All 76 entries tagged Philosophy Research

Research notes in philosophy, from my current PhD work.

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August 21, 2005

Research Notes: still unconvinced about cognitive 'science'

Follow-up to Research Notes: co–evolution and the limits of explanation from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

Despite some interruptions, I'm now up to chapter 8 of Andy Clark's Being There. The chapter on The Neuroscientific Image presented a plausible model of cognition based upon brain research, but combining functional-hierarchical, distributed, embedded and dynamical approaches. But I am still not satisfied that the question of methodology is addressed sufficiently.

The important point is that dynamical and computational explanations are not exclusive, but rather, describe actually distinct forms of organisation and mechanism, and hence our task is to identify when one or the other is more appropriate (and indeed the combinations of the two).

That is good, but rather than giving a systematic guide as to how we can apply these various approaches, we instead see a cognitive 'science' built upon a patchwork of interdependent conjectures concerning the many distinct aspects of embedded and evolutionary cognition. The conjectures add up to an 'engineering model' of the intelligent organism, with the aim of offering a plausible story. They concern, amongst many other aspects:

  • Components available for the construction of the system, and the energetic and physiological limitations imposed on those components (both in the brain and the rest of the body);
  • The ontogenetic generation and regeneration of those components within the life of the individual, in isolation and through complex co-evolutionary relationships;
  • The diversity of the modes of organisation of those components, and their interactions (including either computational and dynamical operations in combination);
  • The generation and regeneration of those organisations;
  • Components in the environment available for simplifying and extending cognitive processes;
  • The feedback and feedforwards loops between these internal processes and the external environment within which the organism is embedded;
  • The limitations and requirements (temporal, spatial) imposed upon the individual by the environment;
  • Co-evolutionary links with other complex entities in the environment of the organism;
  • The phylogenetic development of all of the above in the evolution of the species and its environment.

But how can these individual conjectures be 'falsified'? Much of the work of cognitive science is to assess the fit of one of these conjectures with the many others. Of course that may lead to complex but consistent theories that seem plausible but which turn out to be entirely wrong. What other means do we have for assessing the plausibility of the conjectures. Clarke relies on two:

  1. Selective neural damage evidence – the mainstay of neuroscience, showing how damage to a part of the brain has specific effects on behaviour;
  2. Economic plausibility – assessing whether a conjecture describes mechanisms that are just too extravagant and costly to be likely (for the individual, species or environment).

Method 1 is relaible where a theory depends upon the existence of a localized centre of mental functionality or control that is suspeptible to damage. However, even in these cases there may be important distributed and dynamical elements that are difficult to assess (and hence get ignored by the theory).

Clarke gives some relatively trivial examples of method 2. However, I am not convinced that such 'economies' of resource (including time) are often simple or stable enough for easy analysis. And furthermore, if we consider the organism not to be an individual, but rather to be an assemblage of highly mobile components (especially at the 'higher' levels, at which an individual may become possessed by powerful, nomadic memes driving its behaviour), economies become much less predictable and reducible.

More fundamentally, i'm not at all convinced that there is some 'rule of efficiency' driving and limiting all phenomona. That I think is the really interesting question.

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Robert O'Toole : 21 Aug 2005 10:51 |  Tags:           |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

August 08, 2005

Research Notes: co–evolution and the limits of explanation

Follow-up to Research Notes: Multiplicity, co–involution, Being abstract but not generalized from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

By Chapter 5 of Being There, Clark has reviewed the relevant work in robotics, cognitive science and developmental psychology. The slightly understated conclusion seems to be that a vital ingredient is missing: reality, messy, complex, non-linear reality.

This is a key paragraph:

This approach ignores one of the factors that most strongly differentiate real evolutionary adaption from other forms of learning: the ability to coevolve problems and solutions. p.93

The question is, as I read on, will he propose some kind of mechanism for introducing this factor into simulations, and thus quantifying its likely effects and patterns? Or perhaps he will explore the non-linearity of co-evolution further, with the conclusion that it renders a science of embedded cognition to be of limited explanative power?

My bet would be on coming up with toolkit for identifying the situations in which co-evolution occurs within lmits, as distinct from cases when its non-linearity renders problems obsolete faster than the emergence of solutions: a set of systems co-involuting through a shared Body without Organs, with degrees of stability and relative velocities.

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Robert O'Toole : 08 Aug 2005 22:06 |  Tags:           |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

August 02, 2005

Research Notes: virtuality, speed, necessity and cognition

Follow-up to Research Notes: Multiplicity, co–involution, Being abstract but not generalized from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

I am now reading Andy Clark's book Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. This is a successful attempt to bring together strands in situated robotics (which I studied with Dave Cliff at Sussex), cognitive science, evolutionary and adaptive systems (from von Uexkull, also Deleuze and Guattari's inspiration), developmental psychology, and phenomenology.

The book contains many good observations and conjectures derived from all of these fields. But the guiding principle is that nature tends towards the simplest and most efficient solution. This is, in many cases, a devolved 'subsumption architecture' of the kind employed by the roboticist Rodney Brookes. In some cases however, a more complex solution emerges. An example of this may be simulations that act to provide "virtual feedback" within action loops:

…proprioceptive signals must travel back from bodily peripheries to the brain, and this takes time – too much time, in fact, for the signals to be used to generate very smooth reaching movements. To solve the problem, the brain may use a trick (widely used in industrial control systems) called motor emulation. p.23

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Robert O'Toole : 02 Aug 2005 11:14 |  Tags:                 |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

August 01, 2005

Discussion Primer: the new al–Qaeda

Follow-up to Discussion Primer: Understanding terror networks, asymmetric warfare from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

A response to Peter Taylor's BBC documentary.

Not much to say really, and not much of a discussion primer either. All I can say is "so what?". The journalism was conventional and unimaginative – looking for physical connections when only distant connections would suffice, and making suppositions based on fragments of evidence. He barely addressed the really important issue:

al-Qaeda and other new terrorist networks may well be quite different to the terrorist organisations of the past

The connection to organized crime was made, and should be explored a great deal more. But the strange motivations of the terrorists, the most important thing to understand, was barely mentioned. Interestingly, we were told that at least two of the suspects lived 'double lives' as both 'criminal playboys' and Jihadists – that is fascinating and highly significant. There are strange subcultures of violence, criminality, and male power behind this, but that doesn't quite fit with the Islamic conspiracy theory.

Sadly this documentary failed. We need journalists with imagination, capable of creating adequate concepts to match the innovations of the terrorists and the forces behind them.

This raises an interesting question about the purpose of TV documentaries. The BBC are wrong in thinking that even a good investigative journalist is capable of creating a solid and thorough case of evidence in such a complex situation as this. Too much detail is required, hence the high degree of supposition and grasping at connections. In reality it is so complicated and difficult that national governments, judiciaries and intelligence agencies struggle. Why then does the BBC think it can do the job?

I would argue that the role of TV documentary is to come up with alternative ways of seeing the world, examining the implications, and suggesting ways in which those theories might be tested. Unfortunately, TV journalists are either not brave enough or just not up to that challenge. It's easier to play the role of the detective.

Comments welcome.


: 01 Aug 2005 21:53 |  Tags:        |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

July 27, 2005

Research Notes: Method of transversality and the method of intuition

Follow-up to Research Notes: Multiplicity, co–involution, Being abstract but not generalized from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

And for my next trick: i'll be looking more deeply at the relationship between the methods of Bergson and of Deleuze and Guattari.

Firstly, transversality is the key feature of Deleuze and Guattari's method. I need to define this more precisely, and show how it differs from other methods (dialectical, hermeneutic, phenomenological);

Secondly, i'll write an effective explanation of Bergson's method.

Thirdly, the difference between the method of transversality and the method of intuition (KAP deals with this well in Germinal Life).

_

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Robert O'Toole : 27 Jul 2005 11:43 |  Tags:            |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

July 13, 2005

Research Notes: Multiplicity, co–involution, Being abstract but not generalized

Follow-up to Research Notes: Singularity/continuum, a multiplicitous event from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

More clarification of Deleuze's post-Kantian theory of multiplicitous singularities.

"They say: look at chaos, death and by implication life, right in the eyes, get to know each individual chaos, each death and each life on its own terms."

There's no need for a generalized chaos or passage into chaos (death) in this theory. Every passage into chaos is singular, belonging to an individual or perspective, but the specific chaosmos into which it moves (and from which it is generated) is shared by individuals, deteritorializing together with relative degrees of seperation and involution. The singularity, the perspective, is therefore multiple.

In The Fold Deleuze is concerned with a second dimension (level) to these sensii communis. A superfold that traverses across the individual passages into a shared chaos, formed by the non-linear inter-relations between individuals passing into and out of a shared chaosmos. Or to be more precise, there is an iterative series of levels, from pre-individual singularities, connected up transversally by individuals, and the individuals connected up in other ways such as a socius and capitalist axiomatics.

It could be said that an abstracted Being is shared by each level, and between the levels. This being the plane of consistency or immanence. Is this just their virtuality, their shared principle or movement?

_

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: 13 Jul 2005 08:04 |  Tags:              |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

July 12, 2005

Discussion Primer: Understanding terror networks, asymmetric warfare

Follow-up to Discussion Primer: War on terror from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

An interview with Lord King and an American whose name I missed on the Today programme (Radio 4) this morning demonstrated how there are in fact people outside of party politics with a more sophisticated understanding of the current situation.

Tom King has much experience of terrorism. He has a detailed and personal knowledge of Irish terrorism, having been Northern Ireland Secretary during some of the worst times. His response to the recent attacks on London is that of an informed and intelligent expert. The American interviewee seemed equally infiormed, and I think had held a senior post in the US government. Here's a list of some of the points that I think they made:

  • terrorist networks work in a very different way to conventional armies;
  • al-Qaeda and other new terrorist networks may well be quite different to the terrorist organisations of the past;
  • civil society is now so complex and so big that defending against terrorism using conventional approaches may be impossible (although of course not entirely futile);
  • Tom King stated that responding in the wrong way could in fact make the situation much worse (he cited internment in Nothern Ireland as such a mistake);
  • we need new concepts and models to describe this situation;
  • one such concept mentioned was 'asymmetric warfare', which I take to mean conflict between radically different types of force. (this is a useful but unimaginative definition).

The task then is to understand each side of the asmmetrical engagement, and then how the sides feed-off each other positively and negatively, how they learn from each other, and how they may form a symbiotic relationship locking each other into an ongoing engagement.


Robert O'Toole : 12 Jul 2005 09:12 |  Tags:       |  Comments (11) |  Report a problem

July 11, 2005

Research Notes: Artaud, the theatre and its Body without Organs

As a break from Deleuze and Guattari, and as input for a proposed research network on virtuality and performance, i've been reading the collection of essays by Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double. This contains some fascinating schizoanalysis of theatre and its Body without Organs, biological life. Here's some killer lines from the essay on Theatre and the Plague:

Above all we must agree that stage acting is a delirium like the plague, and is communicable. p.18
…conditions must be found to give birth to a spectacle that can fascinate the mind. It is not just art. p.18
The plague takes dormant images, latent disorder and suddenly carries them to the point of the most extereme gestures. Theatre also takes gestures and develops them to the limit. Just like the plague, it reforges the links between what does and does not exist in material nature. p.18
For theatre can only happen the moment the inconcievable really begins, where poetry taking place on stage, nourishes and superheats created symbols. p.18
Like the plague, theatre is a crisis resolved either by death or cure. The plague is a superior disease because it is an absolute crisis after which there is nothing left except death or drastic putrification. In the same way, theatre is a disease because it is the final balance that cannot be obtained without destruction. It urges the mind to delirium which intensifies its energy. p.22

: 11 Jul 2005 23:04 |  Tags:                 |  Comments (1) |  Report a problem

July 07, 2005

Discussion Primer: War on terror

Follow-up to Research Notes: Naive Deleuzianisms, the war on terror, the valorization of self–organizing systems from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

In response to today's attacks. The response from the politicians will be immediate, but potentially deeply flawed. Those flaws may make the situation much worse. These mistakes stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of the threat that is attacking us.

Following on from what I have previously written, we can see that:

  • it may be that al-Qaeda are not an 'organisation' in the traditional sense;
  • they may well be a loose confederation, network or even just a set of ideas (a meme);
  • each of these possibilities must be met with a radically different strategy;
  • for example, conventional wars are fought between organisations, with definite territories delimiting quantifiable victories and defeats, this may not apply to terrorist networks;
  • responding with a conventional military campaign against such a force may actually offer them easier targets, propoganda, recruits and most significantly a systematic and coordinated set of learning processes;
  • the tactic of trying to draw a terrorist organisation into a conventional campaign, through the destabilisation of a marked territory (as attempted by the US in Iraq), is a high risk, and likely to fail.

Robert O'Toole : 07 Jul 2005 13:41 |  Tags:       |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

July 04, 2005

Research Notes: Naive Deleuzianisms, the war on terror, the valorization of self–organizing systems

Follow-up to Research Notes: Fascism within networks: China and the internet from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

My reading of Germinal Life has reached the third chapter, with Keith's call for a temporary and critical 'suspension' of Deleuze and Guattari's attempted equation 'ethics = ethology'. This suspension opens them up to an awkward but necessary critique.

And at the same time, I have been thinking more in the style of Manuel De Landa, applying his method of 'non-linear' history to the analysis of extremist and terrorist bodies. I am considering their emergence from pre-individual singularities on the machinic phylum to individuated and efficient learning machines. This raises some interesting issues concerning naive readings of the schizoanalytic project.

Consider this: are the various armed groups in Iraq benefiting from the continued presence of the US in a way that a naive schizoanalysis would praise? There were clearly many disparate splinters formed from the explosion of the Sadam Hussein regime of hierarchies, each itself a pre-individual singularity. And in response to the crudely striated tactics of the US military, are these otherwise unconnected singularities finding common currency, points of convergence, catalysts for the creation of their own internal consistency? As with the Nazis, I would say this is likely.

It would seem that the ethology leads to an ethics in which al-Qaeda might be valorized. Clearly there is something wrong, something out-of-order with this. Perhaps it is the same imprecision and confusion of differences that leads to the problem described by Keith in Germinal Life:

the various 'becomings' that characterize 'evolution', and serve to make it nongenealogical and nonfiliative, cannot be treated as if they were all the same, so that, for example, we could move simply but far too quickly, from talking about the transversal movement of the 'C' virus that is connected to both baboon DNA and the DNA of certain domestic cats, so talking about the 'becoming-baboon in the cat', to talking about the becoming molecular-dog of a human being, as if they were of an equivalent order. p.188-189

De Landa's free use of 'abstract machines' made me nervous. But what principle can there be to guide us as to the required level of detail, of specificity?

The answer from Deleuze and Guattari, and which I think Keith is about to give in the next section, is that understanding each deterritorialization's relationship to its own specific Body without Organs, and its passage into the possible constitution of an abstract machine, is the way to understand the appropriateness of that abstract machine to the specific case.

_

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: 04 Jul 2005 22:55 |  Tags:                      |  Comments (6) |  Report a problem

June 23, 2005

Overman, creativity and beyond transcendental recognition

Follow-up to Ontology as recognized Being, or creativity as an old friend from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

"Deleuze seeks to undermine the idea of knowledge that is implied in the transcendental model of modern metaphysics, which, he argues, is a model and form of recognition (between self and world, or subject and object, and self and other." Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life p.89

…to a 'superior empiricism' of "something in the world forcing us to think" .

"The overman exceeds established philosophical modes of recognition and the reduction of becomings in the world to perceptual and affective cliches." (KAP p.89)

…referring back to Bergson's critique of natural perception

As i wrote earlier of the helper concept "creativity":

"Deleuze moves the focus away from recognizing what Is to the question of 'how can we create?'"

_

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Robert O'Toole : 23 Jun 2005 14:32 |  Tags:               |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

Deleuze, active memory, living germinally

Follow-up to Spirit and the virtuality of concepts and their personae from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

I'm now into the second chapter of Germinal Life, which turns its attention to Gilles Deleuze's early work Difference and Repetition. After a few difficult pages in which it is placed in relation to the a broad range of other thinkers (including interestingly Merleau-Ponty and Satre), this superb passage...

The aim of this new art of living is not to identify with the line, though madness and suicide always exist as a risk, since this would destroy all thinking and life. Rather, the task is to both 'cross the line' and make it endurable and workable; in short, this is the line of life cracked by death and concieved as germinal. The 'outside' is the line of life that links up random and arbitrary events in a creative mixture of chance and necessity. Ansell Pearson, 1999, p.85

…note the allusion to Jacques Monod's book…

A new thought of the outside, and a new way of living on the outside, involves drawing new figures of thought and mapping new diagrams, in short, an intensive and vital topology that folds the outside into the inside. The passion of the outside is the passion of germinal life, releasing the forces of life from entropic containment and opening them up for a time to come. ibid p.85

Or as I previously wrote, the virtual of active memory works on the singularity so that a "trait can be extracted, picked up and carried onwards….traits that give a sense of the possible, a future, a continuity, a return".
_

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Robert O'Toole : 23 Jun 2005 08:26 |  Tags:                 |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

June 21, 2005

Research Notes: Fascism within networks: China and the internet

I have just read and greatly enjoyed Manuel De Landa's A Thousand Years of Non-linear History. In fact, i'm so excited by its approach to creating dynamical models of the world, that i'm using it all the time with a wide range of applications. De Landa takes the ethological approach of Deleuze and Guattari, considering how stratified bodies (organic and inorganic) are built up and eroded by the emergent and self-organising expression of network effects (including geological, biological, social and economic netwoks). So here's a few conjectures based on this...

The Nazi's emerged through a meshwork of radical individuals on the periphery of a range of disciplines: mystical, military, medical, commercial, beaurocratic, artistic and the media. Their individual ideas were not particularly innovative, being mostly concerned with the intensification and purification of existing processes. However, it was their intense and fundamental will to application regardless of cost that marked them out in an otherwise consolidating and cautious climate. The meshwork of these diverse forces was consequently drawn together by the combination of their shared peripheral status along and a powerful belief in the necessity (ethical) and certainty (metaphysical, historical) of the foundation of a new world from the traits (in need of purification and authentication) that they could see all around.

Such peripheral forces exist within any large and relatively homogeneous body of individuals. They are the product of its genetic drift, deviations necessary for the existence of adaptive potential. In some cases, selection and replication mechanisms may form that act to single out, purify and intensify traits within the ceaseless drift. And it is not unusual for a small set of such deviations from sometimes very different bodies to become associated through their co-identification as 'outsiders', despite the fact that they may be concerned with quite different traits. An increase in the mobility of such diverse radical agents is often a catalyst for this co-identification. This was certainly a factor in the emergence of the Nazis, with the increase of mobility and resulting inter-connectivity during and following WWI.

But they don't often grow into the kind of wildly abberant monster that was the Nazis. What then might have been the extra condition that catalysed the transformation of the Nazis from fringe to global threat? One way of answering this would be to look at the 'network effects' internal to the Nazi meshwork. De Landa discusses several 'abstract machines' that exploit network effects in different ways. For example, the 'group and grid' model proposed by the anthropologist Mary Douglas. The 'grid' refers to organisations that maintain their identity through an intensity of centralized regulation (typically propogated through hierarchies). The 'group' on the other hand, operates through an intensity of group allegiance (typically propogted through memes, propaganda etc). Most organisations exist with a mix of both group and grid. However, at the extremes, there are some groups that are highly grid structured, having little opportunity to propogate memes (due to external controls). And there are other organisations that have no grid, and propogate via indirect means (memes). We can take this a step further by arguing that any organisation that is able to master all of the combinations, and switch between them as required, will be able to maintain its consistency regardless of external controls.

My conjecture is that the Nazis crystallized around the collapse of a state hierarchy. As the hierarchy collapsed and became less rigid and certain, access to key elements of its operative functions opened up. In response, the Nazis occupied positions of power within the fragmenting hierarchies, and thus formed their own internal grid based hierarchies from them. This resulted in 'immune responses' from the grided hieracrchies of the official organisations that they parasitised, which responded by attacking the emergent grid of the Nazis, who in turn were forced to return to their meme based 'group' roots, until they were again able to consolidate their control of (or just replace) the state hierarchies. This symbiotic relationship continued throughout the 1930's, with the Nazi party gaining increased mastery of the trick of switching modes of operation.

In a very real sense, the Nazis were subjected to a learning process as they were forced between each mode of operation. Perhaps the lesson that should be learnt from this is:

During a time of rapid change and collapsing hierarchies, the auto-immune response of the state to the evolution of networks may actually provide the ideal learning experience for extremist organisations.

It may well be that in response to the expansion of the internet, capitalism and the release of its sedentary populations, China is providing just such a learning experience for a new generation of extremists.

_

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: 21 Jun 2005 08:20 |  Tags:                    |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

The ethical character of Bergson's method of intuition

De Landa's A Thousand Years of Non-linear History left me with a sense that Deleuze and Guattari have the most effective and exciting practical approach to creating active and dynamical models of the world. But that book is one of examples underpinned with a few key concepts. It aims to show how far those concepts can be taken. I suspect that it intentionally leaves unsatisfied philosophical challeneges. A niche that Keith Ansell Pearson's Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze fills more than adequately. Here's my thoughts on reading the first chapter.

The 'ethical' character of this method of philosophy resides, therefore, in the cultivation of a 'sympathetic communication' that it seeks to establish between the human and the rest of living matter. Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life, 1999, p.33

Keith's emphasis on the 'ethical' dimension of Bergson's method of intuition is very significant (and he notes, few others have made this link). The significance for me follows from the idea that the ethical dimension requires a consideration of something beyond any singular act or entity (as the sufficient reason of the act), but which does not assume any kind of totality or finality. I'm not usually interested in talk of Being (with a capital 'B'), although it is often more effective than counting sheep. But there is something in this angle on it that has made me take it much more seriously. And that something is in the negative ethical implications of thinking becoming without Being.

The argument seems to demonstrate how a concept of Being is an essential precursor to an encounter with duration, the key concept invented by Bergson. These encounters with duration connect us with the temporal problematics that (it is claimed) drives all activity and differentiation: real time or the asymmetrical synthesis of the sensible – that is, the sufficient reason behind the richness of the world.

Importantly, the encounter with duration is not singular and purely metaphysical, to be done in one philosophical-historic-eschatological event (it's not Hegel). Rather it is a pedagogical method that must be re-applied, with the aim of leading us away from conceptual confusions ('badly analyzed composites'), along lines that differentiate but at the same time follow virtual tendencies, to an understanding and acceptance of specific differences in kind – for example, to apprehend historical singularities (as De Landa does so brilliantly).

Even more importantly, we should recognize the active nature of this method. It takes us away from a passive relation between a subject and an object. It is an act of perception, intelligence and consciousness, but one that is always an active operation on and in the world. Keith provides a great sample on this from Bergson:

to percieve consists in condensing enourmous periods of an infinitely diluted existence into a few more differentiated moments of an intenser life, and in this summing up a very long history. To percieve means to immobilize Matter and Memory p.208 cited in _Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life, 1999, p.34

The method of intuition is therefore both a means of leading us to a comprehension of differences in kind and at the same time through its immanence to the world in which it perceives, actively creates new differences in kind. It is a method that places thought absolutely in the world. We should always remember that the return of thought and philosophy [in]to the world is really what Deleuzianisms (or neo-Bergsonisms) are about

But this then raises the big question: why philosophy? – why this tendency towards conceptual activity and the apprehension of differences in kind? – wht this method of intuition? The answer to this varies slightly but importantly between Bergson and Deleuze (but the principle is the same). Philosophy is the perception of nature, or nature’s own perception (later Deleuze will see perception as a property existing beyond the human). Differentiation is never a simple or ontologically foundational act, but rather is already complex. How the world differs from itself is not reducible to a mechanism or dialectic. In each case the actual mode of its differentiation is that which is indeterminate in its differentiation (the radical difference). If it were otherwise, nature would never differ from itself. There could be no asymmetry, no drive to overcome and reconnect, no real time, no elan vital, no life. The indeterminacy introduced by this radical difference is essential:

The crucial element that Bergson wishes to grant to life is not a mysterious force but rather a principle of 'indetermination'. It is this indetermination, and with it the capacity for novel adaption, that he sees as being 'engrafted' onto the necessity of physical forces, so as making possible a 'creative', as opposed to a purely mechanistic or deterministic, evolution. ibid p.48

But at this point we risk losing any connecting principle between the differentiations. Does radical difference leave us with an absolute becoming? In what sense is there anything to differentiate from? The world has lost itself, cannot perceive itself, is inert and lifeless. In Bergson’s terms, the elan vital is gone. Saving us from this undifferentiated becoming, we have the ‘ethical’ turn. It is an ethics that seeks to posit some principle of reconnection beyond the differentiation. Some exchange and interlocking between the differences. Some expression that carries content across between the two differentiated worlds. A principle assumed in both sides (but not itself outside of the world) that acts as a virtuality in which the differentiation is played out: a Being that they assume.

The important point to realise is that it is on the virtual plane that unification is to be sought. The 'whole' is 'pure virtuality'. Moreover, differentiation is only an actualization to the extent that it preseupposes a unity, which is the primordial virtual totality that differentiates itself according to lines of divergence but which still subsists in its unity and totality in each line. ibid p.67

For me this is where Being gets interesting: being virtual. For a virtuality always has a technics, the coding and decoding mechanisms of intelligence. As Keith indicates, a technology is the solution to indeterminacy, a virtuality that operates in parallel to real time. At this point technology, ethics, philosophy and metaphysics conjoin. And most importantly for me, creativity is shown to be underpinned with technology.

The next question is this: to what extent is this virtuality contained within and maintainable by an organism, an internally differentiating germ? And to what extent is it always reliant upon a third term, an externally constituted and relatively autonomus viral plane cutting transversally across? Both are true to an extent in different specific situations. Here Deleuze discovers an ethology of such types of differentiation: abstract machines. From an ethics to an ethology.

And I will coninue reading Germinal Life.

_

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Robert O'Toole : 21 Jun 2005 06:44 |  Tags:                              |  Comments (2) |  Report a problem

June 01, 2005

Deleuze's abuse of the history of philosophy

With regards to his books on key conceptual personae such as Leibniz, Deleuze was not an archaeologist in the style of Foucault. There is no careful uncovering of strata. It is more like excavating with a JCB. But that doesn't matter, the creation of good concepts is more important.

The important thing is to create concepts with 'precision'. Not many achieve that aim, especially in this field. Papers on Deleuze tend to the extremes of either grand impressionism on the one hand, and vacuous taxonomic pedantry on the other. Perhaps that could be said of much that passes as philosophy. So when writing on Deleuze, it is important to understand exactly what is meant when he calls for precision in philosophy and in writing about the history of philosophy.

The precision of a concept is defined by its wealth of connections, by the work that it does in relation to the plane external to the concept, the plane in which it is constituted. Deleuze befriends the conceptual personae of Leibniz, Spinoza and others primarily with the aim of stealing their concepts into a plane that is different to those in which they were born. Faithful authenticity is never really the aim. The precision to which Deleuze aspires is not that of the authentic reading, of the recreation of long dead philosophical problems and their concepts. If it were, then perhaps all of those books about the history of philosophy would simply act as a long drawn out answer to the question "what is a concept?". In fact when he does finally address that question he couldn't be more flippant with his reading of Descartes.

Deleuze knew from that start that reconstituting concepts on a plane that no longer exists and no longer does any work only results in vacuity. Even the most authentic reading lacks precision. He was not an archaeologist in the style of Foucault, there is no careful uncovering of strata. This is more like excavating tombs with a JCB. Seeking and reanimating concepts that have been aborted by the history of philosophy is what he does best. But his Leibniz and Spinoza are Frankensteins. Picture this: Leibniz with an arm amputated from Thom, a leg stitched on from Cache, Koch's curve for a back, and Klee's hands. What a monster. Are we supposed to laugh at it? Or be terrified?

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: 01 Jun 2005 04:52 |  Tags:          |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem