Desire/Wax Impressions of Dante’s Realism: Canto XVIII, lines 22-39 Purgatorio

 Dante’s beautiful lines which dicate the com-plexifications of cogntive judgment come to mind over the dicussion of Realism at Perverse Egalitarianism…

Vostra apprensiva da esser verace
Your perception from some real thing
tragge intenzione, e dentro a voi la spiega,
an impression takes, and in you it unfolds,
sì che l’animo ad essa volger face;
so thus the soul to turn it brings;

e se, rivolto, inver di lei si piega,
And if, so turned, toward it she molds,
quel piegare è amor, quell’è natura
that molding love, that nature ‘tis
che per piacer di novo in voi si lega.
which by pleasure fresh in you it binds.

Poi, come ‘l foco movesi in altura
Then how fire upward glides
per la sua forma ch’è nata a salire
by its form being born to climb
là dove più in sua matera dura,
t’where most within its matter it abides,

cosi l’animo preso entra in disire,
thus the soul so pressed enters in desire,
ch’è moto spiritale, e mai non posa
a spirit motion, that wilt not rest
fin che la cosa amata il fa gioire.
‘til the thing beloved makes it ‘joice.

Or ti puote apparer quant’è nascosa
Now should appear to thee how clouded
la veritate alla gente ch’avvera
be the truth with men who deem
ciascun amore in sè laudabil cosa,
every love itself a lauded thing,

però che forse appar la sua matera
perhaps because its matter seems
sempre esser buona; ma non ciascun segno
always to be good, but yet not every stamp
è buono, ancor che buona sia la cera.’
is good, even if be good the wax.’

It is really amazing, again and again, how Dante brings together still lasting philosophical issues, and then condensing in clarity them puts them into verse. (We tend to think that this makes the task all the so much harder, but has anyone thought that perhaps it makes it easier.)  If we trace the effect of the “impression” we have crystalization of a complex of inter-relations which perhaps helps us gain a foot-hold in Realism discussion.

1). Some real thing impresses itself upon us (the wax), but an impression that is in some sense “taken” by the material organization itself.

2). The impression “unfolds,” an unfolding that turns the soul (seen as passive).

3). And IF turned, she then herself does the molding, an activity which is a fresh and binding pleasure.

4). And this pleasure directs the action of the soul towards an extra-human course, towards a real coherence of things beyond/above it.

5). The movement is unresting until a state of Glorification is achieved (a passive completion, a flattening out).

6). But love itself, its very matter (which we could say is composed of the very relations between the thing loved and its turned-to pursuit), is not always “good”.

7). This intra-relation of bodily combination is ultimately judged by a discernment between which real, impressive things are ultimately good for the wax (soul) to combine with.

The result is a near Spinozist conception of knowledge and moral evil. Pleasure leads us towards self-affirmations which necessarily involve our real combinations with other real objects such that we are ever propelled toward a coherence that is extra-human. But such an epistemo-material sense of knowledge-discernment necessarily involves as well a sense in which not all combinations are in preserve of our conatus of being, something ever in transformation. In this way our appropriations of, and combination with other things (resources, techologies, beloveds) oscillate between that which will break us down (deterritorializations, as G&D call them), and that which preserve us (reterritorializations), in an expanse that is ever more incorporating and communicating. Muscially, one might say. And our value judgments, our aesthetic judgments, necessarily consist of bodily affirmations which have real ontological value, expressing real ontological relations, opening up the human domain to organizational powers beyond those of merely human Ideality.

Eros/Thanatos One Drive: The Limb-Loosener of Sappho

Eros the Crawler

Reading over at Fido the Yak, “A Continuous Stream of Emerging Pattern” Fido expressed the desire to sing the praises of paralysis, invoking something of the Greek etymology of the word, loosening-beside. This called to mind Sappho’s use of a related word and concept, and I repeat hear my comment:  

I’m not sure if you have this in mind with your affinity for “paralysis,” but Sappho’s beautiful use of the word λυσιμέλης (fragment130) comes to mind; the word is often translated “limb-loosening,” used to describe the powers of the creeping, undefeatable, sweetly-bitter creature Eros, who has returned. Limb-loosening of course is what Homer uses to describe what happens upon a death-blow in battle [sleep as well], but there is a word-play here, as μέλος (limb), also can mean a “song, or strain” (melody, the song-road). The loosening is both a re/lease of limbs and song, but also a death. But even more, there is a hint of the verb μέλω, “I care, I have concern,” so the limb-loosener is also the care-loosener.

This phrase, and fragment has always haunted me every since I have read it many years back. She condenses so very much about the powers and experience of Eros in just a few compound words, in just a brief shard survived now for more than 2,500 years.

Expansion of Eros: The Loosening

The line reads thus in the Greek (I am never sure if fonts appear on all computers):

ἔρος δηὖτέ μ᾽ ὀ λυσιμέλης δόνει,

γλυκύπικρον ἀμάχανον ὄρπετον.

David A. Campbell (Loeb ed.), translates the line:

Once again limb-loosening Love makes me tremble,

the bitter-sweet, irresistable creature

I translate much more literally/experimentally:

Eros again, me of limb-loosening was shaking,

the sweetly-bitter, aidless creeper.

Aside from the nuances of association and wordplay, the word has the curious fortune of condensing a very significant question in the history of philosophy. Is there one drive, Eros, or pleasure, Joy (Spinoza). Or are there two, Pleasure and Death (Freud). I’m reminded of a recent reading over at Complete Lies, where there are musings about the nature of two drives understood as one:

What must be understood for this explication of drive is that things are continuously moved towards these impossible extremes. Does this mean that there is a fundamental dualism however? No; the drives to expansion and contraction, while seeming to have entirely different goals, achieve the same end: collapse. When a thing expands or contracts too much, that is, is taken from it’s precarious position of existence as we know it, it essentially disintegrates in the sense that is it no longer linked to other ghosts in the same way. This is the end that all things achieve at some point, their own elimination from this network we are a part of, the network of haunting and mourning. This is why both drives are ultimate death drives, as they both achieve death, in one form or another, in their drive to infinity.

I do not keep with Complete Lies’ position which is somewhat homologous with, though inverting of Empedocles’ theory of two forces (Aphrodite and Nike). But I would say that Sappho presents something of the internal forces, the ambiguities of what “loosening” means, as it can be both release and death, finding a correspondent in G&D’s (these initials should be reversed), territorialization and deterritorialization.

I think something of the apparent contradiction also exists in Spinoza’s One Drive format, as he argues that the more selfish we become, the more self-interested in power and its increase, the less of a “self” we realize that we are, finding expression in the distinct and determinative expressions of all that is beyond us. The pursuit and undestanding of love ends up with the integrative dissolution of the “self”, as a matter of perspective. Sappho gives us both, a literal Eros that crawls and creeps in such a way that the bitter, the sharpness is sweet, and our loosening helplessness beyond all device, is both a deathlike release, but also the release of a song, a melody. It shakes you, releasing you.

Guattari’s Four Ontologies

For those who have never looked into the thought of Felix Guatarri, the nearly effaced thinker of the pair D & G, for which the name Deleuze can come to regularly stand, I post below a significant section from Gary Genosko’s admirable treatment of Guattari’s primary ideas, Felix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction. The selection deals with the history of analytic concepts found in two cartographic, schematic grids, and their principle meanings. They are called the Four Functors, or functional domains, but I prefer to think of them, and call them The Four Ontologies, in part to indicate their necessary disjunction and modal differences, in part to necessitate their immanent reality. For those only familiar with the works of their joint authorship, you may find interesting familiar terms and concepts in new contexts. Enjoy. I read the book some time ago and the diagram still stays with me.

Guattari’s diagrams and tables of the four functors and the domains proper to each tell us a great deal about his attempts to overcome simple problems of doubling couplets (all sorts of reductive dualisms), of evoking logical or semiotic squares in a segmental quadrature of deterriotorialization (the four domains result from segmentation of the plane of consistency). In CS (cartographies schizoanalytiques, 41) Guattari wrote of the “two couples” that constituted the four categories – actual and virtual and possible and real -to which he added other couples – some familiar, like expression and content (Chs [Chaosmosis] 60) and some less familiar but with a broadly semiotic lineage. (See figures 5.1a and 5.1b.) By the time of Chs, Guattari saw the expression and content couple as a problem to be overcome because it was still too much stained by linguistics and automatic contraction that would restrict the openness of assemblages of enunciation (the detour became a dead end). His reference to the left and right hand sides of the figure further exacerbated the question of whether or not his Fourth term consituted an advance over the ingenious Threes discussed in the previous chapter since he kept adding couple upon couple. The Threes are still very much at work here. Guattari advanced by analogy with the important form-substance-matter distinction – which he profoundly modified to describe diagrammatic deterritorialization by means of sign-particles between form and matter (IM [L’Inconscient machinique] 224-5) – in relation to the Fours: just as substance is the manifestation of form in matter, existential Territories are the manifestation of incorporeal Universes and machinic Phylums in material Fluxes (CS 84, n. 1), given that substance is akin to Territory, Universes and Phylum are akin to form, and Fluxes are akin to matter (unformed). The abstract machines of the domain of Phylum are new coding of the a-signifying semiotics with a purchase on material fluxes (Flux), whereas the existential incarnation (Territory) of the incorporeal constellations (Universe) metamodel as virtual rather than actual the former relation.

However, Guattari use the example of two options of Freudian cartography as they concerned libido and the unconscious to demonstrate the core features of Figure 5.1a. On the left side, libido either pursues a deterritorialized option toward abstract matters of the possible (Phylum), or is reterritorialized into the psychogenetic stages and dualisms (Eros -Thanatos) of stratified Fluxes; on the right side, the unconscious explores deterritorialized lines of alterity that are both original and unheard-of (Universes) or takes refuge in the Territories of the repressed according to various reterritorializing maps of the mind that Freud developed over the course of his career, most pertinently, between the dream book and the “The Unconsious”, “Ego and the Id”, and “New Introductory Lecture 31”. (CS 44-7; Chs 62). Guattari was also, like Freud, mapping the unconscious. Without being reductionistic, Guattari’s cartography of the schizophrenic unconscious is situated against but in the tradition of  the Freudian metapsychology of diagramming the psychical topography and the two systems (Cs. [Pcs.] Ucs.), description of their characteristics, communications, conflicts, classifications (of instincts), and emergence of the Ego-Id-Superego – the three regions – or indeed, the Lacanian tripartite Real-Imaginary-Symbolic. Guattari took great pains to decentre his cartography from the linguistic signifier, from the many psychoanalytics dualisms (primary-secondary process); to render the domains contingent and evolutionary is relation to technology, art and science, and avoid reductive prototypes of subjectivity (CS 32ff). Whether or not he was successful will need to be carefully considered.

 

What is the Fourth Term anyway?  How many is an open Three? The diagramming of the transversal relations between heterogenous domains: material and energetic Fluxes (F); an abstract machinic Phylum (P); existential Territories (T); leaves incorporeal Universes (U) that escape the coordinates of F, P, and T (CS 74). The  Fourth term is the virtual possible and, together with the actual possible, these envelop the actual real and virtual real. Guattari linked both powerlessness and unreachable foundations with Twos; pyramidal dialectical trees with Threes, and the generation of non-prioritized, proliferating trans-entity interactions that respected the principle of autopoesis with Fours…

 

…Guattari’s model of the unconscious had three types of energetico-semiotic quantic configurations describing interentity relationship: non-separability, or synchronic compossibility (intrinsic reference); separability or diachronic complementarity involving time and becoming (extrinsic reference); and quanitification operating between non-separability and separability, but not subordinate to them (non-separability being the semiotic superstructure of separability; quantification being the pragmatic superstructure of separability). Each had their own tensors (although Lyotard used this concept to describe a singular point of libidnal intensity such as Dora’s throat against the semoitic nihilism that a sign stands for something for someone, this extra-semiotic element produced libidnal intensity through force and singularity, like a proper name, as opposed to signifying meaning through differentiation; 1993: 54-6) and because Guattari was concerned with describing inter-entity relations by means of this mathematically derived concept, it may be thought of as a generalized vector of such relations. These relations, about which more will be shortly, are constrained by those between the levels of the unconscious that Guattari presented (it is evident from Figure 5.1a that there are NOT, for example, direct connections between Fluxes and Universes and Territories and Phylums, but Guattari invented indirect links by means of synapses). So, in the first instance, one of the tensors of non-separability is Expression and Content (extrinsic reference of deterriotorialization) and the other is System and Structure (intrinsic reference of deterritorialization). Both concern deterritorialization and this axis occupies the place of both possible and real in Figure 5.1a (where possible was, infinite, irreversible, deterritorialization, far from equalibrium, shall be; and where the real was finite, reversible deterritorialization close to equalibrium shall be (CS 86)). The tensors of separation are semiotic (engendering laterally, from their point of origin, sites of entities of meaning – hence largely Territorial functions functions) and the surplus value of possibility, which  relays the site of entities of meaning and transfers them, via synapes of effect – situated  between Fluxes and Phylums – and affect – situated between Territories and Universes – to pragmatic effects and subjective affects. The tensors of quantification are synaptic: they are, as suggested, relays for the transfer of the surplus value of possibility toward the sites of entities polarized as either systematic or structural. As I indicated in Figure 5.1a, each domain has a figure in which entities are situated: Fluxes=Complexions; Phylums=Rhizomes; Territories=Cut outs; Universes=Constellations. Although Guattari preferred to diagram the domains as four parallel sub-ensembles in a topological space in order to give some depth to an otherwise two-dimensional diagram such as Figure 5.1a and its variations, the latter were commonly used.

 

As for the metamodel’s contraints, there are restrictions on direct tensorial relations that I have already mentioned (but which the synaptics mediate); tensorial relations are subject to dyssynchrony;and the levels, corresponding to the three configurations governing inter-entity relations but based upon order of presupposition: Level 1 has no presuppositions; Level 2 presupposes Level 1 (semiotic); Level 3 presupposes Levels 1 and 2 (pragmatic and subjective). Guattari’s work is not very far removed in spirit from what Freud and Lacan did in their diagnosis and algorithms. Freud even went so far as to compensate for weakness in his diagrams, asking his audiences to make mental corrections. Constraints include how the id relates to the external world only via the ego, the specification of certain types of entities (cathetic intensities that are mobile or not), and topographic relations of semiological algorithms defined by two cumbersome structures (metaphor and metonymy), etc. Despite Guattari’s warnings abou the profound modification of psychoanalysis, he continually introduced codings that suggested precisely the diminishment of such modifications. For example, the fourfold segmentation of domains on the plane of consistency is based on two arguments:

 

      1. for discursivity, an ontological argument: if there is a given (donne/), there is a giving (donnant);

            – unity, discontinuous divisions of Territories and constellations of Universes (giving);

            – plural, continuous, fusional complexions of Fluxes and rhizomes of Phylums (given);

      2. for deterritorialization, a cosmological argument: two domains of intrinsic reference without immediate intersection yield a GIVEN corresponding to an intrinsic, systematic reference and a GIVING corresponding to an intrinsic structural reference;

            -finite, reversable, deterritorialization referenced around a point of equilibrium;

            -infinite, irreversable deterritorialization referenced far from a point of equilibrium

 

The problem is that giving-given corresponds to expression-content as does structure-system, on top of which Guattari develops his division of the unconscious into three levels reflecting the later topography of Freud’s ego-id-super-ego model, a primary, secondary, and tertiary unconsciousness, each with their own tensors. Remember the pairings that pile up in the two-dimensional Figures 5.1a and 5.1b, with their expansions, are worked by processual cycles (Figure 5.2 [not included here]) which seem to lack real depth. Guattari struggled with representing the four domains (CS 80).

 

      Level 1. Primary Unconscious

      Level of Intrinsic Reference: Systems and Structures

      Reversible Tensors:

      (a)   systematic referent, on the side of the given between sites of entities of Flux and those of Phylums (left side of Figure 5.1a) (i.e., systems that articulate material and energetic Fluxes on abstract machinic rhizomes);

      (b)   structural referent, on the side of giving, between between sites of Territorial entities and incorporeal Universes (right side of Figure 5.1a) (i.e., a musical structure that crystalizes rhythms, melodies of incorporeal Universes; a biscuit that conjures an incorporeal Universe of another time and place but, through globalization, becomes available everywhere, leads to the Universe’s implosion, and the existential Territories of subjectivity become ambivalent about their own taste)

 

SUMMARY: F=complexion; P=rhizome; T=cut out; U=constellation.

 

      Level 2. Secondary Unconscious

      Level of Extrinsic Reference: Semiotic Tensors

      Irreversible Tensors of:

      (a) persistence, vectorized from Systems to Structures (from given to giving):

            – sensible tensors virtualizing sensible contents within existential Territories (i.e., cutting out from diverse Fluxes a refrain of territorialization in an ethological assemblage, as in the Stagemaker’s upturned leaves on its display ground selected from the Flux of leaves);

            – noematic tensors virtualizing the noematic contents within Universes (i.e., smile of the Cheshire cat, unlocalizable as a point in space);

      (b) tensors of transistency, vectorized from structures to systems (giving to given):

            – diagrammatic tensors actualizing diagrams in Fluxes (i.e., a machine-readable magnetic strip of a bank card that, in conjunction with a personal identification number, provides access to an account);

            – machinic tensors actualizing abstract propositional expressions of rhizomic Phylums (i.e., the incorporeal faciality of Christ projected on machinic capitalist Phylums, already traversing spaces before being deployed; already always there).

 

SUMMARY: F-T=sensible; T-F=Diagrammatic; P-U-noematic; U-P-machinic.

 

      Level 3. Tertiary Unconscious

      Persistence and Transistency: Pragmatic (between F and P) and Subjective (between T and U) Synapes

      (adjusting the three configurations of non-separation, separation and quantification in different ways on earlier Levels: on L1, in the presentifcation of the backwards-looking potentialities of Systems and Structures; on L2, forward looking surplus value of possibility of semiotic concatenations)

      (a) Bivalent synapes result from the conjunction of two afferent tensors of consistency – F and P – effect of extrinsic coding (i.e., perception without foundation, hallucination) and T and U – affect of extrinsic ordination (i.e., a “real impression” of a dream).

      

      (b) Trivalent synapes result from the conjunction of two afferent tensors and one efferent tensor resulting in:

            — Consistency F – closed systems effect (i.e., closed cybernetic loop);

            — Consistency P – open systemic effect (i.e., micro-social systems upon which family therapy strives to intervene);

            — Consistency T – closed structural affect (i.e., function of the mature Freudian topography);

            — Consistency U – open structural affect (i.e., becoming vegetable, child, animal).

 

      (c) Tetravalent synapes either associate effects of extrinsic coding (consistency F and P) with open and closed systemic synapes or affects of extrinsic ordination (consistency T and U) with open and closed structural synapes:

            – pragmatic synapse (between F and P): an affect is virtualized when an assemblage is polarized by a relation of persistence emanating from pragmatic to subjective;

            – subjective synapse (between T and U): an effect is actualized when an assemblage is polarized by a relation of transistence emanating from subjective to pragmatic (hence, a play of virtual persistence implosion and actual transistence expansion without destroying the two poles of effect and affect).

 

SUMMARY: F-P=open systemic effect; P-Fclosed system effect; T-U-open structural affect; U-T=closed stuctural affect. (Note: summary based on correction to Table 3, CS 91); see also the tensors and entities mapped in CS 83.)