The Art of the Paradox: Massumi Speaking on Luminosity

Massumi tells us that there is a method of paradox production which he holds in contrast to the clarity aims of critique, a kind of production of Luminosity through paradoxical operators:

Generating a paradox and then using it as if it were a well-formed logical operator is a good way to put vagueness into play. Strangely, if this procedure is followed with a good dose of correction and just enough technique, presto!, the paradox becomes a well-formed logical operator. Thought and language bend to it like light in the vicinity of a superdense heavenly body. This may be an example of miraculation. (As if luminosity itself can be invented.)

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I don’t have a lot to say about this, other than the exact methodology of condensing the paradox into a light-bending black hole, the intensity of the process, its entire mechanism of pressurization, seems what keeps paradox from being mere confusion, or banal contradiction. In order for luminosity to be invented, so to speak, a great and crushing paradox has to be performed, something that (unlike the setting out of the grid, the framework, in Kant, the screen upon which the phenomenal movie is then played) does the opposite, it takes the logical nexus points, the molecular bond of our rationality, is imploded, crushed-under.

I am unsure if I agree with either the methodology, or the analogy, but something tells me that it must be put into the rhetorical (if not metaphysical) store of the arms of philosophy.

The Sewn Stitch of Logical Stoppage: Massumi on Terminus

The difference between actual stopping that occurs when a continuity exhausts itself and reaches a terminus and the logical stopping that goes over what then appears its path, in order to cut it into segments separated by plottable points, is not at great as it might seem at first. The retrospective ordering enables precise operations to be inserted along the way, in anticipation of a repetition of the movement – the possibility that it will come again. If the movement does not reoccur, it can be captured. It comes to a different end.

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Here Massumi is really cool. The passage is in the context where reflexive feedback of positionality (definitionality) loops back into potential, in his story of ontogenesis. I do resist this picture of time and action, but will bracket it and allow it to travel with me. Here though is a compelling homology along the registers of terminus. There is the ending that is actual, for instance we might assume something like “death”, and there is the terminus of logical capture (which he goes onto exemplify by “space”). Both are kinds of endings. The analogy thrusts us forward onto interesting topology, but how far are we to take this (we don’t want to ontologize it into a force, I would want to say, a force of “death” or extensionality)?

If I take a Spinozist reading of these two terminal relations, the actual termination is a break down of a consistent ratio of parts in communication. The parts fall out of orbit, so to speak, they disperse. Spinoza would deny that the continuity “exhausts” itself, rather he reads it as that it has been intercepted by a stronger force (or forces), encountered a dis-ressonance, a dis-ruption. Where it gets interesting is that the definitional capture or “end” that result in the nominalization of possibility, is that any nominal relation MUST be considered as part of the environment of the actualizing ratio that is being described. In a certain sense, the living processes that are being terminated in a description (which for Spinoza are a lasting ratio of parts in communication), are not simply fed back into by those descriptions, but are also participated in, with those descriptions. When we describe, logically, this is not just a sharing of freeze-frame death, but also a lived cross-body communication and mutuality. (This is an enfleshed melding, which can really occur via affect, as much via idea.) It is for this reason that I resist the reflexive loop as essential, the stationed turn that wants to make of logic a sewing stitch.

It of course may be that Massami will move in this direction with his treatment of affect, but as a Spinozist of affect I have to say that when describing, chopping up, framing, etc, these actions themselves must be understood and affirmations of my own ontological status, and thus must be understood not simply and terminus relations in reflection. Part of this involves the radical reconsideration of what terminus is. Indeed species can become extinct, but as well they can be (or will be) re-activated through technological means. The genetic line of my body, its cells, does end in the possibilities, but also advocatable is the continuance (or permanence) of its varying combinations.

Ontological Privilege: Massumi on the Priority of Change

Massumi here reshuffles his cards in the stacked deck, so that the aces will fall into his hand.

Indeterminancy and determination, change and freeze-framing, go together. They are inseparable and always coincide while remaining disjunctive in their modes of reality. To say that passage and indeterminancy “come first” or “are primary” is more a statement of ontological priority than the assertion of a time sequence. They have ontological privilege in the sense that they constitute the field of the emergence, while positionings are what emerge. The trick is to express the priority in a way that respects the inseparability and contemporaneousness of the disjunct dimensions: their ontogenetic difference.

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I want to approach this field/emergence logic of priority from a Spinozist point of view (surprise). We at first see some strong general homology. The “field” of change and process is Natura Naturans (nature naturing) and the emergent positionality is Natura Naturata (nature having been natured), and there is even the rough correspondence to the diminishment of the importance of the modes that some readings have imposed on Spinoza (all the way to Hegel’s accusation of an acosmism). This is significant, and something I always want to stress when people try to impose an Idealist (18th century German) interpretation on Spinoza. The modes are the very means by which Substance exists and acts (E3p6dem). They are not secondary, or less real. What is key about this is the prescription of human action implied in any diminishment of “positionality”, the sense that positioning or framing comes after (in any sequitor fashion) the processes themselves. Instead, all our degrees of power, being, pleasure, perfection changes are real and coincident changes in semiosis. This is to say, following Spinoza’s treatment of the affects, our changes in capacity are changes in the idea we have of ourselves in the context of the world itself, but not reflective changes in idea. We do not look at ourselves in a mirror (of consciousness or any other), and then make adjustments in idea. Rather, our concrete “position” is itself a positional change. This goes down into a radical sense of what (self) affirmation is, a non-reflective (relatively) autonomous embrace which includes that which cross-currents our own being, propelling us out to mutualities.

Massumi at this point, in his counter to positional, linguistic philosophies I think is very well placed. But there is a difference I believe between our ratio-imaginary mappings (including mathematics) of semiotic differences, and informational semiotic change involved in process of becoming that Massumi is trying to prioritize. The “field” is not just processes of becoming that underlies a surface of concretizations or condensations, but must be semiotic (that is to say, informational) itself. What he calls “freeze-frames” are both imaginary, but also real, let us say, edge-of-chaos determinations. Which are strictly speaking determinations without being opposed to (linear) indeterminancy.

Another way of stating this is, perhaps: There is no “disjuction”.

As Energy Is to Matter: Massumi on Indeterminancy

Massumi troubling on how to characterize the body such that it is dynamic enough, and roots itself in Deleuze’s concrete abstract:

The charge of indeterminancy is inseparable from it. It strictly coincides with it, to the extent that the body is in passage or in process (to the extent that it is dynamic and alive). But the charge itself is not corporeal…Real, material, but incorporeal. Inseparable, coincident, but disjunct…

One way of starting to get a grasp of the real-material-but-incorporeal is to say that it is to the body, as a positioned thing, as energy is to matter. Energy and matter are mutually convertable modes of the same reality. This would make the incorporeal thing a phase-shift of the body in the usual sense, but not one that comes after it it in time. It would be a conversion or an unfolding of the body contemporary to its every move.

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This is the thing. There is a preoccupation with the body, per se, which wants to take IT as the locus of something vital and non-reductive. This reads as a mythologization of the social entity “a person”. If we adequately re-describe bodies abstractly and powerfully enough, and locate enough metaphysical/ontological powers within a “body”, then we trace out a storyboard of how each and every “person” (who is only a  concrete actualization of the “plan” of bodies in general), can erupt with differences that are meaningful. Because this mythology involves the trappings of binary logics, the border of the body has to be taken as a logical toggle-point. The struggle of origin, located in this mythological, person-redeeming way, compression cosmological arguments into what is otherwise given freedom under the much wider nomenclature of “the flesh”. The abstract floats under the flesh, like a magnetic carbomb, waiting to unfurl its political (sensory) change. The localization of “body” frustrates me. It carries too much baggage.

Also note Massumi’s analogy of matter to energy. Matter is a kind of colder calcification of freer floating intensity or fluidity. Solid to its liquid. But what is strikingly missing (at least at this point) is “information” the third term. I’ve talked about the metaphysical value of Information before: Information, Spinoza’s “Idea” and The Structure of the Universe. What does information as the third term to Massumi’s incorporeal-concrete do? It opens out every body across its boundaries, transversely. We do not get the doublet of the actual and its ghost beneath it, and the attendant mythology of personhood. Instead the body itself tears across its sinews and bone, into a different matrix. Instead of locating a Same/Difference autonomy of “movement” and its animation cell analogy (where does difference come from? as quaesta), the infinities within a body strain against the infinities outside it. The “phase-shift” decenters every object not just from itself (boring), but from every other existence. A change in information elsewhere touches the informational state of this body. Massumi’s vortex seems to be missing an axis of imaging, at least at this point. Too much internalization of change, too much Hegel thrown forward:

This self-disjunctive coinciding sinks an ontological difference into the heart of the body.

It is precisely this sinking into, like an anchor’s line into the aeons of coral reef, that is a needless or occluding mythology of the self.