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.

Parables on the Virtual, 10

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.