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Ode to Man
Tho’ many are the terrors,
not one more terrible than man goes.
This one beyond the grizzled sea
in winter storming to the south
He crosses, all-engulfed,
cutting through, up from under swells.
& of the gods She the Eldest, Earth
un-withering, un-toiling, is worn down,
As the Twisting Plough’s year
into Twisting Plough’s year,
Through the breeding of horse, he turns.
& the lighthearted race of birds
all-snaring he drives them
& savage beasts, their clan, & of the sea,
marine in kind
With tightly-wound meshes spun
from all-seeing is Man.
Yet too, he masters by means of pastoral
beast, mountain-trodding,
The unruly-maned horse holding fast,
‘round the neck yoked,
& the mountain’s
ceaseless bull.
& the voice & wind-fast thought
& the passion for civic ways
He has taught, so from crag’s poor court
from under the ether’s hard-tossed arrows
To flee, this all-crossing one. Blocked, he comes
upon nothing so fated.
From Hades alone escape he’ll not bring.
Tho’ from sickness impossible
Flight he has pondered.
A skilled one, devising of arts beyond hope,
Holding at times an evil,
But then to the noble he crawls,
honoring the laws of the Earth, &
Of gods the oath so just,
high-citied.
Citiless is the one who with the un-beautiful
dwells, boldly in grace.
Never for me a hearth-mate
may he have been, never equal in mind
He who offers this.
Ode to Man
A BwO is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate. Still, the BwO is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass. It has nothing to do with phantasy, there is nothing to interpret. The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree—to the degree corresponding to
the intensities produced. It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity = 0; but there is nothing negative about that zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities. Matter equals energy. Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero. That is why we treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic movements involving group displacement, by migrations: all independent
of accessory forms because the organs appear and function here only as pure intensities. The organ changes when it crosses a threshold, when it
changes gradient. "No organ is constant as regards either function or position, . . . sex organs sprout anywhere,... rectums open, defecate and close, . . . the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments." The tantric egg. After all, is not Spinoza's Ethics the great book of the BwO?
Ode to Man
But human power is extremely limited, and is infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes; we have not, therefore, an absolute power of shaping to our use those things which are without us. Nevertheless, we shall bear with an equal mind all that happens to us in contravention to the claims of our own advantage, so long as we are conscious, that we have done our duty, and that the power which we possess is not sufficient to enable us to protect ourselves completely; remembering that we are a part of universal nature, and that we follow her order. If we have a clear and distinct understanding of this, that part of our nature which is defined by intelligence, in other words the better part of ourselves, will assuredly acquiesce in what befalls us, and in such acquiescence will endeavour to persist. For, in so far as we are intelligent beings, we cannot desire anything save that which is necessary, nor yield absolute acquiescence to anything, save to that which is true: wherefore, in so far as we have a right understanding of these things, the endeavour of the better part of ourselves is in harmony with the order of nature as a whole.
Difference as a correspondence of identity (recognition) is a product of differenciation in Deleuze’s work. Difference-in-itself. What you are describing as a phase space kind of correlates, but with an unknowable complex through which the passage of differenciation passes.
Affect is Massumi’s third term. It will be interesting to see what you make of this considering your background with Spinoza.
The way Foucault decribed incorporeal materialism in his inaugural college de france lacture is congruent with his use to describe the event in Theatricum Philosophicum. In the lecture it is a space of possibility immanent to a configuration of power relations for uttering ‘truth’ through statements. I bring it up because information also seems to exist in this space of incorporeal materialism for you, but you are making it nonhuman-centric.
Yes, Identity (recognition) simply is too binary a concept for my search for terms.
I too am wondering how I will appreciate Massumi’s affect, which surely he filters through Deleuze (Deleuze is often liberal with what he does with Spinoza’a affect). One must recall that for Spinoza, Substance utlimately has no “affect”, though things paradoxically do. From this early point I can’t see how affect works as a third term since it seems that Massumi is going to place it qualitatively on the side of “movement” or change, denying it proper third term power. I will wait and see though.
Right now the missing “information” is what forces (or allows) Massumi to privilege change over semiosis, when by my lights they should be co-incident.
I’m glad to have your thoughts on Foucault and the event. The “event” troubles me some in the general sense, probably because the term has been poisoned by Badiou. But it also localizes change in a fashion, which is less helpful. Largely much of this metaphysics is meant to be a metaphysics of the “resister”. You are right though, mine is a materialist(ic) non-human centric topography, which also refuses “object” prooccupation as well as its supposed philosophical counterpart, process prioritization. Informational change is the semoisis of the degree of change in on a vector of power, and would seem to be the proper locus of “affect”.
I will certainly wait and see what Massumi is doing. I suspect that there will be lasting tensions throughout the book for me, but as well, lasting attractions. Read my comments as improvisario.
Badiou’s event! I guess you’ve probably seen the essay by Badiou that compares his concept of the event to Deleuze’s?
Click to access parrhesia02_badiou2.pdf
Hmm, ok, so I am getting an idea of where you are coming from, in terms of your concerns regarding the event. The event does localise process, but only in the ‘extension’ (as spatio-temporalisation) immanent to itself. In the Fold Deleuze described it as a grid that is always placed over chaos. This is only the simplest way to describe the event-process relation, because he then goes on to discuss the ‘baroque house’ as a metaphor for trying to indicate the way in which the virtual-singularities (what I think from what you have described here and in your other post on information, could be related to your approach if information is thought of as structured according to the relevant set of virtual singularities actualised as extension through ontological processes of organisation) and actual-extension fold back and forth into each other. So even if the event refers to an immanent localisation, this is only in an instant, as a non-extensive moment of time, without having the quality of duration (duree). As soon as duration enters the picture, so to speak, as process, there is a far more complicated baroque architecture to events and process.
Badiou describes this (in essay linked above) as the concept of the event’s “original ambiguity”:
“[The event] effectively contains a dimension of structure (interruption as such, the appearance of a supernumerary term) and a dimension of the history of life (the concentration of becoming, being as coming-to-self, promise).”
Of course, he has already lost me here, as this is far too Heideggarian an appreciation of the event (being as being-on-the-way), I am not sure if he fully comprehends that the virtual and actual are subjacent to each other. For example, the boiling point of water (as a virtual singularity, is actualised in any number of relations between bodies; the boiling point is a pure relation between relations of pressure, chemistry, thermodynamics) has no ontological parity with water or steam. Or perhaps more abstractly, and therefore more concretely, the ‘boiling point’ itself can be actualised across any number of chemicals/minerals, water is just one. ‘To boil’ is an event that is not determined by the coming-into-being of steam or any other gas as it is produced from its relevant liquid form. Any interruption is apparent in this case because the rate of evaporation increases so drastically it enters into the threshold (affects) of human perception. Water is always evaporating (or condensing, freezing or melting).
One confusion I definitely have is regarding what you mean by third term, and in relation to what other terms. Perhaps I was too hasty to suggest affect as Massumi’s third term. I guess it depends on the relation between affect and affection. Affect pertaining to bodies and affection describing the relation of one body affecting another. Have you written about the concept of the third term on you blog or are you using the concept in a specific way you could explain?
I am really appreciating your way of reading Massumi. I think it is very productive.
Glen: “In the Fold Deleuze described it as a grid that is always placed over chaos. This is only the simplest way to describe the event-process relation, because he then goes on to discuss the ‘baroque house’ as a metaphor for trying to indicate the way in which the virtual-singularities (what I think from what you have described here and in your other post on information, could be related to your approach if information is thought of as structured according to the relevant set of virtual singularities actualised as extension through ontological processes of organisation) and actual-extension fold back and forth into each other.”
Kvond: There is an over-riding metaphor of emergence here, in Deleuze, and then also one of a Hegelian folding back. The two conflate to some degree, and I have trouble with both. The first is a kind of soil bed (of process) with concretization of what comes out, the second is that of an implied reflexivity. Instead, and this is what is vital in Spinoza, is that it is not just that what is actual comes out-of what is potential, but that the potential IS actualization itself, and that actualized power is a non-reflexive affirmation, a kind of aesthetic distribution, which provisionally I position along the edge-of-chaos. The “event” as a localization is simply too caught up in the Same/Different binarization concerning itself with a localized boundary (again, projected onto or into a mythologized personhood as a locus of power or resistence), and it is also too “epiphenomenal” (if I can borrow the term) to an imagined bed of process-first-ism. If the body is to be granted full power, its positionality (as Massumi conceives it) cannot be a secondary measure, and it cannot be a microscale Hegelianism as well (a difference with itself).
glen: “So even if the event refers to an immanent localisation, this is only in an instant, as a non-extensive moment of time, without having the quality of duration (duree). As soon as duration enters the picture, so to speak, as process, there is a far more complicated baroque architecture to events and process.”
Kvond: It is precisely this, the “as soon as duration enters the process” that I toil against. The process itself (in Spinoza Natura naturans) is the edge-of-chaos tidal shift of durative oscilation. At least that is where I am heading. Think of Plotinus’s image of a light sphere heading out from a radiational center, wherein the edge of the light going out as it diminishes marks out the degrees of being of any of its actualizations. The light where it is, is entirely Real and is fully Being, but its distribution expresses degrees of power. Within actualization, the path to intensification and activity is not within a binary of self and difference (that game), but across-self so to speak. An affirmation in a line. There is a lot of Deleuze that is in support of this as well, his whole line of flight and melodic conceptualization, his mapping and not representing, etc (most of it accomplished through the Guattari assemblage). It is his preoccupation with boundary-ism binaries that I find unhelpful. I’ll wait and see how Massumi proceeds. I know that he does invoke phase space complexity and the whatnot. So there may be much of importance to build on.
glen: “One confusion I definitely have is regarding what you mean by third term, and in relation to what other terms. Perhaps I was too hasty to suggest affect as Massumi’s third term. I guess it depends on the relation between affect and affection. Affect pertaining to bodies and affection describing the relation of one body affecting another. Have you written about the concept of the third term on you blog or are you using the concept in a specific way you could explain?”
Kvond: The invocation of the “third term” is not a Hegelian third, but in immediate reference to the article on Spinoza and information. Massumi uses energy and matter to analogize his process and position, and I suggest that Stonier’s third structural component of the universe is helpful to expand what Massumi is analogizing: https://kvond.wordpress.com/2009/09/27/information-spinozas-idea-and-the-structure-of-the-universe/
But the “third term” also has deep Neoplatonic roots going back to Augustine’s borrowing of Plotinus to defeat the problems of manichaeist dualism. In plain fact, much of philosophy is still in the grips of manichaeist dualism, inevitable dualism of spirit and body brought on by Descartes and German Idealism. Placing “spirit” in the abstract and underbed of Process, and “matter” in the concretization of position (as a lesser term), does not solve the essential dualism. What solves it, and has solved it since the beginning, is a degree-of-being conception. This was the case with Augustine, and has been so ever since. This is coupled with a semiosis of being (Augustine is credited with being the first semotician by some): Related thoughts: https://kvond.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/the-problem-with-spinozas-panpsychism/. This semiosis though is oriented through a trinity of principles in Augustine: posse, nosse, amare. Power, to Know, to love. What is quite important is to see how the third of these is inseparable from the first two, and that solving the problem of the duality of body and spirit requires all three (and the semiosis of a degree of being conception). I discuss the three terms in their Campanellian expression of the Three Primalities here: https://kvond.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/campanellas-three-primalities-potentia-sapientia-amor/ , where they have become power, sense, and love. In Spinoza power has become the power to extend, to know has become the knowing of idea, and to love the distributions of conatus (cutting across the two attributes). But these are toticipations (in Campanella, and not reflexive relations. The third term that often slips out is, as Massumi identifies, is affect, sense itself, feeling. (Campanella turns “to know” into “to sense” rightfully.) But this is at the cost of collapsing sense into process (I am guessing), and surrending “to be” to a secondary emergence of position (freeze-framing). Instead all three have to be considered in my opinion. And “to love” is the informational distribution along an aesthetic line in relation to the edge-of-chaos. It though is intimately braided to “to know” and “to be”. They are worked together in a way in which no term drops out or becomes the primary source of the other, ideally so. At least that is what I think. This long history of a trinity of terms (and hell, there might be a fourth or fifth, that’s okay too, but not a dyad which has deep trenches to fall into) has painted the solution to binarism. The “third term” prevents the heirarchism, as well as the preoccupation with projected personhood.
This no doubt has been a huge digression, but I thought I might as well get the greater context out there.
glen: “I am really appreciating your way of reading Massumi. I think it is very productive.”
Kvond: Thanks for the good words. I’m trying to come to this with a kind of innocence. I have a lot of reasons to want to agree with Massumi. I like the way he thinks and expresses himself, I have affinities with Deleuze, and certainly as Spinozist the priortization of affect is of the utmost concern. It might be that in that he builds his reading of affect on a binarization of difference it won’t be of so much use to me, but it seems a text well worth engaging.
This dialog is great. Keep it up. Right now I’m rooting for Theatricum Philosophicum (and the time to reread it ; )
KVOND, your “third term” seems almost eliminativist in its focus on informational power vectors of control. This is very Churchlandish, where all cognition is considered some resolution (totalization ?) of competing vectors of ‘neural’ anticipation. For some time I’ve speculated (too shallowy, I’m afraid) about a coequal, threefold ontology of resisters, capacitors and conductors (which may be why I still have doubts about a single ‘substance’ ; )
BTW, on a scale of blog diminishment how would you rate the COLLAPSE of ELIMINATIVE CULINARISM?
MC,
I’ve never really thought alot about Churchland. Its possible. But my project is wholly metaphysical, and information is about distribution and power-to-be, act. If indeed the argument is that neural structures of anticipation are expressions of this, sure. As a panpsychist though I would see this distribution across all levels of being, so to speak. I like your three-fold ontology of registers. Perhaps it might fit within my appeal to Neoplatonic three-fold, degree-of-being resolution of manichaeism. I don’t know enough to say.
As for Eliminative Culinarism, yeah, I have no idea what is going on there. That is a pretty big diminishment. I hope that is not where I am heading.