All 46 entries tagged Philosophy Research

Research notes in philosophy, from my current PhD work.

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February 08, 2005

Figural empty concepts

Follow-up to Methodology – what is a concept? what is philosophy? from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

And what happens when the extent of a concept is passed but something attempts to extend it, even when it no longer engages, no longer has intension? It becomes figural, an empty concept valued only for its anamnesis, its capability to invoke the ghost like presence of a context long gone.

Is the concept of creativity figural? What is its extent? In discussions of artificial intelligence for example, does its use have any intension, or is it merely their to re-invoke a ghostly apparition of some entirely human characteristic posited within machines, so as to hype their significance?


Robert O'Toole : 08 Feb 2005 21:47 |  Tags:       |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

Methodology – what is a concept? what is philosophy?

What difference does the concept make? What becomes inevitable when the concept is available? And further, what becomes inevitable when the concept is used? (which is not the same question). A concept is not understood by its potential to exist or not, but rather by what it makes inevitable, what it determines. The choices are components in the concept, but the scope of those choices is already determined as the intension of the concept.

In considering a concept, consider the life of the concept – its sustainability. Can the concept stand on its own, permanently? Or does it inevitably carry the seeds of its own destruction, its own subjugation to a higher concept, of which it is only a component? For example, the way in which a badly analyzed concept of 'free speech' results in a babble of opinion. If what the concept of 'free speech' makes inevitable is a meaningless babble, then it is actually just a component in the 'higher' concept, meaningless babble.

The extension of a concept – its portability. This makes a concept more than just a raw event. What is the limit of a concept's extension? – the point at which it becomes a component? No, it is the point at which it fails to engage at all, and leaves a void into which a search for a new concept becomes necessary?

The 'over' of Nietzsche's 'overman' does not indicate that man as a concept becomes subservient to a new order, for example a component in the National Socialist program. Rather it indicates the point at which the extension of the concept of man is reached, and at which point it no longer engages. A new concept must be found.

The tasks of philosophy:

  1. finding the concept, going beyond the components to the absolute field that holds them together, the sustainable concept;
  2. testing the extension of the concept;
  3. forming new concepts when the extension of a concept is surpassed.

And when we pass through the void, are there special concepts that help us to generate new concepts? Is the concept of creativity one of those concepts?


Robert O'Toole : 08 Feb 2005 21:28 |  Tags:              |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

February 01, 2005

The attendant figure, deterrritorialization, sensus communis

The figure, as a site of habitual sensation, simultaneously dissipates into a chaosmic and unknowable field, whilst defining itself through its engineering agency from that field, which in this return movement stands as a material structure, habitat or frame. The field, being dense with connections, is that space in which the slightest of movements has a massive and irreversible effect. Habit or the organ has no definite sense in the field, has no role in reproduction, hence the necessity to become a 'body without organs' when passing into the field – zero intensity, zero effect, zero feedback, guaranteeing that a return from the field to the figure in repetition, but renewed from the outside.

But how does one reach zero intensity? – how to pass through chaos and back, surviving in some recognisable form? – how do you make yourself such a body without organs? On fleeing from the habitat, from the aparatus of capture, they say that it is necessary to pick-up in an itinerent fashion "weapons" with which to encounter chaos. The weapon is, in fact, that which draws the diagram: some other thing deterritorializing at the same time against which marks can be cut: the painters brush and colours. As they say, 'you never deterritorialize alone'. The friend of the painter is the canvas, brush, colour, texture. And the attendant figure? As Deleuze says of Bacon, not an observer, a counter-point, but a figurative companion standing as a diagram in the deterritorialization through chaos and back. A sensus communis even.


Robert O'Toole : 01 Feb 2005 23:41 |  Tags:                    |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

January 20, 2005

Zone of indiscernibility between philosophy, art and science

Follow-up to Opinion from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari seem to argue for a strong division between philosophy, art and science. This could be a reaction to criticism of their earlier collaborations. But do they only go so far as to say that the different disciplines (machinic phyla) have different aims and different methods, whilst still maintaining that they do pass through chaosmosis together, sharing zones of indiscernibility? That would be more in keeping with their earlier work. And what is the nature of this transversality? Just opinion? Or are there more sophisticated (viral, germinal) mechanisms at work?

Robert O'Toole : 20 Jan 2005 07:47 |  Tags:           |  Comments (1) |  Report a problem

January 16, 2005

Free expression – a misconception

A misconception of a misconception:

"A third misconception is that creativity is to do with free expression. This is partly why there's such concern about creativity in education." Out Of Our Minds: Learning To Be Creative, Ken Robinson, Capstone 2001, p.112

Of course Ken is right to argue that creative activity necessarily involves more than just wild and unguided behaviour. Creativity requires a discipline, some kind of order. However, in placing such disciplined creativity in opposition to 'free expression' a powerful connection is missed.

Firstly, we could say that creativity and freedom are dependent upon each other. This follows from considering that any activity that tends towards the stereotypical and away from difference is in no way free, being determined by the stereotype. And if we then consider that creativity always involves such differentiation, we could argue that: to be creative is to differentiate, to differentiate is to be free. Similarly, there is no freedom in a speech that simply applies stereotypes and secondhand opinions.

Secondly, we could argue that all expression requires some form of discipline, order, organisation: a language of expression, or the 'material' of expression. And therefore, all 'free expression' is ordered and disciplined to a varying extent.

From these arguments we can conclude that creativity must always be in some way a free expression, a differentiation that applies a discipline to break out of some stereotypical behaviour.

Going one step further, we could consider if a unified and strongly deterministic discipline, one that is unaltered by its application, is ever capable of producing anything new? If that is the case, then free expression is a special form of expression in which the tools, the material or language of the expression, and the potential of those tools, is somehow extendable and modifiable. Perhaps being modified by the act of expression in which they are applied: a non-linearity in expression.

Now consider again the fear of 'free expression' that Ken talks of. What real fear does it mask? A fear of chaos? Or rather the fear that a cherished discipline will become modified? A fear that a toolset will be developed independently of its stereotypical application?

Is it then the case that this simplistic concept, deployed in the campaign against creativity in education, is a parody-concept designed to lead us away from more sophisticated, powerful and essential concepts of freedom, expression, creativity and intelligence? For readers of Deleuze and Guattari this will be a familiar ploy, they repeatedly identify concepts that are designed to parody complexity, creativity, desire and chaosmosis. The parody is always the same: portraying them as an uninhibited and undifferentiated sublime.


: 16 Jan 2005 10:52 |  Tags:             |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

November 27, 2004

The engineering in science, the experimentation in philosophy and art

Writing about an entry you don't have permission to view

"Experimental method does sometimes manipulate things" – no, it always manipulates things. Tell me of an experiment that doesn't involve the manipulation of a variable and the recording of the effect of that manipulation. Even in the case of experiments that seek to be purely the observation of 'natural events', those events are manipulated such that variables may be isolated and their relationships, as events occur, quantified. So every form of experiment is engineered, constructed, manufactured. And for every experiment, there is possibly an alternative configuration, a different engineering solution.

"Some of the most famous experiments in modern physics are gedankenexperiment – thought experiments – that don't actually require any prodding of stuff at all." – it depends on what you think that stuff is. A thought experiment considers a possible world in which variable A is somehow related to variable B. Some mechanism is posited that explains how the variables interact. Again the whole thing is engineered, this time as a simulated set of variables and functives. However, those simulated objects must still be constituted as mathematical, computational or conceptual objects so that they may be manipulated. For the thought experiment to have any 'scientific validity' that engineering must hold up to scrutiny, must work, in the same way as any engineered structure must work.

And here's the final twist: are physical experiments and scientific thought experiments different in kind, or only by degree? In the former case, a model is applied to the physical world in order to see if something is missing or inaccurate. The model predicts what will happen. Even when we are just seeking to gather empirical data, we apply a model, assuming that the things that we are measuring are the things that we think them to be and not some figment of our imagination (consider if the sense data that we are tracking turns out not to belong to the object that we assume it to be part of, and in fact is just there by coincidence). In the case of thought experiments, we are again looking to see if the relationships that we posit can be seen to necessarily result in the effect that we posit as the result of the interactions – or is there something missing from our model? Perhaps the only difference between scientific thought experiments, which I am calling simulations, and physical experiments, is that the former deals with a restricted and less complex environment.

Notice the shift of terminology there, from talking of scientific thought experiments to referring to them as simulations. At the moment i'm reading the section of What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari) that deals with the difference between science and philosophy. Science we are told is concerned with functions and variable. Philosophy is the realm of concepts, which are quite different. I'm still working on this, but it seems that the key difference is that functions and variables represent reversibles, and concepts are irreversible. Anyhow, D&G seem to reserve the term 'thought experiment' for a mode of experimentation that works with concepts, and is therefore the domain of philosophy. This implies that they see a commonality between experimentation in science (be it physical or simulated) and experimentation in philosophy (with concepts):

To be sure, there is as much experimentation in the form of thought experiment in philosophy as there is in science, and being close to chaos, the experience can be overwhelming in both. What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 127

The different modes of experimentation are defined by their relationship with chaos. In the case of philosophy, the aim is to pass through chaos such that an impossible world is actualised, a formerly inconcievable state is reached. In the case of science, experimentation posits a set of possible states that can be interchanged for each other through the operation of a function along variables. The model opens itself to chaos through its application, and on the discovery of missing elements, assimilates them back into the model as further possibilities, as further variables. In this way science progresses, whereas philosophy differentiates.

But in reality science and philosophy are mixed. Scientific models can suddenly breakdown upon their engagement with chaos. And creation (or differentiation, its pseudonymn in D&G) then occurs:

But there is also as much creation in science as there is in philosophy or the arts. ibid p.127

The tendency of science, it could be said, is to sometimes creatively fictionalise the sense of progression by reinventing its model in a new but familiar form. Philosophy, of course, also suffers from this delusion, and must itself be more prepared to abandon the concept of progress. Art, the third of the trinity of disciplines, suffers from a related delusion, in this case the idea that it proceeds without experimentation, simply through a sensus communis of good taste experienced as genius:

There is no creation without experiment. ibid p.127

Robert O'Toole : 27 Nov 2004 21:22 |  Tags:             |  Comments (3) |  Report a problem

November 15, 2004

PhD proposal submitted

I have finally submitted a PhD proposal:

  • To investigate the method outlined by Deleuze and Guattari, most explicitly in What is Philosophy? and implicitly in earlier works.
  • An examination, as key to that definition of thinking, of immanence, virtuality, actuality, chaos, and the double nature of the event and of time.
  • To consider the role of technology and technological change in this method, examining how concepts form, inhabit, and overcome the tools through which they are expressed.
  • To apply the method to an increasingly powerful figure/concept: creativity.
  • Considering the syntagmatic pathway of the concept of creativity, both within key philosophical thinkers (including Bergson and Whitehead), within the arts (the debate between Klee and Kandinsky, and the works of Cezanne, Van Gogh, Bacon, Burrows and other contemporary artists), and within science (including artificial intelligence, computing, cognitive science, evolutionary biology – Germinal Life, complexity – Prigogene & Stengers).
  • Considering the power and diversity of concepts of creativity in educational and cultural policy (Ken Robinson, All Our Futures).
  • To identify the role of creativity in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, its unstated presence (Whitehead), and its sudden re-emergence in What is Philosophy?
  • To question whether creativity is itself a transcendent figure in their works.
  • To consider if a developed concept of creativity can be used to connect a wider range of communities and projects with Deleuze and Guattari, how this relates to current technological change, and how it can be used to guide it, with specific consideration of creative technologies in the academic process, organisational theory (Boisot), and within psychotherapeutic practice (Guattari, Le Borde).

The project will itself be undertaken with the aid of technologies that support conceptual development, writing and 'creativity'. The experience of using these tools will feed directly into the subject matter if the project. It will also be used for refining them and identifying further requirements in the development of tools to support the academic and philosophic process, and into the subject matter of the project itself. Particular emphasis will be placed upon examining the relationship between technologies that employ methods of semantic cartography and the process of conceptual development identified by Deleuze and Guattari.


Robert O'Toole : 15 Nov 2004 21:02 |  Tags:    |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

November 13, 2004

Forms and relations in virtuality and actuality

Follow-up to Actual from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

This seems to be the key concept that needs working on…

An actual pathway (becoming) is a form. In virtuality all possible (in relation to the past?) forms are considered. A form is as much its relation/consideration of other forms, of incompossible and compossible.

Aion, chronos, reversibility, irreversibility and the event should make some sense of this.


Robert O'Toole : 13 Nov 2004 07:19 |  Tags:        |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

November 07, 2004

Excellent David Burrows exhibition at the Mead – New Life

Writing about web page http://www.warwickartscentre.co.uk/?page=mead.html

It is rare for an artist to produce a work that is both stunning visually, having effect beyond the visual, and philosophically fascinating. In his exhibition New Life, currently installed in the Mead Gallery at the University of Warwick (ends 4th December 2004), Dave Burrows has done just that.

The artwork is stunning:

Firstly, what does this exhibition feel like? Stepping inside the large white room, taking up half of the Mead's extensive gallery space, you are quickly drawn past a manifesto-like statement of propositions and into a three dimensional, immersive work that explodes space and compresses time. Across the room debris is strewn, both in concentrations around remnants of building, and between the concentrations. You are in what appears to be a children's bedroom, filled with brightly coloured almost familiar items: flip-flops, toys etc. Between the concentrations, and extending out to the edges of the exhibition, fragments and dense layers of grey crunchy dust (as if from things or persons vapourised) are everywhere. You have to walk through the work itself to see it. You have to enter its moment. Illustrations of the aftermath hang on the walls, including opposing images of a girl and a boy. They act to extend the work out beyond the walls of the gallery. It is spatially a vast and unbounded work.

And philosophically powerful:

We are familiar with, conditioned to, artworks that are spatially constrained. Containment is a powerful mechanism in painting, as in Francis Bacon, who as Deleuze says, confines his subjects spatially (the pope in his chair). But this work seems, at first, to be uconcerned with spatial limits. There are concentrations within it, repetitions and rhythms. There is an entire cartography of intensity. But it seems more unbounded than any painting. We sense that the repetitions could extend out infinitely: the same moment but different again and again.

Narrative usually acts within a work to extend it temporally. A common rule of art is: spatially limited, temporally extended. Landscape is often used to fade out the containment to infinity. But the problem has always been that definition decreases as the distance increases. David Burrows has an interest in mirrors, and the way in which they can, if used correctly, break out of containment without a loss of detail. Perhaps the paintings at the boundary of this work are really mirrors? It certainly feels more extensive than any painting. This combines with repetition to extend the work to infinity. If there is no spatial containment, can there be narrative?

On wandering around the room I was for some time searching for narrative, in fact searching for variables that I could manipulate to play back some kind of narrative implicit in the representation of this explosive event, analysing the phenomenon as if it were the result of some kind of nuclear physics. Variables and functives like those in a scientific experiment: reversible. This is saying something about the limitations of science, and how art deals with the pure event, the event of total loss. There is, fundamentally no "external framing or exoreference" which, as Deleuze and Guattari claim (What Is Philosophy? p.119) is necessary for science. Instead there is the presence of the irreversible Chronos as opposed to the reversible Aion (Deleuze, Logic Of Sense, p.77). Anyhow, David seems to have played upon this desire for narrative sense. Slogans that could lead to some story are graffitied in random locations. The bodies of the children are suggestive of some kind of sick story. But I never got the story. Never grasped the variables. Never worked out how to replay the event. It is, as I think David said in his recent talk at the Mead, an irreversible event (thermodynamics). As described by Deleuze…

Chronos is the present which alone exists. It makes of the past and future its two oriented dimensions, so that one goes always from the past to the future… Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 77

…just the aftermath. Hardly identifiable to discourse. No mythology. The familiarity of the artefacts, and the familialism of the children, is just there to tease us. There are no symbolic figures to transcend this event, its got no papa-mommy (Becket via Deleuze), other than the presence of the event itself: immanent.

But there is more. Two concentratory dispositifs hang from the ceiling of the event. Yet again they reverse the normal artistic relationship between time and space. In this case space is confined, while time is opened out. They pass simulateously into its future and reach back into its past. Mobiles suspending familiar objects, either sucked up in the explosion or collapsing as debris. This is the second dimension of the event, of the moment. An indeterminacy. A dice throw…

Aion is the past-future, which in an infinite subdivision of the abstract moment endlessly decomposes itself in both directions at once and forever sidesteps the present. Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 77

…the 'time of the artist' as David Burrows called it. The determinacy of the exhibition, with even the movement of the audience within it making little difference, is punctuated by the hand of the artist holding the moment in these two trajectories. And they draw you in to examine the objects in their suspended animation. You begin to notice the constructedness of the objects, the craft in them, the time of their assemblage. And then are opened out onto a second, intersecting line of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, a second line of time/space containments and explosions folded onto the first. A double event.


Robert O'Toole : 07 Nov 2004 19:59 |  Tags:                    |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

November 06, 2004

Note on creativity

Follow-up to Deleuze and Guattari on the (relative) superiority of English Imperialism from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

I think that this is one of the few and most interesting examples of Deleuze and Guattari using the term 'creativity':

We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present. (What Is Philosophy? p.108)
Art and philosophy converge at this point: the constitution of an earth and a people that are lacking as the correlate of creation.

Robert O'Toole : 06 Nov 2004 07:43 |  Tags:            |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

PhD proposal extended

Follow-up to The power of the migrant versus the authority of Heidegger and the Volk–State from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

So now I have to include something about travel-writing, english imperialism, migration, and the post-colonial world.

Robert O'Toole : 06 Nov 2004 06:43 |  Tags:    |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

The power of the migrant versus the authority of Heidegger and the Volk–State

Follow-up to The ethics of rivalry, friendship and the creation of concepts in Ancient Greece from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

Deleuze and Guattari on Heidegger's membership of the Nazi party:

Perhaps this strict professor was madder than he seemed. He got the wrong people, earth and blood. For the race summoned forth by art or philosophy is not the one that claims to be pure but rather an oppressed, bastard, lower, anarchical, nomadic and iremediably minor race – the very ones that Kant excluded from the paths of the new Critique. Artaud said: to write for the illiterate – to speak for the aphasic, to think for the acephalous. (What is Philosophy? p.109)

Geophilosophy then is about the engagement with minor races, or better (to avoid the mistakes of the English) the engagement between minor races: at the edge of understanding, in discomfort. And then to take that a step further, which is the point of so much literature that comes out of this geophilosophical deterritorialization, to make oneself, ones body, path, existence, a composition of such minor races, minor species:

I looked at myself in the same light, as a monkey given my life to play with, prodding it, trying to stretch it into different shapes, dropping it and picking it up again, suspecting always that it must have some use and meaning, tantalized and frustrated by it but always unable to make any sense of it. Ted Simon, Jupiter's Travels

Travel writing, deterritorialization, creativity and philosophy.


Robert O'Toole : 06 Nov 2004 06:41 |  Tags:            |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

The ethics of rivalry, friendship and the creation of concepts in Ancient Greece

We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present. (What Is Philosophy? p.108)

Ecstasy of communication = that which promises absolute deterritorialization, but in fact delivers only immediate reterritorialization on the concept of communication (pure exchage) itself. Deleuze and Guattari's criticism of Habermas and idea of founding an ethics on communicative action.

Instead they argue that the creation of concepts only occurrs when communication breaks down within a pre-constituted milieu. The impoprtance of the Greek sense of philosophical rivalry is precisely that. Friends who can misunderstand, or who have to forge a new concept to achieve an understanding, who necessarily have to philosophize because of their relative difference. The new concept makes an irreversible difference, an absolute deterritorialization, but the friends-rivals must move towards it in their own way. This act of mutual but differentiated moving-towards, this relative deterritorialization, also acts to define the rivals to each other more clearly. They understand the work that each must do to achieve the agreement on the new concept. It is in the work of that relative deterritorialization on the creation that Deleuze and Guattari find an ethic of friendship-rivalry.

And we should remember that this ethic emerged to serve diplomacy, international relations, a rhizomatic maritime people engaged with complex engagement with the East: the Greek people.


Robert O'Toole : 06 Nov 2004 06:28 |  Tags:                 |  Comments (3) |  Report a problem

Deleuze and Guattari on the (relative) superiority of English Imperialism

Follow-up to Migration and geophilosophy from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present. (What Is Philosophy? p.108)

In consumer capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari claim, the milieu of the Greeks, the relative deterritorialization of concepts, is impossible. Philosophy is impossible. The firgures of communication, of an ecstacy of communication as Baudrillard described, repeat a single concept, consumer acquisition. No two incommensurable concepts are brought together in a state of relative deterritorialization. There is no resistance. Everything is immediately deterritorialized absolutely (the acquisition claims to make all the difference), and just as quickly reterritorialized (the acquisition makes no difference, follows the same familar order).

There is a diifferent English capitalism, they claim. In the chapter on Geophilosophy, they describe the real drive behind the English imperialism, as something by which neither the Germans nor the French were motivated. Not just a desire to be Greek (as in Heidegger) but more importantly:

…the English are precisely those nomads who treat the plane of immanance as a movable and moving ground, a field of radical experience, an archipelegian world where they are happy to pitch their tents from island to island and over the sea. The English nomadize over the old Greek earth, broken up, fractalized, and extended to the universe…a concept is acquired by pitching one's tent, by inhabiting it, by contracting a habit. (p.105)

English philosophy then is a curious form of travel writing, of travelling along with the great heroes of the Empire (what a misnomer): T.E. Lawrence and Alexander the Great.

And the point at which English Imperialism becomes violent, imposing, extending a State, is at that point at which its subjugated people's pack up their own tents and seek to move on, move away from the romantic ideal: Lawrence being appalled by the Arab desire for Rolls-Royce rather than camel, for their own Capital as much as the oasis:

Europeanization does not constitute a becoming but merely the history of capitalism, which prevents the becoming of subjected peoples. (p. 108)

It just isn't cricket anymore.


Robert O'Toole : 06 Nov 2004 06:13 |  Tags:              |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

November 03, 2004

Migration and geophilosophy

Follow-up to Ted Simon and the art of deterritorialization from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

Two perspectives on migration and deterritorialization, the recieving milieu and the migrant…

…philosophy was something Greek – although brought by immigrants. The birth of philosophy required an encounter between the Greek milieu and the plane of immanance of thought. It required the conjunction of two very different movements of deterritorialization, the relative and the absolute, the first already at work in immanence. Absolute deterritorialization on the plane of thought had to be aligned or directly connected with the relative deterritorialization of Greek society. Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?, p.93
I looked at myself in the same light, as a monkey given my life to play with, prodding it, trying to stretch it into different shapes, dropping it and picking it up again, suspecting always that it must have some use and meaning, tantalized and frustrated by it but always unable to make any sense of it. Ted Simon, Jupiter's Travels

Robert O'Toole : 03 Nov 2004 07:34 |  Tags:              |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem