literature on Deleuze, it’s surprising how little of it pays attention to arguably his most important work, Difference & Repetition. While commentary generally alludes to arguments from it, and often borrows concepts from it, there’s been very little discussion of it as a whole – particularly with respect to the difficult later chapters. Hopefully that’s changing though, as Alberto Toscano made the later chapters a key moment in The Theatre of Production, Ray Brassier has devoted an in-depth discussion to them in Nihil Unbound, and Sinthome has an entire book focused on Difference & Repetition (which I highly recommend, as Sinthome maintains his typical clarity, rigor and insight in tackling Deleuze's most difficult work). The focus here will be on Brassier’s account, in which – following his general approach in Nihil Unbound – he’s critical of what he sees as a paradigmatic correlationist move: the privileging of time over the autonomy of objective space-time. This move reaches its apex in the ontologization of time carried out by Heidegger and Deleuze. These moves also function as a defense against Meillassoux’s arche-fossil argument - by making these temporal syntheses absolute, they can encompass the ancestral time of the arche-fossil and deny that it references a world indifferent to ideality. Thus, “the only hope for securing the unequivocal independence of the ‘an sich’ must lie in prizing it free from chronology as well as phenomenology.” (NU, 59)

With regards to Deleuze, Brassier carries out this critique of the ontologization of time by focusing on the three temporal syntheses outlined in Difference & Repetition. In particular, Brassier takes aim at the first synthesis of contraction and the role of thought in the process of individuation.

The first synthesis, in Deleuze, takes the form of a contraction of two bare repetitions, much like Hume’s argument that causality is only a constructed habit of the mind. Now for Deleuze, this contraction of presents into the lived present requires the contemplation of a larval subject. This is the case because habit requires the drawing out of differences between repetitions. This leads him to declare that “a soul must be attributed to the heart, to the muscles, nerves and cells, but a contemplative soul whose entire function is to contract a habit.” (D&R, 74) To be clear, this contemplative soul is not conscious, nor is it representational, nor is it active – rather it is the unconscious, sub-representational, passively synthesized condition for the emergence of subjectivity proper.

The question Brassier poses with regards to this first synthesis is: what is the ontological scope of the passive selves which are required for the contraction of habit that constitutes the lived present? It appears there are two options. Either they only apply to the organic – in which case, Deleuze is unable to account for sub-organic realities indexed by sciences like physics. This option is suggested by quotes like the one above which solely reference hearts, muscles, and other organic material. Or, they apply to everything, in which case Deleuze is left with a panpsychism of larval subjects even at quantum molecular levels. This choice is suggested by moments where Deleuze suggests “everything is contemplation, even rocks and woods, animals and men.” (D&R, 75) These mutually unappealing alternatives – either most of reality is left unaccounted for, or some larval form of consciousness functions throughout reality – stem, Brassier argues, from Deleuze’s “empiricist premise that time implies the psychic registration of difference, and hence that temporal difference is a function of psychic contraction”. (NU, 196) We'll return to this claim later on, but for now we'll merely highlight that temporal syntheses for Brassier seem to necessarily entail the introduction of psychic aspects.

Turning to the issue of individuation, Brassier wants to claim the only psychic individuation is capable of introducing ontological novelty. Only thinking can carry out the act of the caesura. The reason why, however, is not entirely clear to me, although I'll hazard some guesses. First, Brassier is right to highlight that the caesura of time introduced in the third synthesis both splits and relates the other two syntheses of the past and the present. In this way, an a priori relation between the physical (first synthesis) and the psychical (second synthesis) is established. Yet, the fracture in the I that the caesura introduces would seem to prohibit reducing the third synthesis to a psychical individuation. It opens experience onto a transcendental field irreducible to individuated subjects or objects. Insofar as Difference & Repetition is concerned with uncovering the transcendental genesis of experience, there may be a privilege given to the amount written about psychical individuation, but the third synthesis would seem to open up beyond the immanence of a finite subject and lead into the properly ontological groundlessness of the eternal return.

The confusion I have with Brassier’s claim about the centrality of psychic individuation is exemplified in this quote: “Thus the ‘universal ungrounding’ unleashed by the eternal return cannot be confined to the psychic domain as the transfiguration of consciousness wherein mind throws off the shackles of representation; it points to a fundamental metamorphosis in nature whereby the intensive depths rise up to engulf the surface of extensity and dissolve all empirical laws and jurisdictions. However, this claim seems to harbor the fantastic implication that physical qualification and partitioning, as well as biological specification and organization, can simply be eliminated through an act of thinking.” (NU, 188) In the first sentence, Brassier attributes the eternal return to nature itself, to the material world. Yet, in the second sentence, he appears to make it the prerogative of a psychical act.

One reason I can see why Brassier believes this is summed up in his claim that “only consciousness can be folded back into its own pre-individual dimension; only the psychic individual can be come equal to its own intensive individuation.” (NU, 185) Contrary to Brassier, however, I would tend to follow DeLanda’s realist reading of Deleuze and argue that, in fact, material systems can also be folded back onto their own pre-individual dimensions. To put it simply, this is the shift from a stable system to one that is in the process of qualitatively changing.

Pushing a bit deeper though, we can see Brassier arguing that the reason the eternal return is affirmed solely by a psychic individual is that it is initially produced through the encounter with the intensive differences that elude our faculties. It is only when our faculties are pushed to their transcendent exercises that thinking is produced within thought and the eternal return is affirmed. So the act of the caesura is produced by the faculties encounter with intensity. The problem here, I believe, is that Brassier assumes the faculties are solely the prerogative of psychical systems. As such, the eternal return could only be affirmed within a mind, and therefore we can see how he could claim that Deleuze’s philosophy leads to the claim that thought could eliminate the organization of the material world. As Sinthome shows though, the faculties are a misnomer, as they are not the property of a transcendental subject, but rather they “are none other than the tendencies characterizing being. They are the differentials or joints of being itself, and not the faculties of a subject’s mind. It is for this reason that Deleuze qualifies faculties with the genitive ‘of’ when referring to the ‘being of the sensible’, ‘the being of language’, ‘the being of memory’ and so on. In all of these cases, the tendency is not identical to sensibility, language, or memory as we find them in our experience, but rather is that by which sensibility, language, or memory is given. They are the genetic conditions allowing for the givenness of the given.” (D&G, 97-8) I would add too that any interpretation of the faculties as properties of an individual would have difficulty accounting for the faculty of sociability which pertains to society as a whole, or the biological faculty of vitality, or the physical faculty. (D&R, 192) So faculties are themselves tendencies within being. That being the case, the transcendent use of the faculties is not solely limited to the psychic individual, and therefore the eternal return can pertain to physical, biological and psychical systems without being mediated through psychic individuation. Just like thought, these material systems can be plunged back into their preindividual states by encountering an external shock irrecuperable within their present mode of operation.

While that may constitute a reply to Brassier’s specific criticism, the larger point to be made is also important. His general approach throughout the section on Deleuze appears to be arguing that any reduction of space to the ontologization of time, must explain temporal syntheses in terms of psychic qualities. “Thus Deleuze’s account of spatio-temporal synthesis begins by ascribing a privileged role to organic contraction in the first synthesis of the present, proceeds to transcendentalize memory as cosmic unconscious in the second synthesis of the past, and ends by turning a form of psychic individuation which is as yet the exclusive prerogative of homo sapiens into the fundamental generator of ontological novelty in the third synthesis.” (NU, 200-1) As such, there is no room left for a materialism independent of thought. The experience of time in consciousness, Brassier wants to argue, leads to a sense of its irreducibility to brute spatial matter, but such a belief is a correlationist bias. We might say, following Deleuze, that it illegitimately fashions the transcendental in the image of the empirical. In this way, Deleuze’s unique form of correlationism arises, with mind and matter being mutually intertwined in the constitution of reality. “For Deleuze then, being is nothing apart from its expression in thought; indeed, it simply is this expression.” (NU, 203) While I've hopefully mitigated the force of Brassier's specific argument with respect to Deleuze, the general point still stands.

I think Brassier’s general point here is a powerful one, and, in the context of Deleuze's work, finds a lot of textual support. The question is whether a privilege given to time over space necessarily entails a correlationist outcome. My initial reaction is that his criticism can be mitigated by questioning what is meant by passive selves and larval subjects. Are these merely not so subtle reintroductions of mind at the level of matter, or are they rather poorly named ontological operations? In other words, does temporality itself not require some form of synthesis? The question can also be turned around onto Brassier: given that Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stenger’s work on dynamic systems reveals that even physical laws of nature are not reversible (i.e. there is an arrow of time), then how is this formal differentiation of a before, present, and after possible? Or, even more despairingly for Brassier, how can quantum entanglement be accounted for without particles contracting their past in some way? More generally, temporality appears to be a problem for most of the speculative realists at the moment. Harman’s notion of vicarious causality could plausibly be developed into a theory of time, and Meillassoux’s as yet to be published work on how stability emerges from absolute contingency could possibly incorporate time, but these are not yet finished projects. Brassier, moreover, appears to be the worst off, since he argues against any sort of temporal synthesis as being a correlationist move. He speaks approvingly of an identity of space-time, but I’m not yet clear on how this differs from the synthesis of space and time that he criticizes. No doubt, Laruelle has a part...

On Contemporary Materialism

One of the most interesting and engaging trends to emerge in recent contemporary philosophy is the attempt to develop a rigorous materialism - one shorn of any hand-wringing over the inevitable mediation of language, with its endless hermeneutics and language games. Against the interpretation which would see immanence as the common theme of cutting-edge philosophy (and this I take to be one of the claims of John Mullarkey's Post-Continental Philosophy), it is rather materialism which provides the basic framework for much of the more interesting work today. Immanence itself is a fairly common thesis, put forth at least since Kant's rejection of the transcendent uses of reason; materialism, on the other hand, seems to me to be only a fairly minor position (Marx excepted, of course). It is only lately that it has really become a widespread movement. As Lee Braver shows in his excellent A Thing of This World, most of 'continental' philosophy - Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, along with many, many others - are all idealist in the sense of focusing on the linguistic and representational construction of reality. This idealist tendency has had a number of unfortunate side effects: foremost, in my mind, being the fear of science. This is no doubt thanks in large part to Heidegger's criticisms, but also, I would argue, because the idealist tendency has played into the literature circles who would (obviously) much rather endlessly interpret passages of Joyce, than perform experiments or grapple with mathematical equations. (Not that there's anything wrong with either!)


One of the startling parts of contemporary materialism, on the other hand, is the full-fledged willingness to incorporate scientific discoveries into their philosophical system (without, for all that, making philosophy simply subordinate to science as some analytic philosophy has done). Deleuze, being the devourer of any and all knowledge, makes biology and evolutionary theory one of the central points of his philosophy. He also cites esoteric debates over early calculus interpretations, and references virtually unknown mathematicians like Albert Lautman, along with incorporating Gilbert Simondon's previously unknown work on technology and scientific models of individuation. Alain Badiou, of course, makes the radical (for continental philosophy) claim that mathematics is the discourse of ontology. While set theory provides the basis for his ontology, in Logiques des Mondes, category theory has become the new discourse used to illuminate the relationality of worlds. Ray Brassier, in his work Nihil Unbound (which I aim to read in the next little while) cites Paul Churchland who is famous for his denial of qualia (the subjective experience of the world) and his reduction of the mind to neurological functions. Graham Harman, meanwhile, makes the constant polemical plea in Tool-Being to return to the things themselves, against the repetitive movement into deeper and deeper conditions of things. Quentin Meillassoux, lastly, makes his 'correlationist' argument by employing scientific data to show the existence of an item which escapes any idealist tendency to make the world (even an independent one) necessarily correlated to thought. The "arche-fossil" indexes a truly materialist world, one that has only retroactively been discovered by science.

As a result, part of what makes aspects of contemporary materialism (also known as speculative realism) truly exciting is its potential to bridge gaps that have been virtually impassable for 100 years. The gap between analytic and continental philosophy can be decreased since one of the hallmarks of many modern materialists is not only their commitment to scientific insights, but also the clarity of their writings. No longer bound to respect the infinite interpretability of texts, these thinkers often provide some of the clearest arguments for their positions to be found in continental philosophy. This overcomes the immediate hurdle which plagues any reconciliation between analytic and continental camps, namely the difficulty of entering into continental discourse. The respect that the materialists have for science also facilitates this reconciliation, while hopefully giving pause to those analytic philosophers who dogmatically make philosophy secondary to science. Therefore, science, analytic philosophy, and continental philosophy need not be seen as mutually exclusive interpretations of the world, but rather mutually conditioning forces that aim at (perhaps) different levels of reality.

One question that initially arises, though, is the relation of contemporary materialism to the more classical accounts. In particular, the Marxist form of materialism. In what sense can these be productively related to each other? Does the modern form of realism sacrifice all the materialist insights of the Marxist account? I'll leave the details to some one more well-versed in Marx than I, but the questions seem worthwhile.

More generally though, and more importantly, what does contemporary materialism have to say about socio-political issues? In what ways does developing an object-centred ontology change the ways we perceive specifically human issues? This, to me, seems to be one of the major failings of Manuel DeLanda's otherwise excellent work - the negation of any sort of specifically cultural or human aspects. In his rigorously materialist history of societies, there is no question of gender or racial or ethnic identities, or any sort of immaterial power struggles. His reduction is more of a physical reduction than a material reduction, effecting a sort of synthesis of sociobiology and complexity theory. While the complexity theory avoids any strict determinism, the sociobiological aspect seems to leave aside the primary questions about the uniqueness of human societies, instead reducing them to merely plays of physical flows. Is this the necessary endpoint of materialism? Or can there be a materialism that avoids the physicalist bias, and provides a viable explanation of systems like culture, language, religion, and international relations?

Ray Brassier - undoubtedly the theorist pushing the nihilistic implications of speculative realism to its ultimate conclusions - still retains a focus on struggling against capitalism, as attested to in a number of his articles and works. This would suggest that he believes that materialism still has a powerful voice to critique modern socio-political systems. Badiou also believes his form of materialism is capable of introducing revolutionary sequences into politics, in the form of a generic community of equal entities forcing change upon the situation. Gilles Deleuze, too, argues that his transcendental materialism reveals an absolute becoming that escapes even capitalism's destruction of all stable points, effecting a revolutionary change that refuses to be bound by exploitative structures.

Anyways, I'm presently making my way through Graham Harman's Tool-Being, and I'll hopefully put up some thoughts on it when I get inspired to do so. It's fascinating to see the emergence of a new philosophical position, but nearly all of the important issues are missed in summary posts like this one. So I intend on tackling the details in future posts, if I get the chance to. For anyone who's interested though, there's also a discussion going on over at Larval Subjects about very similar issues, including a debate over art's contribution to a meaningless, material world.

Forcing the Event

One of the great advantages of Badiou's work has been to re-think the notion of subjectivity and provide a counter to all those who have dissolved the subject into its surrounding semiotic, political, imaginary, cultural and biological structures. Against the postmodern doxa proclaiming the death of the (unified and active) subject, Badiou instead argues that subjectivity is precisely the link between being and it's evental supplement - it is what recognizes and forces the consequences of the event into a newly re-structured system of knowledge. Moreover, it does so in a militant fashion, rigorously examining the effects of the event's naming on the situation. In these regards, Badiou appears to present a subject that is not only an active agent of change, but also one that appears to present an image of hope for a leftist thought mired in the domination of global capitalism. Yet, it is not clear that Badiou achieves this. Most glaringly, with the absence of a contemporary political event, what are we to do?

There seems to me to be (at least) 3 options. The first is undoubtedly the most foreign and devastating to Badiou's project - namely, to passively wait for an event to occur. Besides consenting to the doctrine according to which 'there is no alternative', it also raises the real spectre of false events being proclaimed out of impatience. As Badiou argues in Ethics, such false events are precisely an instance of Evil. Instead of an event being addressed universally, it is instead addressed to a particular grouping (of race, nation, gender, etc.). Raising this particularity to the formal status of a subject, it's fidelity requires the destruction or subjugation of other particularities. Thus, while sharing all the formal characteristics of an event and its truth procedure, these simulacra of events are concerned only with a substantial particularity, rather than the void of a situation. If this is the only solution to our main question, then Badiou's project seems destined to lead to political passivism, with the rare exception of those true events.

The second option leads us into somewhat more Deleuzian territory: to repeat a past event, or perhaps, to rename a past event in a way suitable for the present. In this way, the event of the French Revolution, for example, and its declaration of the equality of all, could be recuperated in the present moment as an axiomatic decision to counter growing inequality. In Badiou's strict terms, though, what would it mean to repeat an event? For one thing, an event is always the event of a specific situation. There can be no question of exactly repeating the event therefore, since the situation has changed. What is repeated then? The pure multiple? But this is to leave the repeated event and any other event ultimately indistinguishable, since they are all instances of pure multiplicity, or the void of the situation. Moreover, it can't be a matter of repeating some substantial attribute of the French Revolution, since to base the event on an element of the situation is to fall into the Evil of simulacra mentioned earlier. Now, an important distinction needs to be recalled. As Badiou outlines, the event is unpresentable as such in the situation; but what does present itself is the evental site. The evental site, while locatable within a situation and therefore potentially repeatable, is still nevertheless formally defined as a presented multiple whose elements are themselves unpresented. As a formal definition, the evental site can certainly be repeated; but again, this leaves every event indistinguishable by virtue of sharing the same formal/ontological structure. Either every event is a repetition of the exact same event, or, as Badiou argues, each event and its truth is singular.

Perhaps, however, there could be a becoming of the event that allows the power of the past to be re-situated within the present? This again leads us closer to Deleuze, in particular The Logic of Sense. This idea is still vague to me at the moment, but it connects nicely with a comment made by Badiou in an interview, where he speaks of 'obscure events'. Referring to May '68, and whether or not it should be considered an event, Badiou says that "perhaps we [don't] know the name of this event, and that, consequently, it [is] an event-ality still suspended from its name - what Sylvain Lazarus calls an 'obscure eventality'." The possibility here is that not only can an event wait for its proper name, but also that maybe every event contains some measure of obscurity and can therefore be continually rejuvenated through a re-naming. In this way, the obscurity of the event could undergo a becoming, while nevertheless instantiating itself in concrete evental sites. (Whether such a notion could fit into Badiou's mathematics, I don't know. But as Brassier has made clear in his essay, "Presentation as Anti-Phenomenon", the metaontological discourse of philosophy plays the essential, albeit unacknowledged, role in Badiou's system, not mathematics.)

The third possibility of answering our question is alluded to in the title of this post: forcing an event to occur. The idea here would be to actively work towards the emergence of an event. The immediate problem, of course, is that the event is defined as being radically unpredictable from within the situation. How, then, to organize political action towards producing the unpredictable? Here's Badiou's own take on the question:

"None of the little processes that led up to the event was equal to what actually took place. ... There was an extraordinary change of scale, as there always is in every significant event. ... I've never argued that the event, when we examine it in its facticity, presents irrational characteristics. I simply think that none of the calculations internal to the situation can account for its irruption, and cannot, in particular, elucidate this kind of break in scale that happens at a certain moment, such that the actors themselves are seized by something of which they no longer know if they are its actors or its vehicles, or what it carries away." (Ethics, 125)

The problem with this conception of the pre-event, is that it again appears to rely on the intervention of a pseudo-miracle for any real change to occur. The way around this may be to blunt any sharp distinction between being and event, such that the event is always a real potentiality of being. If this can be achieved, then pre-evental political action could be aimed towards shifting appearances (or the sensible, as Ranciere would have it) in order to bring forth the immanent edge-of-the-void (i.e. evental site). To some degree, this blurring of the boundaries between being and event is already set in place by Badiou: on the one hand, a site is always already a part of each and every situation (as per the Axiom of Foundation). Significantly, it is not necessarily an evental site, but rather fulfills the condition for an evental site to potentially occur by placing a limit on the series of multiples of multiples of multiples. In every situation, there is some point at which the multiples presented do not have their own elements presented. As such, every situation contains a multiple on the edge of the void. On the other hand, every situation is characterized by the undecidability of an event's belonging. The event, as described by Badiou, is composed of the unpresented elements of the site (which we just saw are always an aspect of the situation), and the presenting of itself. This secondary aspect of the event is always undecidable from the perspective of the situation, and necessarily so because of its circularity. The question of whether an event has occurred entails deciding whether or not what the signifier of the event (e.g. the "French Revolution") refers to is something that belongs to the situation or not. Either decision, yes or no, retroactively discerns the decision as veridically true. The aspect that makes this undecidability a universal feature of situations is the fact that there are (and can be) no criteria for delimiting an event. Given that the elements of a possible evental site are always existing, the only determination left is to discern whether a given configuration of unpresented elements can be named and decided as an event. As far as I can tell, this is an immanent possibility of every situation. If this is the case, then pre-evental praxis could take as its goal the reconfiguration of the situation in order to structure it in such a way as to produce the space for an event to emerge. Or in other words, a Deleuzian/Guattarian ethics of experimentation could be employed to (unpredictably) discover what a situation is capable of.

Gilbert Simondon, "On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects - Part I"

To all who have been patiently waiting for Simondon translations to appear, we at The Accursed Share are pleased to offer the first half of Simondon's doctoral dissertation, "On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects". (Cheers to Kieran, for being the first to find it hidden in the university library.) For those who aren't aware, Simondon was a huge influence on Deleuze, particularly in the theme of individuation that would repeat throughout Deleuze's career and in the notion of intensive systems that would be central to Deleuze's magnum opus, Difference & Repetition.

From the Introduction:
"The purpose of this study is to attempt to stimulate awareness of the significance of technical objects. Culture has become a system of defense designed to safeguard man from technics. This is the result of the assumption that technical objects contain no human reality. We should like to show that culture fails to take into account that in technical reality there is a human reality, and that, if it is fully to play its role, culture must come to terms with technical entities as part of its body of knowledge and values. Recognition of the modes of existence of technical objects must be the result of philosophic consideration; what philosophy has to achieve in this respect is analogous to what the abolition of slavery achieved in affirming the worth of the individual human being.

The opposition established between the cultural and the technical and between man and machine is wrong and has no foundation. What underlies it is mere ignorance or resentment. It uses a mask of facile humanism to blind us to a reality that is full of human striving and rich in natural forces. This reality is the world of technical objects, the mediators between man and nature."

Simondon, Gilbert, trans. Ninian Mellamphy, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. London: University of Western Ontario, 1980 [1958].

[3.2 MB PDF file]

Apropos John Protevi's review of 'Out of this World'.

I am not in the custom of publishing my thoughts in blogs. However, since it just so happens that I typed up this semi-long response on a whim to a recent review published by John Protevi, I thought I may as well use it as an opportunity to make good on my promise a while ago to write something for the A.S. blog.
the review I'm referring to is here

below are some of my initial responses. since this is not a prepared paper, i don't provide citations. anyone who wants them, I would be happy to supply page references, let me know.

-I certainly think that the emphasis on intensive individuation contra the weak dualism of virtual/actual is a decisive element in responding to both hallward and badiou's treatment of deleuze. however, i think a potential shortcoming of Protevi's reply here lies in showing how this claim works. It seems he almost always takes the easy way out, which consists in maintaining the 'binary' and just inserting an operator between them. Consequently, this leaves him in the position of comprehending the intensive as a "mediation" (his words) between virtual and actual, or a figure of limitation at best. and that sounds a lot like this one german dude deleuze really despised...doesn't it?
So, if this approach is insufficient, what can we propose to augment it? First of all, it seems to me that showing the primacy of intensity must be carried out from the point of view of time or repetition first and foremost. This approach immediately undercuts the banal understanding of creation as something linear and successive, even if only logically linear. Now, while protevi actually isolates two of the key passages in this regard (e.g. the temporal 'divisions that intensity introduces into the Ideas'), his interpretation of them seems only to work against him, because he maintains the pure coexistence of Ideas 'prior' to their selection by individuation. Thus when he complains that this sounds too Platonic and sues for a 'shifting totality', he only ends up perpetuating the misunderstanding, which concerns the notion of totality to begin with. What do I mean here?
What I mean is that Ideas do not form a totality of coexistence by themselves. There are two claims necessary here:
a) "totality" is not understood by Deleuze as something analogous to a 'collection' or a 'group', a 'set' of some sort, albeit intrinsically defined rather than extrinsically. when deleuze proceeds to demonstrate the functional operations of the 3rd synthesis, the notion of totality has to do with the division or 'caesura' which different/ciates dimensions as such, spatial and temporal. Only within and between such dimensions, i.e. only through individuating processes, can one speak of a totality. in his reading of holderlin in chapter 2 of Diff & Rep for example, the temporal totality concerns not a collection of moments or happenings unfolding one after another and gradually gathering steam (or all coexisting in a single absolute ground or element, for that matter), rather totality is something Formal, i.e. the way in which, in dividing and changing their nature, intensities bring about a difference WITHIN the present through which past and future inhere in it. it is a totality of Dimensions, not elements. Moreover, this means that every 'totality' is finite, and cannot be infinite. (see the series on the Aion in Logic of Sense on this last claim, p.165, and consider this in light of the caesura in D&R). Now, I should also say that a large part of this is caught up in the complicated reasons involved in Deleuze's delimitation and displacement of the 2nd synthesis of time through the account of the 3rd in D&R, where nearly everything functional that was initially ascribed to the 2nd synthesis becomes ultimately carried out only through the 3rd, the latter of which is (i argue) coextensive with the process of individuation. I won't go into detail about this latter claim here, but I have written on this at length elsewhere if anyone is interested.
b) The claim that intensity forms 'one ontological region among others' for Deleuze is something i tend to cringe at. The reason is that this tends to suggest that intensities can somehow be conceived as being a 'stage on the way to being (actual)' or something, and given a respective content which would in a certain respect exist. It is certainly true that intensity bears upon a content - however, considered in itself, intensity refers to nothing other than the pure and empty form of division in nature, change in nature, a change which happens to be selective of the determinate relation between obscure and clear aspects of a multiplicity. Change is not a 'dimension' of reality... it is much more like a modus, a vitus, a power. hence if it is given too exclusive a reality, the problem is then that one has implicitly done the same for Ideas considered apart from intensities, and then no doubt defaulted to the idea of an infinite totality of coexistence again.
Lastly, returning to what I referred to as the 'banal understanding of creation' (as something linear and successive), the ultimate difficulty is that of the 'top-down' metaphors that Deleuze unfortunately used here and there, Badiou emphasized, Hallward picked up from him, and Protevi continues in his review. This always seems to me like a spatialization of a logic that is much more paradoxical in Deleuze than may initially meet the eye. Reading the Structuralism essay in Desert Islands, or certain parts of D&R, it seems occasionally (or one could at least get the impression) that the picture is that there are (virtual) 'terms', then they just get selected and are actualized. However, the meat of the concept of repetition, once brought to bear on the distinction between clear and obscure expression in DR, and carried into the time of the Event in Logic of Sense, always functions to rupture this easy picture, by problematizing the conveniently causal logic of this picture. Indeed, Deleuze even says at some point (Toscano cites this in his book if I recall correctly, see the footnotes) in a seminar on Leibniz that the virtual is not causal. so how can it move from 'pre-actual' to actual? this totally misses the point about quasi-causality, and constitutes the core of the idiocy of Zizek's reading of Deleuze (e.g. Does he fail to notice that deleuze explicitly claims that the Body without Organs is a quasi-cause, and not a cause?) I would even venture the claim that all of production in deleuze needs to be reconsidered, (in my humble opinion), through this logic of a paradoxical or quasi-causal logic. Until this is properly conceived of, the banal distinction between virtual and actual, creating and created, or cause and effect, will haunt Deleuzean studies.
-Kieran Aarons

Seeking Potentials

One of the first and most important questions facing any immanent ontology of politics that aims at being revolutionary is the question of how to discern the potentials that exist immanently within a given situation. Such an analysis precludes all the teleological and transcendent determinations of social movement, since they exist precisely as overarching logics that determine immanence from a distance (remaining themselves untransformed by the vagaries of time). For much of contemporary philosophy, such a transcendent conception is a reversal into traditional metaphysics. Following John Mullarkey’s Post-Continental Philosophy, we can describe Deleuze, Badiou, Henry and Laruelle as thinkers of immanence. To this list we could add Žižek, who, like Badiou, seeks to discern the gaps within immanence. The problem faced by all these thinkers, on a political level, is how to determine the possibility of true revolution without, however, falling into what Daniel Bensaid has called “the miracle of the event” (TA 94). However, the tendency here, on the part of what I’m tempted to term ‘negative immanence’ (meaning those immanent philosophies which seek a disruptive void or gap in the ontological framework), is to proclaim the inauguration of the New as a complete break with the past. One can see this in much of the work surrounding Badiou (I leave it aside for now whether this position can truly be attributed to Badiou himself) and his conception of the event which eschews ‘normal’ time in order to bring about ‘historical’ time via the irruption of the pure indeterminate multiple counted as nothing. Similarly, with Žižek’s work on the radical act, there is the direct privileging of the negative moment that clears the social space as it were (the Symbolic and the Imaginary, along with any fantasies) in order to make way for something novel. (Although I have not yet read it, in the Parallax View, Žižek apparently even privileges the figure of Bartleby and his negative refusal to the point of arguing for a perpetual refusal.) In both Badiou and Žižek, therefore, there seems to be a sense that the only way to account for a truly revolutionary and immanent politics is to put forth some conception of a radical rupture at the heart of being (for Badiou, the event that breaks with the situation; for Žižek, the subject as void being the foundation of any positive order). The problem with such a radical rupture is twofold: one, it can lead to political apathy by avoiding any question of fostering the conditions for a new order to arise. By this I mean that the rupture is determined as essentially aleatory and unpredictable, and therefore incapable of being prepared for. Secondly, it tends to avoid the question of actual politics. Žižek, for his part, makes the useful distinction between the ‘administration’ of the existing order and the properly ‘political’ moment that seeks to disturb the existing framework, but still avoids any question of transforming administration into a disturbance. Badiou too, is largely quiet on the issues of actual politics. As Bensaid notes,

“When [Badiou’s] L’Organisation Politique ventures onto the terrain of practical constitutional proposals, it comes as no surprise that all it has to offer are banal reforms, such as abolishing the office of the President of the Republic (however indispensible this may be), demanding the election of a single assembly, requiring that the Prime Minister be leader of the principal parliamentary party, or recommending an electoral system that guarantees the formation of parliamentary majorities – in other words, as Hallward dryly remarks, ‘something remarkably similar to the British Constitution.’” (TA, 103)

Cheap shot? Sure. But perhaps such a lackluster political program is indicative of the fundamental incapacity of Badiou’s ontology to grasp actual, existing politics (although, Logiques des Mondes attempts to correct this). Insofar as Being & Event, and even the more political works like Metapolitics, present a formal ontological theory, they seem unable to determine how these ontological dynamics are played out in everyday life. Related, therefore, to the two problems we noted, is the fact that it is not clear what we – as theorists or activists – should do to change things. Žižek famously denounces such an idea, claiming that he wishes merely to play the role of the analyst and act, for us, as the subject-supposed-to-know. It is not for him to determine what we should do, but rather for us to use his analyst position to traverse our own fantasies and realize the self-relating negativity that we are (a “mere piece of shit” (TS 157) as Žižek concisely puts it).

The alternative to such a negative immanence is therefore to approach the problem from a more Deleuzian perspective, via a positive immanence that strips negativity of any foundational status. Rather, ontology is immediately a becoming, a constant individuation premised upon intensive systems composed of a continually changing set of heterogeneous elements that differentially determine each other. Beyond the actualized, identifiable elements of our situation there exists unactualized, yet real potentials exerting force on the dynamics of the actual. The problem of revolutionary change becomes not a matter of seeking evental sites and immanent ruptures, but rather of discerning the productivity of the potentials immanent to the real sociohistorical situation we live in. In this regard, Deleuze is more in line with Marx and with Negri and Hardt. In both of those cases, the authors examine their concrete circumstances to discern real tendencies in being in order to make predictions on potential outcomes, and – significantly – to offer real political programs that actually effect change. In his introduction to Capital, Vol 1, Ernest Mandel notes that whatever the validity of any of Marx’s theories, his long-term predictions were amazingly prescient:

“the laws of accumulation of capital, stepped-up technological progress, accelerated increase in the productivity and intensity of labour, growing concentration and centralization of capital, transformation of the great majority of economically active people into sellers of labour-power, declining rate of profit, increased rate of surplus value, periodically recurrent recessions, inevitable class struggle between Capital and Labour, increasing revolutionary attempts to overthrow capitalism – have been so strikingly confirmed by history.” (C 23)

As modern-day Marxists, Negri and Hardt’s work too is essentially a matter of discerning potentials and predicting possible and likely outcomes. “The key is to grasp the direction of the present, to read which seeds will grow and which wither.” (M 141) (And here, I would mention to my friend Kieran, there is perhaps a chance to combine your analysis of the caesura of the present with an explicitly political approach. It seems like an interesting possibility at least.) The oft-cited critique of Negri and Hardt – that they are too optimistic – is (in my mind) correct, but misses the essential method employed by them. Within the given global, biopolitical regime, and the increasingly hegemonic status of immaterial labour, they discern the potentials and the tendencies of an emergent democratic subject in the form of the multitude. The level of the problem is not so much their optimism, since they are careful to qualify their enthusiasm for this potential by repeatedly stating that many factors stand in the way of its actualization. Rather we must critique their method, since it is the method which is responsible for discerning that such a tendency exists. We return, therefore, to our original problem: if Hardt and Negri are wrong in their assessment, it must (in part) be carried out by examining the method they use to extract the various tendencies and potentials in the world. The question is, and I’m left without an answer for the moment, can there be a rigorous method of seeking potentials? It is necessarily an immanent and hence constantly rejuvenated method, but when Deleuze and Guattari speak of ‘indices’ in Anti-Oedipus (e.g. A-O 350-3), it seems that they have in mind precisely such a method. Similarly, Deleuze’s work on Nietzsche brings up the question of a “symptomatology” which sees that a “phenomenon is not an appearance or even an apparition but a [non-representational] sign, a symptom which finds its meaning in an existing force” (N 3). It is such a science of symptoms that seems to me to be key to working out a revolutionary politics that truly faces up to immanence.

References:
Bensaid, Daniel. [TA] “Alain Badiou and the Miracle of the Event.” Think Again. ed. Peter Hallward. Continuum, 2004.

Deleuze, Gilles. [N] Nietzsche and Philosophy. The Athlone Press, 1986.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. [A-O] Anti-Oedipus. The University of Minnesota, 1983.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. [M] Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Penguin Books, 2004.

Marx, Karl. [C] Capital, Vol. 1. Penguin Books, 1980.

Žižek, Slavoj. [TS] The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Verso, 2000.

Assemblage Theory, Complexity and Contentious Politics

So I have finally finished my thesis for the Master's program! It's been a long time coming, but I now have a finalized copy and have completed my oral defense. I had heard from others' experiences that at a certain point I would have to just let go of it, warts and all, and I'd agree that's the case with mine. There are a few areas I would like to go back and clean up, but I'm largely happy with how it turned out. I have (hopefully!) made a few original suggestions and connections. And since the aim of writing it was to spur different lines of thought in others, I'm making it available online in the hopes that others can gain some benefit from it. So, feel free to download a copy:

"Assemblage Theory, Complexity and Contentious Politics"
[Warning: 354kb PDF file]

If anyone should find something useful in here and wish to use it in their own work, I only ask that you provide a proper reference.

Srnicek, Nick. (2007). Assemblage Theory, Complexity and Contentious Politics: The Political Ontology of Gilles Deleuze. Unpublished master's thesis, University of Western Ontario.

The Virtual and the Intensive in the Actual

Continuing on from my last post on individuation, I look here at the ontological system outlined by Deleuze in terms of the actual, the intensive, and the virtual. This is likely somewhat repetitive for people have been studying Deleuze for a while (Massthink has their own version up, which was helpful in organizing my own thoughts), but I figure others might find it useful. These past few posts have all been towards my larger thesis project, so any external comments are welcome. That also means that you’ll find references throughout this post to other sections of my paper, and lots of academically satisfying footnotes. Anyways, on to the good stuff!

UPDATE: Larval Subjects has a new post that resonates with a lot of the work I've been developing here. Whereas I've been timidly working around how to translate this ontology into concrete social terms, Sinthome jumps right into it, giving an excellent post on what it might entail.

---------------------------

With the importance of individuation and the basic approach outlined, we are now in a position to examine in more detail the ontological system. As already mentioned, this model of reality can be abstractly analyzed into three realms: (1) the actual which consists of the stable, identifiable systems and individuals which tend to cover over (2) the intensive process of individuation that produced them, consisting of far-from-equilibrium processes that are ‘metastable’ and that embody (3) the virtual structure of potentialities that are immanent to a situation. It is important to remember that these three areas are, strictly speaking, not separate or based on a hierarchy. While we can break them apart for convenience, each is real and always in a concrete mixture with the others.

The actual is perhaps the simplest and most straightforward aspect of Deleuze’s ontological system. In his early, philosophical work, the actual consisted of the individuated phenomenon of a present experience (i.e. the basis of empiricism). In his later, more explicitly political work with Guattari and Parnet, the actual found new expressions as the stabilized systems of power and desire, whether of individuals, communities, classes or states. The link between these various examples of the actual is their reliance upon identity – the point at which ‘something’ coalesces into an individuated object or subject. This individuated product can usefully be explained in terms of complexity theory,[1] a recent scientific paradigm which many commentators have found to resonate with Deleuze’s work.[2] Put briefly, the constructed individual acts as a system[3] in a state of equilibrium or stasis.[4] More precisely, since an individual is never ontologically independent of its milieu, the individual acts as an ‘open system’ through which various material flows pass. Given this openness, the stabilization of the individual relies upon the existence of certain endogenously generated equilibrium points,[5] called ‘attractors’ or ‘singularities’. These attractors are the products of the interactions of the various trajectories which define a particular system. When the path of a system comes within a certain distance of an attractor (the ‘basin of attraction’), it inexorably converges towards it. Since it is open, however, the system never actually reaches the attractor; instead it asymptotically approaches it, subject to constant, generally minute, fluctuations resulting from various perturbations. The attractor itself is “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract”.[6] Having converged upon an attractor, however, the individual-system takes on a stability which lends it a sense of solidity, and permits theorists to draw out its ‘essential’ properties, without which the system would become something different. The constructed essence is then retroactively used to explain why the individual is the way it is; e.g. “it is a nation-state because it has the properties of x, y, and z”. In other words, the essence becomes a transcendent entity that is posited to explain the empirical world. As we saw with Aristotle, however, this form of thinking overlooks precisely the real, systemic processes which led the individual to converge upon a particular singularity in the first place. Similar to our earlier criticisms of focusing on the individuated product, focusing solely on the stable systems which permit a certain traditional mode of theorizing (susceptible to classification, linear causality where A affects B without B affecting A, etc.) neglects the ways in which the actual effaces its intensive genesis. It is to these key intensive processes that we turn now.

As noted earlier, the intensive level is an aspect of Deleuze’s ontology that has been relatively neglected. This is unfortunate, because the reduction of his ontology to the virtual and the actual means that there is no account of how the intensive ‘spatiotemporal dynamisms’ “immediately incarnate the differential relations, the singularities and the progressivities immanent in the [virtual] Idea."[7] In other words, without recognition of the intensive level, Deleuze is susceptible to the criticisms of people like Alain Badiou who wish to radically separate the actual and the virtual, and present the virtual as a modern day version of Platonic Ideas.[8] Against this tendency, we must insist upon the intensive level which “incarnates” the virtual and produces the actual, while also being itself reciprocally determined by the actual situation. In this regard, complexity theory is again a useful means to explain how these three moments can still be conceived as monistic. Whereas the actual consists of the stable, equilibrium states of systems, the intensive field is populated by systems far-from-equilibrium. These are systems which, unlike the actual, have been pushed outside the basin of an attractor. Instead, they are systems in becoming, subject to the constraints of the various elements and forces which constitute them. These multiple forces, pulling in different directions, compel the system to waver on the edge of a variety of attractors. This makes them extremely sensitive to their environment and to their initial conditions, as the slightest inclination can send them off in a particular direction.[9],[10],[11] Intensive systems are further characterized by a number of other properties that John Protevi and Mark Bonta outline:

“Processes exhibiting intensive properties are those that (1) cannot be changed beyond critical thresholds (the ‘line of flight’) in control parameters without a change of kind (a ‘becoming’), and that (2) show the capacity for meshing into ‘consistencies’, that is, networks of bodies that preserve the heterogeneity of the members even while enabling systematic emergent behaviour."[12]

It is these ‘preindividual’ processes which both produce stable, identifiable individuals, and which are retained alongside the constituted individual, thereby leaving it open for further “individualization”.[13] What is particularly unique about the intensive level is the fact that it is a realm of inclusive disjunction, where heterogeneity is retained and each virtual singularity really exists despite the fact that they cannot all be actualized at once. It is in the process of individuation, therefore, that the inclusive disjunction (and…and…) becomes transformed into an exclusive disjunction (or…or…).[14]

This idea of inclusive disjunction also reveals the in-between nature of the intensive. While embodying the multiple, incompatible potentials of virtual (through a superposition of their attractors), they are also drawn towards individuating themselves into actual systems; they are between the virtual and the actual.[15] In order for this to be possible though, they must embody a particular type of relation. This is significant because our emphasis on individuation means that the ontological status of relations must take on a new shape. They can no longer be thought of as between pre-constituted substances, since this would presuppose what has been put into question. Neither can we simply posit that relations take precedence over terms, since that would entail identifying relations and thus returning to a form of constituted individuals. Neither, however, can relations simply be internal to some larger unity, such as society or Being. It is here that the concept of multiplicity plays a central role. With multiplicity, the heterogeneous multiple itself becomes a substantive, rather than some form of overarching unity (the One), or some collection of basic units (the Multiple).[16] There is no external principle (such as economic determinism) which would determine the nature or progression of the multiplicity; there is only the immanent measure reciprocally determined by the intensive differences between its elements.[17] These intensive multiplicities are distinguished from virtual multiplicities by the nature of this intensive difference.[18] As DeLanda argues, “the key concept in the definition of the intensive is productive difference."[19] Intensive difference is productive because the tension at the heart of its difference is capable of spontaneously generating the movement of a system towards a nearby attractor. In other words, it is capable of producing order from chaos, without any mediation by an external authority (such as concepts, social movement leaders or the state). An intensive assemblage, therefore, is ‘metastable’ meaning that “’prior’ to individuality, being is affected by inconsistency, populated by divergent tensions, and pregnant with incompatible potentials."[20]

How then, do the various dimensions of an intensive system combine heterogeneous aspects to produce a functioning system? Since a multiplicity consists of neither atomistic individuals, nor a totality in which all relations would be internal, the solution is to insist upon the externality of relations.[21] This system relies, therefore, upon a distinction between the ‘properties’ of a term and its ‘