Personal Knowledge, Preface and Chapter 1

 

Michael Polanyi (2005 [1958/1962]) Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Routledge, London.

Summary of Preface

Michael Polanyi [aka “the other Polanyi”] states that his book is “primarily an enquiry into the nature and justification of scientific knowledge” (iv). He rejects the “ideal of scientific detachment” which has had a “destructive influence,” particularly in certain sciences, and seeks to “establish an alternative ideal of knowledge, quite generally.” “Personal knowledge,” the title of the book, might seem contradictory, as aiming at both the particular and subjective, and the objective and universal; but this will be resolved by “modifying the conception of knowing.”

He will build off Gestalt psychology, despite the fact that scientists “have run away from the philosophic implications of gestalt.”

Skilful knowing and doing is performed by subordinating a set of particulars, as clues or tools, to the shaping of a skilful achievement, whether practical or theoretical. We may then be said to become ‘subsidiarily aware’ of these particulars within our ‘focal awareness’ of the coherent entity that we achieve. Clues and tools are things used as such and not observed in themselves. They are made to function as extensions of our bodily equipment and this involves a certain change of our own being. Acts of comprehension are to this extent irreversible, and also non-critical. For we cannot possess any fixed framework within which the re-shaping of our hitherto fixed framework could be critically tested.

The “personal knowledge” gained through such participation with the world is not merely “subjective,” it is both personal and objective:

Comprehension is neither an arbitrary act nor a passive experience, but a responsible act claiming universal validity. Such knowing is indeed objective in the sense of establishing contact with a hidden reality; a contact that is defined as the condition for anticipating an indeterminate range of yet unknown (and perhaps yet inconceivable) true implications.

In addition to cut-off subjectivity, P also wants to challenge the idea of abstract, detached objectivity:

into every act of knowing there enters a passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known, and that this coefficient is no mere imperfection but a vital component of his knowledge. (v)

Part One: The Art of Knowing

Summary of Chapter 1: Objectivity

Polanyi starts off by asking, what is the lesson of the Copernican revolution? The standard answer is that the lesson is basically that we (humans) are not the center of the universe, and need to understand our actual, puny place in it.

What precisely does this mean? In a full ‘main feature’ film, recapitulating faithfully the complete history of the universe, the rise of human beings from the first beginnings of man to the achievements of the twentieth century would flash by in a single second. Alternatively, if we decided to examine the universe objectively in the sense of paying equal attention to portions of equal mass, this would result in a lifelong preoccupation with interstellar dust, relieved only at brief intervals by a survey of incandescent masses of hydrogen—not in a thousand million lifetimes would the turn come to give man even a second’s notice.

However, P replies, it is impossible for us to actually think this way, and nobody, even scientists and philosophers, actually does so.

For, as human beings, we must inevitably see the universe from a centre lying within ourselves and speak about it in terms of a human language shaped by the exigencies of human intercourse. Any attempt rigorously to eliminate our human perspective from our picture of the world must lead to absurdity.

The actual lesson of the Copernican revolution was that Copernicus sought “intellectual satisfaction” over the self-importance of the previous model; he “gave preference to man’s delight in abstract theory, at the price of rejecting the evidence of our senses.” His system is every bit as anthropocentric as the Ptolemaic one, “the difference being merely that it preferred to satisfy a different human affection.”

If we call Copernicus’s conclusions more “objective” this means we think objectivity means privileging theory over sensory experience; “So that, the theory being placed like a screen between our senses and the things of which our senses otherwise would have gained a more immediate impression, we would rely increasingly on theoretical guidance for the interpretation of our experience, and would correspondingly reduce the status of our raw impressions to that of dubious and possibly misleading appearances” (3).

P lists three “sound reasons for thus considering theoretical knowledge as more objective than immediate experience”:

1. “A theory is something other than myself.” P gives the example of a map. “A theory on which I rely is therefore objective knowledge in so far as it is not I, but the theory, which is proved right or wrong when I use such knowledge.” [And thus, can be corrected and built on over time, fine-tuned through collective effort, unlike (or at least moreso than) immediate individual perception.]

2. A theory has its own structure and so “cannot be led astray by my personal illusions.”

3. “Since the formal affirmations of a theory are unaffected by the state of the person accepting it, theories may be constructed without regard to one’s normal approach to experience.” Unlike the Ptolemaic, the Copernican model holds true from any perspective in the universe.

Thus, when we claim greater objectivity for the Copernican theory, we do imply that its excellence is, not a matter of personal taste on our part, but an inherent quality deserving universal acceptance by rational creatures. We abandon the cruder anthropocentrism of our senses—but only in favour of a more ambitious anthropocentrism of our reason. In doing so, we claim the capacity to formulate ideas which command respect in their own right, by their very rationality, and which have in this sense an objective standing.

Copernicus’s theory then led on to many further discoveries which were made possible by it.

The intellectual satisfaction which the heliocentric system originally provided, and which gained acceptance for it, proved to be the token of a deeper significance unknown to its originator. Unknown but not entirely unsuspected; for those who whole-heartedly embraced the Copernican system at an early stage committed themselves thereby to the expectation of an indefinite range of possible future confirmations of the theory, and this expectation was essential to their belief in the superior rationality and objective validity of the system. (4)

A “theory which we acclaim as rational in itself is thereby accredited with prophetic powers” in that we expect it to lead to further discoveries and confirmations. This, and not the smallness of humanity, is the real lesson of the Copernican revolution:

It inspires us, on the contrary, with the hope of overcoming the appalling disabilities of our bodily existence, even to the point of conceiving a rational idea of the universe which can authoritatively speak for itself. It is not a counsel of self-effacement, but the very reverse—a call to the Pygmalion in the mind of man.

Polanyi now traces two lineages of scientific and philosophical thought beginning with the ancient Greeks. Copernicus is in the first, Pythagorean lineage, which finds the truth of reality in numbers, and thus stands for the fundamentality of theory over observation. After Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo are also in this lineage, which tends towards the mystical and rapturous. The Pythagoreans and their Renaissance successors are mistaken, but they are definitely on to something, in Polanyi’s estimation, in the way they express and value an emotional attachment to knowledge.

The other, less mystical and more materialist line, is the older Ionian one, the atomist Democritus being the avatar. The dominance of this line in European science led to the emergence of the mechanistic worldview, which separated pure mathematics, as an abstract realm, from empirical, and thus more “real,” reality. This leads ultimately to 19^th Century positivism, embodied in the perspective of Ernst Mach:

Scientific theory, according to Mach, is merely a convenient summary of experience. Its purpose is to save time and trouble in recording observations. It is the most economical adaptation of thought to facts, and just as external to the facts as a map, a timetable, or a telephone directory; indeed, this conception of scientific theory would include a timetable or a telephone directory among scientific theories. (8)

The mechanistic worldview, in turn, was replaced by relativity; P makes a big deal about Einstein not responding to the Michelson-Morley experiment, the point of which is that he was inspired not by empirical problems (as in the standard account which Polanyi is challenging), but by his own reflections and reason. After the acceptance of relativism as the dominant worldview, later experiments by Miller which supported the theory of aether were ignored, not on empirical but theoretical grounds. (Polanyi’s point here is not that Miller was correct and should therefore have been listened to; he is instead pointing out that he was ignored because his findings conflicted with what had become established theory, scientists being more interested in verification of laws than discovery.)

[At this point his argument is very reminiscent of Kuhn (not to mention Foucault), and there is a complicated relationship between Polanyi and Kuhn. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions came out in the same year as the revised version of this book. Kuhn cites Polanyi, and Polanyi expressed support for Kuhn’s position, but there is a more recent literature teasing out the similarities and differences between Polanyi’s and Kuhn’s (more “relativistic”) arguments.]

By virtue of the triumph of relativity over the previous mechanistic worldview,

modern physics has demonstrated the power of the human mind to discover and exhibit a rationality which governs nature, before ever approaching the field of experience in which previously discovered mathematical harmonies were to be revealed as empirical facts.

Thus relativity has restored, up to a point, the blend of geometry and physics which Pythagorean thought had first naïvely taken for granted. (15)

Polanyi seems to have two main points to make in this chapter: 1) fight against the separation of theory and observation into separate realms, with observation seen as more real and primary, and theory/reason as existing only in the mind, not also in nature; and 2) emphasize the value of a sense of wonder and beauty in science (particularly its theoretical side), which had been dismissed by the empiricists as “mystical.”

We cannot truly account for our acceptance of such theories without endorsing our acknowledgement of a beauty that exhilarates and a profundity that entrances us. Yet the prevailing conception of science, based on the disjunction of subjectivity and objectivity, seeks—and must seek at all costs—to eliminate from science such passionate, personal, human appraisals of theories, or at least to minimize their function to that of a negligible by-play. (16)

This is the myth of “objectivity" as mere empiricism: “This conception, stemming from a craving rooted in the very depths of our culture, would be shattered if the intuition of rationality in nature had to be acknowledged as a justifiable and indeed essential part of scientific theory.”

P castigates the use of “simplicity,” “symmetry,” and “economy” as euphemisms for “rationality.” He promises to elucidate his theory of personal knowledge as a corrective to all this nonsense.

We shall find Personal Knowledge manifested in the appreciation of probability and of order in the exact sciences, and see it at work even more extensively in the way the descriptive sciences rely on skills and connoisseurship. At all these points the act of knowing includes an appraisal; and this personal coefficient, which shapes all factual knowledge, bridges in doing so the disjunction between subjectivity and objectivity. It implies the claim that man can transcend his own subjectivity by striving passionately to fulfil his personal obligations to universal standards. (17)

 

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 10

Summary of Chapter 10: Down Quantity Street

Insert the words dill pickle into every sentence of every summary.

V’s Summary:

Economic imperatives seek to impose the standardised measuring system of the market on the whole of human activity. Very large quantities take the place of the qualitative, but even quantity is rationed and economised. Myth is based on quality, ideology on quantity. Ideological saturation is an atomisation into small contradictory quantities which can no more avoid destroying one another than they can avoid being smashed by the qualitative negativity of popu1ar refusal (1). The quantitative and the linear are indissociable. A linear, measured time and a linear, measured life are the co-ordinates of survival: a succession of interchangeable instants. These lines are part of the confused geometry of Power (2). (88)

Everything is being subsumed under quantifying logic. V discusses figures such as Don Juan and the idler, as half-ass forms of resistance – this is the attraction of large quantity: feasting, overconsumption, as the only available stand-in for quality in this system. My first thought on reading this was that he could have done a lot more with this insight a la consumption in general, as a drive to overconsume, accumulate pointlessly, in a sort of derailed potlatch. Cf. a recent BBC story about Elon Musk forcing Tesla investors to give him some ridiculous sum of additional money; the reporters openly wondered, does he really think he needs more money? And in general the pointless, psychotic quest for accumulation of wealth over all over ends, which characterizes Silicon Valley culture and poisons all it produces.

However, Vaneigem’s next point shows why he didn’t go down this path; his argument is that “even quantity is rationed” (89): the bourgeoisie have refused the Gift (and so also Potlatch, Bataille’s general economy, etc.). That belonged to the old order of Myth; this has been replaced by the order of Ideology corresponding to capitalism and the modern State. Modern politics has moved from the Big Lie of the Nazis to countless lies, which overwhelm (e.g., the countless, confusing diversity of products for purchase) yet the system sows the seeds of its own destruction by producing trauma and inhibition in consumers”

Boredom breeds the irresistible rejection of uniformity, a refusal that can break out at any moment. Stockholm, Amsterdam and Watts (for a start) have shown that the tiniest of pretexts can fire the oil spread on troubled waters. Think of the vast quantity of lies that can be wiped out by one act of revolutionary poetry! From Villa to Lumumba, from Stockholm to Watts, qualitative agitation, the agitation that radicalises the masses because it springs from the radicalism of the masses, is redefining the frontiers of submission and degradation. (91)

The bourgeois world-order destroyed the old pyramidal hierarchy of the “unitary regimes” of the past, claiming to free the individual. But

The dismantling of the pyramid, far from destroying the inhuman cement, only pulverises it. We see tiny individual beings becoming absolute: little ‘citizens’ released by social atomisation. The inflated imagination of egocentricity creates a universe on the model of one point, a point just the same as thousands of other points, grains of sand, all free, equal and fraternal, scurrying here and there like so many ants when their nest is broken open.

The old order was unified around the omnipresence/omniscience of God; V expresses doubts whether “cybernetians” could replace him.

Quantification implies linearity. The qualitative is plurivalent, the quantitative univocal. Life quantified becomes a measured route march towards death. The radiant ascent of the soul towards heaven is replaced by inane speculations about the future. Moments of time no longer radiate, as they did in the cyclical time of earlier societies; time is a thread stretching from birth to death, from memories of the past to expectations of the future, on which an eternity of survival strings out a row of instants and hybrid presents nibbled away by what is past and what is yet to come. The feeling of living in symbiosis with cosmic forces – the sense of the simultaneous – revealed joys to our forefathers which our passing presence in the world is hard put to it to provide. What remains of such a joy? Only vertigo, giddy transience, the effort of keeping up with the times. You must move with the times – the motto of those who make a profit if you do. (92)

Not to beat a dead horse, but that last line sums up the AI hype pumped out manically by an industry desperate to achieve profitability at any (social) cost (exhibit A, investor Marc Andreesen attacking the Pope’s fairly tepid calls for “morality” in AI, because any and all slowdowns in investment must be resisted).

V does not seek a restoration of the old cyclical time, centered on the “divine animal,” but a corrected version, centered on “man.” [though how is “man” not every bit as much a wheel in the head, as V is at pains to demonstrate that the “individual” is, in the current order?] In any event, “Man is not now the centre of time, he is merely a point in it.” The reduction of everything to points in an endless and pointless sequence has hollowed out all meaning and made life into a superficial acting out of roles, actions, stereotypes. Once again, as V repeatedly stresses, the exhaustion and disaffection created by this system, and even our hapless attempts to create meaning within it, are the key to its eventual overturning:

What do I want? Not a succession of moments, but one huge instant. A totality that is lived, and without the experience of ‘time passing.’ The feeling of ‘time passing’ is simply the feeling of growing old. And yet, since one must survive in order to live, virtual moments, possibilities, are necessarily rooted in that time. When we try to federate moments, to bring out the pleasure in them, to release their promise of life, we are already learning how to construct ‘situations’. (93)

Seeing Like A State, Chapter 1

 

Summary of Chapter 1: Nature and Space

Certain forms of knowledge and control require a narrowing of vision. The great advantage of such tunnel vision is that it brings into sharp focus certain limited aspects of an otherwise far more complex and unwieldy reality. This very simplification, in turn, makes the phenomenon at the center of the field of vision more legible and hence more susceptible to careful measurement and calculation. Combined with similar observations, an overall, aggregate, synoptic view of a selective reality is achieved, making possible a high degree of schematic knowledge, control, and manipulation. (11)

This chapter is an exploration of the historical application of the above premise, particularly through the development of scientific forestry, tax reform, the imposition of standard measurements, and cadastral mapping; with the ensuing suffering, abuse, and centralization of power associated with this practical “myopia.” This history also shows the complicity of the modern, centralizing state with the emergence of markets and capitalism. “The logic of the state-managed forest science was virtually identical with the logic of commercial exploitation” (15). Scott adds in a footnote:

I was tempted to add that, with regard to the use of forests, the view of the state might be longer and broader than that of private firms, which can, and have, plundered old-growth forests and then sold their acreage or surrendered it for back taxes (e.g., the “cutover” in the Upper Midwest of the United States at the turn of the century). The difficulty is that in cases of war or a fiscal crisis, the state often takes an equally shortsighted view. (360n12)

This utopian dream of scientific forestry was, of course, only the immanent logic of its techniques. It was not and could not ever be realized in practice. Both nature and the human factor intervened. The existing topography of the landscape and the vagaries of fire, storms, blights, climatic changes, insect populations, and disease conspired to thwart foresters and to shape the actual forest. Also, given the insurmountable difficulties of policing large forests, people living nearby typically continued to graze animals, poach firewood and kindling, make charcoal, and use the forest in other ways that prevented the foresters’ management plan from being fully realized. Although, like all utopian schemes, it fell well short of attaining its goal, the critical fact is that it did partly succeed in stamping the actual forest with the imprint of its designs. (19)

The monocropped forest was a disaster for peasants who were now deprived of all the grazing, food, raw materials, and medicines that the earlier forest ecology had afforded.

In contrast to most crops, which rotate at a rate of only a year or so, forests take about 80 years to rotate, so each rotation involves the careers of several generations of foresters. At Scott's time of writing many of these forests were only at the end of their third rotation. The first rotation produced promising results, but by the second rotation the negative ecological consequences became clear. These include damage to soil, erosion, loss of nutrients, and increase of pests created by the pest-favorable conditions of monocropping

The “virtual ecology” of so-called “forest hygiene” was an attempt to work around the problem with artificial solutions (such as installing boxes for owls, to make up for the lack of hollow trees), while retaining the core of the problem, which is the monocropping.

The metaphorical value of this brief account of scientific production forestry is that it illustrates the dangers of dismembering an exceptionally complex and poorly understood set of relations and processes in order to isolate a single element of instrumental value. The instrument, the knife, that carved out the new, rudimentary forest was the razor-sharp interest in the production of a single commodity. Everything that interfered with the efficient production of the key commodity was implacably eliminated. Everything that seemed unrelated to efficient production was ignored. Having come to see the forest as a commodity, scientific forestry set about refashioning it as a commodity machine. Utilitarian simplification in the forest was an effective way of maximizing wood production in the short and intermediate term. Ultimately, however, its emphasis on yield and paper profits, its relatively short time horizon, and, above all, the vast array of consequences it had resolutely bracketed came back to haunt it. (21)

Such dangers can only partly be checked by the use of artificial fertilizers, insecticides, and fungicides. Given the fragility of the simplified production forest, the massive outside intervention that was required to establish it—we might call it the administrators' forest—is increasingly necessary in order to sustain it as well. (22)

The administrators’ forest cannot be the naturalists’ forest. Even if the ecological interactions at play in the forest were known, they would constitute a reality so complex and variegated as to defy easy shorthand description. The intellectual filter necessary to reduce the complexity to manageable dimensions was provided by the state’s interest in commercial timber and revenue.

If the natural world, however shaped by human use, is too unwieldy in its “raw” form for administrative manipulation, so too are the actual social patterns of human interaction with nature bureaucratically indigestible in their raw form. No administrative system is capable of representing any existing social community except through a heroic and greatly schematized process of abstraction and simplification. It is not simply a question of capacity, although, like a forest, a human community is surely far too complicated and variable to easily yield its secrets to bureaucratic formulae. It is also a question of purpose.

Their abstractions and simplifications are disciplined by a small number of objectives and until the nineteenth century the most prominent of these were typically taxation, political control, and conscription. They needed only the techniques and understanding that were adequate to these tasks. (23)

He turns to the example of taxation in authoritarian France. The relative blindness of the premodern state meant that much detail about actual landholdings, etc. in the countryside were in fact unknown to the state, because the state dealt through intermediaries such as local elites. The state embarks on a process of transforming the dense and multi-layered feudal order into a transparent nation of individual citizen-taxpayers; the analogy Scott is making with scientific forestry nevertheless breaks down (he points out) because trees are different from humans:

The trees themselves, however, were not political actors, whereas the taxable subjects of the crown most certainly were. They signaled their dissatisfaction by flight, by various forms of quiet resistance and evasion, and, in extremis, by outright revolt. A reliable format for taxation of subjects thus depended not just on discovering what their economic conditions were but also on trying to judge what exactions they would vigorously resist. (24)

Each undertaking also exemplified a pattern of relations between local knowledge and practices on one hand and state administrative routines on the other, a pattern that will find echoes throughout this book. In each case, local practices of measurement and landholding were “illegible” to the state in their raw form. They exhibited a diversity and intricacy that reflected a great variety of purely local, not state, interests. That is to say, they could not be assimilated into an administrative grid without being either transformed or reduced to a convenient, if partly fictional, shorthand.

And yet this “shorthand” would then be treated as, and transform, reality. Drawing on the work of Witold Kula in Measures and Men, Scott turns to the encounter between the rationalizing state and local, non-state forms of measurement. Both state and non-state measurement practices are shaped by the purposes for which they are used, but these being very different purposes, very different “immanent logics” result:

Virtually any request for a judgment of measure allows a range of responses depending on the context of the request. In the part of Malaysia with which I am most familiar, if one were to ask “How far is it to the next village?” a likely response would be “Three rice-cookings.” The answer assumes that the questioner is interested in how much time it will take to get there, not how many miles away it is. In varied terrain, of course, distance in miles is an utterly unreliable guide to travel time, especially when the traveler is on foot or riding a bicycle. The answer also expresses time not in minutes—until recently, wristwatches were rare—but in units that are locally meaningful. Everyone knows how long it takes to cook the local rice. Thus an Ethiopian response to a query about how much salt is required for a dish might be “Half as much as to cook a chicken.” The reply refers back to a standard that everyone is expected to know. Such measurement practices are irreducibly local, inasmuch as regional differences in, say, the type of rice eaten or the preferred way of cooking chicken will give different results. (25)

There is, then, no single, all-purpose, correct answer to a question implying measurement unless we specify the relevant local concerns that give rise to the question. Particular customs of measurement are thus situationally, temporally, and geographically bound. (26)

Modern abstract measures of land by surface area—so many hectares or acres—are singularly uninformative figures to a family that proposes to make its living from these acres. Telling a farmer only that he is leasing twenty acres of land is about as helpful as telling a scholar that he has bought six kilograms of books.

Farms, for example, are described not in terms of acreage but as a “farm of one cow,” “farm of two cows” etc; “three morgens (day’s work) of land,” etc.

The measurements are decidedly local, interested, contextual, and historically specific....Directly apprehended by the state, so many maps would represent a hopelessly bewildering welter of local standards. They definitely would not lend themselves to aggregation into a single statistical series that would allow state officials to make meaningful comparisons.

Yet non-state measuring practices, on their part, were not somehow “objective” in contrast to state measurement, they were also shaped by power relations, reflecting the interests of different classes and subject positions; there was always a “politics of measurement.”

Perhaps the stickiest of all measures before the nineteenth century was the price of bread. As the most vital subsistence good of premodern times, it served as a kind of cost-of-living index, and its cost was the subject of deeply held popular customs about its relationship to the typical urban wage. Kula shows in remarkable detail how bakers, afraid to provoke a riot by directly violating the “just price,” managed nevertheless to manipulate the size and weight of the loaf to compensate to some degree for changes in the price of wheat and rye flour. (29)

[This is relevant also to the history of steam beer, as the price was sticky (stuck at five cents) and the glass size was apparently also sometimes fixed; also to the history of adulteration and the insistence on purity as a form of moral economy.]

Local forms of measurement were responsive to local circumstances and always malleable, which meant they each had their own, divergent, histories and political contexts.

The king’s ministers were confronted, in effect, with a patchwork of local measurement codes, each of which had to be cracked. It was as if each district spoke its own dialect, one that was unintelligible to outsiders and at the same time liable to change without notice.

This made it very difficult for the early modern state to monitor food supply, a crucial issue. Absolutist rulers sought conformity of rules and measures in their realms, but this was resisted by local elites to whom the existing system reserved some power. “The very particularity of local feudal practices and their impenetrability to would-be centralizers helped to underwrite the autonomy of local spheres of power.” (30)

Three factors, in the end, conspired to make what Kula calls the “metrical revolution” possible. First, the growth of market exchange encouraged uniformity in measures. Second, both popular sentiment and Enlightenment philosophy favored a single standard throughout France. Finally, the Revolution and especially Napoleonic state building actually enforced the metric system in France and the empire.

The impersonality of long-distance trade, and mass production, favored metricalization:

Whereas artisanal products were typically made by a single producer according to the desires of a particular customer and carried a price specific to that object, the mass-produced commodity is made by no one in particular and is intended for any purchaser at all. In a sense, the virtue of the mass commodity is its reliable uniformity. (30-1)

For centralizing elites, the universal meter was to older, particularistic measurement practices as a national language was to the existing welter of dialects. Such quaint idioms would be replaced by a new universal gold standard, just as the central banking of absolutism had swept away the local currencies of feudalism. The metric system was at once a means of administrative centralization, commercial reform, and cultural progress.

This would also, of course, make taxation easier. Scott discusses the Encyclopedists and the ideal of an unmarked French citizen, in a unified nation in which all are equal. “In place of a welter of incommensurable small communities, familiar to their inhabitants but mystifying to outsiders, there would rise a single national society perfectly legible from the center.” (32)

There was of course resistance; toise sticks for local measurements were confiscated and replaced with meter sticks, but the people marked the old lengths on them.

Scott turns to the subject of land tenure reform by states, with a Javanese proverb: “The capital has its order, the village its customs” (33). He provides a detailed example of how use rights to common lands and resources could have been distributed in a hypothetical Southeast Asian village (33-4), a key element of which is plasticity:

To describe the usual practices in this fashion, as if they were laws, is itself a distortion. Customs are better understood as a living, negotiated tissue of practices which are continually being adapted to new ecological and social circumstances-including, of course, power relations. Customary systems of tenure should not be romanticized; they are usually riven with inequalities based on gender, status, and lineage. But because they are strongly local, particular, and adaptable, their plasticity can be the source of microadjustments that lead to shifts in prevailing practice. (34-5)

The law could never reproduce such a plastic, adaptive system:

Imagine a lawgiver whose only concern was to respect land practices. Imagine, in other words, a written system of positive law that attempted to represent this complex skein of property relations and land tenure. The mind fairly boggles at the clauses, sub-clauses, and sub-sub-clauses that would be required to reduce these practices to a set of regulations that an administrator might understand, never mind enforce. And even if the practices could be codified, the resulting code would necessarily sacrifice much of their plasticity and subtle adaptability. The circumstances that might provoke a new adaptation are too numerous to foresee, let alone specify, in a regulatory code. That code would in effect freeze a living process. (35)

And what of the next village, and the village after that? Our hypothetical code-giver, however devilishly clever and conscientious, would find that the code devised to fit one set of local practices would not travel well. Each village, with its own particular history, ecology, cropping patterns, kinship alignments, and economic activity, would require a substantially new set of regulations. At the limit, there would be at least as many legal codes as there were communities.

(He later gives example of postrevolutionary France attempt at a code rural, which fails for precisely these reasons). This is only a nightmare from the perspective of administrators seeking a single, universal code legible to their purposes of administration; to the villagers living with such traditional practices, they are perfectly legible. “Indeed, the very concept of the modern state presupposes a vastly simplified and uniform property regime that is legible and hence manipulable from the center.” [And this is perhaps another aspect of the radicality of a proposal like ‘bolo’bolo: that it creates a situation of ungovernable local diversity].

To promote control over land the state creates and imposes the abstract individual subject as property-holder:

The historical solution, at least for the liberal state, has typically been the heroic simplification of individual freehold tenure. Land is owned by a legal individual who possesses wide powers of use, inheritance, or sale and whose ownership is represented by a uniform deed of title enforced through the judicial and police institutions of the state. Just as the flora of the forest were reduced to Normalbäume, so the complex tenure arrangements of customary practice are reduced to freehold. (36)

The individual “taxpayer” becomes a legible unit imposed on the existing diversity, in the same way as the “normal” tree of the forest had been in scientific forestry. [Another reason for the importance of the concept of the Unique as a counter to the universalizing aspects of right-articulated individualism]. Nevertheless the project of course encounters various difficulties of local complexity and resistance by local elites,

It was claimed, although the evidence is not convincing, that common property was less productive than freehold property. The state’s case against communal forms of land tenure, however, was based on the correct observation that it was fiscally illegible and hence fiscally less productive. [emphasis added]

The state’s project of legibilization/rationalization worked in the service of [primitive accumulation]:

As long as common property was abundant and had essentially no fiscal value, the illegibility of its tenure was no problem. But the moment it became scarce (when “nature” became “natural resources”), it became the subject of property rights in law, whether of the state or of the citizens. The history of property in this sense has meant the inexorable incorporation of what were once thought of as free gifts of nature: forests, game, wasteland, prairie, subsurface minerals, water and watercourses, air rights (rights to the air above buildings or surface area), breathable air, and even genetic sequences, into a property regime.

“It is worth noting that, like the modern tax system, the modern credit system requires a legible property regime for its functioning” (366n79). The “objectivity” of the new system is achieved through abstraction and universality:

The value of the cadastral map to the state lies in its abstraction and universality. In principle, at least, the same objective standard can be applied throughout the nation, regardless of local context, to produce a complete and unambiguous map of all landed property. The completeness of the cadastral map depends, in a curious way, on its abstract sketchiness, its lack of detail—its thinness. Taken alone, it is essentially a geometric representation of the borders or frontiers between parcels of land. What lies inside the parcel is left blank—unspecified—since it is not germane to the map plotting itself. (44)

The complicity of the state and the regime of privatized property:

Before comprehensive cadastral surveys, some land was open to all and belonged to no one, though social arrangements might regulate its use. With the first cadastral map, such land was generally designated as state land. All land was accounted for; everything not owned privately became the property of the state. (367n82)

Such maps are for outsiders, as locals would not need them; thus they are tied to marketization of land.

The cadastral map is very much like a still photograph of the current in a river. It represents the parcels of land as they were arranged and owned at the moment the survey was conducted. But the current is always moving, and in periods of major social upheaval and growth, a cadastral survey may freeze a scene of great turbulence. (46)

He gives the example of the ridiculous door and window tax, which caused peasants to remove all windows from their dwellings, with health consequences that lasted a century. In colonial contexts, cadastral mapping created a shift in power relations, as traditional systems rooted in local knowledge and memory were replaced with written codes in languages only accessible to foreign officials and intermediaries.

The gulf between land tenure facts on paper and facts on the ground is probably greatest at moments of social turmoil and revolt. But even in more tranquil times, there will always be a shadow land-tenure system lurking beside and beneath the official account in the land-records office. We must never assume that local practice conforms with state theory. (49)

A strong civil society could hold off or resist cadastral mapping, so colonies often preceded the conquering nation in being mapped. He gives several examples of neat grid maps being imposed from a distance over land unsuited to it as part of commodification; (not mentioned, but very relevant, is the example of California, and San Francisco in particular).

A final paragraph foreshadows the subject of the next chapter:

Although the purposes of the state were broadening, what the state wanted to know was still directly related to those purposes. The nineteenth-century Prussian state, for example, was very much interested in the ages and sexes of immigrants and emigrants but not in their religions or races; what mattered to the state was keeping track of possible draft dodgers and maintaining a supply of men of military age. The state's increasing concern with productivity, health, sanitation, education, transportation, mineral resources, grain production, and investment was less an abandonment of the older objectives of statecraft than a broadening and deepening of what those objectives entailed in the modern world. (52)

Swindell et al., Against Automated Education

 

Swindell, Andrew; Luke Greeley, Antony Farag, and Bailey Verdone (2024), “Against Artificial Education: Towards an Ethical Framework for Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Use in Education” Online Learning 28(2), 7-27.

Summary:

This interesting article argues for an ethical framework drawing on the work of Gunther Anders, Michel Foucault, Paolo Freire, Benjamin Bloom (actually, the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy), and Hannah Arendt. In the event, Anders, Foucault, and Freire are discussed briefly for broader ethical context, but the main focus of the article is the addition of an ethical dimension to Bloom’s Taxonomy using Arendt’s hierarchy of labor, work, and action.

They apply this to the actually existing use of AI by imagining this, frankly, quite likely scenario:

Let’s consider an example of how AI might be used with current GPT technology in a classroom. A journalist, under pressure to produce more consumable content for its struggling publication, uses a GPT to write a story about the benefits and costs of electrical vehicle production and use. A teacher, excited by the labor-saving allure of an AI teaching assistant product called Brisk, uses the software extension to read the news story about electric vehicles and design a 60-minute lesson plan for their students, complete with learning goals, discussion prompts, a presentation activity, and summary quiz about the reading. The students, given carte blanche to use their school-provided Chromebooks, “read” the story using an AI platform like Perplexity, which provides summary analysis and key takeaways for them to use in their discussion and respond to the quiz. Simultaneously, they use Microsoft’s AI image generator to create a slide deck for the class to graphically represent their group’s ideas. The teacher completes the assessment cycle by having their AI assistant grade the quizzes, provide feedback to the students, and input their scores into a learning management system. (Swindell et al., 2024: 17).

[Brisk is a classic example of the stark cynicism of our current use of GAI, allowing “instructors” (the term loses meaning in this context) to automatically generate “feedback” on student essays, which you (the instructor) are then encouraged to “personalize” and present to the students as “from you.”]

The authors’ critique of such a situation:

In this scenario, the AI engages in activities of labor and consumption, while all of the parties involved advance nothing of lasting significance, and if debate or critical reflection arise amongst students it is an incidental, rather than planned, outcome of the AI-prescribed lesson. Indeed, the Brisk teaching assistant might be well programmed to incorporate into the lesson features of the RBT such as understanding, evaluating, and creating activities; but unless a human being in this process is attuned to helping learners act in the world and make it a place, using Arendt’s (1963/2006) words, “fit for human habitation,” ... the most common educational experience might become, ironically, ones in which humans are unnecessary. (ibid., 18)

They go on to propose a “Framework for Ethical AI Use in Education,” in the form of a graphic inputting insights from each of the five philosophies they are drawing on. They apply this framework in two examples, which are, unfortunately, not particularly satisfying. They begin with a list of “guiding questions” for lesson design using AI:

1. In what ways are our historical, technological, social contexts shaping how we think and act; what activity or experience can shock learners into appreciating their contingency?

2. Will the technologies we are going to use advance humanizing ends? In what ways can the technology enhance or harm the co-creation of knowledge?

3. How can we design learning activities that have benefits beyond their own sake; how are the learning activities helping students to act in the world?

4. In what ways can AI reduce the burdens of teaching and learning labor while increasing the capacity to act in the world? (ibid., 22)

[The first two questions show the influence of Foucault and the rest; the last two are primarily informed by Arendt.]

Their first proposed exercise involves a research project in which students seek to learn about their local “political landscape.” AI is used to conduct research on who the local elected officials are, what the local issues are, and what are the important fora for discussion and debate. Students then form their own positions using this knowledge: the idea is that AI performs the “labor” (Arendt’s lowest category), leaving humans free to focus on “action” (Arendt’s highest category.

However, having done exercises like this in the past without AI, this just seems like so many attempts to rationalize an “ethical” or “harmless” use of AI – namely, AI is inserted as an extra element where it is not actually needed. Local political entities, candidates, electoral bodies, and so on, have websites with all this information – it is not hard to find. Using a generative AI search tool only introduces the likelihood of errors, along with the dangerous habit of taking AI as a reliable source of information. At best, AI could be asked what websites contain this information, and then the information looked up on those websites (with the added hope that the list is correct, of course). What is more difficult is not the “labor” of looking up information, but the process of reading through debates, articles, and so on to try and evaluate and formulate issues and positions, and it is this that students are likely to use AI for – against the recommendations of Swindell et al, since after all this involves higher-level Bloom’s and corresponds with “action,” which is supposed to be left to humans.

In their second example,

students are tasked with researching a topic of their choosing both to learn about it and apply this knowledge to their own context. To facilitate this endeavor, AI acts as an agent of Socratic dialogue and questioning for the student, helping students generate research idea topics that will be specifically catered towards student interests. AI will be equipped to ask students questions regarding their level of interests and commitment, suggest other topics of potential interest based on specific student response in addition to refine students’ thinking regarding logical sequencing of topic selection and eventually argument. This personalized approach allows them to analyze how these topics manifest in their own lives and communities, gaining valuable insights. (ibid., 24)

Again, why is AI required to engage in Socratic dialogue? First of all, isn’t this the instructor’s job? (And one of Brisk’s more cynical applications is just such an automated “feedback” generator). But more deeply, isn’t this an opportunity for students to engage in Socratic interaction and mutual critique with each other? After all, the authors have been citing Freire on conscientization and the need to allow students to develop control over their learning process. The instructor could easily model Socratic questioning in class, and give students example questions and topics to guide them in developing their own practice. Delegating this to AI is an opporyunity lost.

Thus, we have yet another attempt at reasoning out an ethical use for AI in the classroom, which fails to provide any good reason for actually using AI in the first place. Seeing as the primary use of AI today is 1) to avoid having to do any actual work or difficult thinking, and 2) to avoid interacting with people, it is hard to see how a “humanist” or ethical use can gain much traction, until this situation – and the underlying causes, pre-existing the development of generative AI – are addressed.

Another limitation of the model could be the reliance on Arendt’s hierarchy of labor-work-action, which has been reasonably criticized as reproducing an arbitrary, classist distinction (cf. also Sennett 1990). It is not true that we don’t learn or gain from anything classed in this model as “labor,” or that there can in fact be a clear line drawn between the actual, complex, productive activities which Arendt has delineated into these three a priori types. More to the point, it is not the type of work, but the social context, aka the relations of production, which render some kinds of work more meaningless or alienating than others. Likewise, it is not the mere fact of automation that is problematic, but how that automation is deployed, to what ends, and in whose ultimate interests. The authors make some nods to this political-economic context (via their discussion of Freire, Foucault, etc.) but the proposed ethical framework does not much reflect this.

Beyond this, the insistence on a “humanist” framing could be a limitation (Arendt in fact called herself an “anti-humanist”). The result is yet another call to keep “humans in the loop,” as masters, rather than servants, of the technology—as if it were the relations between humans and machines, rather than those between humans and other humans, that was ultimately at stake.

What difference might a post-humanist view have on the issue? ANT, for example, could have been brought in to consider the human subject as a historically and contextually created “figure” in a larger more-than-human assemblage, and the dissolution of this figure, with the supplanting of the disciplinary society with the control society, occurring, in Foucault’s words, like the erasure of “a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (Foucault 1970: 387).

Foucault, Michel (1970) The Order of Things. Vintage Books, New York.

Sennet, Richard (1990) The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

Profane Illumination, Chapter 3

 

Summary of Chapter 3: “Qui suis-je?” Nadja’s Haunting Subject

In this chapter, Cohen traces Andre Breton’s relation to Freudianism through his novel Nadja. Breton saw connections between Freudianism and Marxism:

he pursues not only how the Marxist and Freudian forces of deter­mination in the last instance are susceptible to apprehension by each other’s methodologies but also the possibility that they communicate closely (thus the notion of communicating vessels) and may in fact ultimately be indistinguishable. (60)

She traces in particular the concept of the “haunting” self in Nadja.

Breton posits this identity as a sequence of temporally differentiated moments. The I becomes a series of ghosts of its contiguous experience rather than a centered self. (64)

Breton references Rousseau, and C contrasts his writing with Rousseau’s project of portraying himself “as the portrait of an already formed, extratextual subject” in his confessions:

Breton's subjectivity is not any­where fully present but rather must be constructed through narrative; his textual act of representation resembles the process of self-construc­tion characteristic of the Freudian talking cure. (66)

Like an analysand’s discourse, Breton’s narration acquires significance not from the accuracy of any event represented but rather “dans son ensemble,” from the relation among the memories narrated, as the narration be­comes itself the event that generates meaning....

Breton’s text lacks a metalanguage that will comment with authority on the events he recounts. Asserting that his self is constituted by a series of haunting I’s, he refuses to grant to any one I a privileged status as the real Breton.

Breton suggests the subject as the ghost of some sort of unconscious realm, simultaneously implying that this unconscious is individual and that it is related to objective factors. Breton emphasizes the objective character of this realm increasingly as his reflections on its content proceed.

By “objective character,” she means the I as an object:

Alienating the I as the objective myself and then dissociating this objectified self from himself, turning it to “he who from farthest away comes to meet me,” Breton raises the uncer­tainty of his being able to reconstitute such alien material as a unified self at all. With the introduction of an objective dimension into the sub­ject, the possibility exists that the boundary between subject and object will crumble in the direction of contingency rather than recuperation, and this problem echoes in the final question, “Is it myself [moi­-meme]?” (67)

She discusses Sartre’s attack on Surrealist views of the subject, for instance his criticism of automatic writing (which Breton championed) as a sort of eating away at, or erosion of, the subject:

Au­tomatic writing is above all else the destruction of subjectivity. When we attempt it, spasmodic clots rip through us, their origin unknown to us; we are not conscious of them until they have taken their place in the world of objects and we have to look on them with the eyes of a stranger. (Sartre, quoted on p. 68)

Sartre is thus alarmed at the alterity or uncanniness of the self to its self, which the surrealists celebrate. It is interesting to consider why this alarms Sartre (speaking here for the viewpoint of existentialism, and to a degree for traditional Marxism) so much, given that in the traditional Hegelian dialectic, the individual consciousness must in fact go through this phase of becoming an object to itself, in order to become a full “self-consciousness.” The issue, I think, is that the dissolution of subject into object celebrated by the Surrealists such as Breton goes too far, and is not recuperable into the unified and rational self which traditional Marxism desires. Whereas in Marx the worker, for example, sees themself through their product, their own agency mixed with the world, in the case of automatic writing, it is the opposite, some other force intrudes and supplants or replaces our own agency, so our own creations are mysterious and alien to us. [On “action without agency,” see below.]

Sartre reacts with venom to the surrealist representation of the sub­ject because such a subject is ill-suited to carry out the praxis an existen­tialist protocol of engagement demands. (68)

Cohen makes much of Breton’s juxtaposition of a photo of himself with the subtitle referring to his envy for “any man who has the time to prepare something like a book”:

While in a standard documentary photo Breton’s portrait would illustrate the sentence to which it is juxtaposed, Breton constructs this sentence in such a way that he problematizes establishing a one-to-one correspondence between photograph and the textual passage whose ex­traliterary existence it documents. There are, after all, two parts of the sentence to which the photograph could refer. The subject of the photo­graph could be identical with the subject of the sentence, “I.” It could also, however, refer to the object of the sentence from which Breton’s subject here differentiates himself, “every man who has the time to prepare something like a book.” (69)

The photo of himself appears in a sense to refer to some other guy who can more confidently write and finish a book. B had presaged this with an earlier reference to a character from

a film I saw in the neighborhood, in which a Chinese who had found some way to multiply himself invaded New York [actually San Francisco] by means of several million self-reproductions. He entered President Wilson’s office followed by himself, and by himself, and by himself, and by himself; the President removed his pince-nez. (Breton 1960, 34-7)

Breton states that this film “has affected me far more than any other.” Howard translates the French title L'Étreinte de la Pieuvre as The Grip of the Octopus, but the original English title is in fact The Trail of the Octopus (though how often does an octopus leave a trail?). The self-duplication cited by Breton is achieved through a cinematic trick, which Cohen explores through a quote from Barthes on photography, but is interestingly far from the only example of self-duplication in that rambling, semi-coherent, massively trashy and entertaining silent film serial (the plot makes as much sense as automatic writing). First off, the number of villains (various stock ethnic stereotypes, for the most part) in the film start to multiply, ally, bicker, and fight amongst themselves; there is a Monsieur X (evil French guy) who obscures his face with a mask, but soon there are at least three characters wearing the same mask, posing as Monsieur X. Towards the end Wang Foo (the evil Chinese guy, who can multiply himself) rips the mask off the true Monsieur X, only to find he is one of his own (Wang Foo’s) copies!

The full potential of this serial’s accidental surrealism has yet to be taken up by scholars, though some exceptions are Mayer 2017 and Ungureanu 2020. Apropos of Breton’s agenda in Nadja, Mayer uses The Trail of the Octopus to demonstrate that “the detective serial maps a world of action without agency,” observing that “nobody is in control any longer, the police, the detective, the villains and the victims each pursuing their own, often discordant, agendas.” The movie also happens to feature disembodied eyes, such as appear several times in the images accompanying Nadja, and Monsieur X’s mask is similar to that which appears in one of “Nadja’s” (Leona Delacourt’s) artworks.

To return to Cohen’s argument:

This mention of how cinematic reduplication captures a differentiated subject points to a more general similarity between Breton’s ghostly definition of subjective manifesta­tion and what numerous theoreticians of photography have charac­terized as the ghostly nature of the photographic sign. (70)

She gives a quote from Barthes, which she suggests is influenced by a close reading of Nadja:

In the realm of the imaginary, the Photograph . . . represents this very subtle moment where, to tell the truth, I am neither a subject nor object, but rather a subject who feels itself become object: I then live a micro-experience of death (of parenthesis): I become truly a ghost. (71)

Rosalind Krauss had discussed surrealism and photography as index; Cohen notes this but decides to use the related but more Freudian term, trace.

We might term the ghostly mode of presence that Breton’s haunting subject shares with the photographic image trace-like, borrowing from Nadja’s own description of how she will haunt Breton.

Nadja in fact describes herself as a “trace,” in one of her cryptic statements to Breton. C links this to uses of the term “trace” in Freud:

For Freud the term designates a sign that represents the subjective activ­ity that produced it in distorted rather than mimetic fashion. (72)

[We can see how “distorted rather than mimetic” will link back to the previous chapter’s discussion of Benjamin and superstructure.] For Freud, the trace in the dream is altered through displacements to avoid censorship by the conscious ego or whatever.

Extending the term from dream to waking experience, Breton uses trace to designate the indexical fashion in which the ghostly subject haunts the tracks of his own experience.

The subject of Nadja is “the obscure realm of which the subject is a ghostly manifestation.” C notes Freud’s theory of the uncanny, according to which this is all the return of the repressed.

She comes now to a very interesting quote in which Breton distinguishes his own method in the novel from that of psychoanalysis. In Cohen’s version:

I would like finally . . . if I say, for example, that in Paris the statue of Etienne Dolet, place Maubert, has always simultaneously attracted me and caused me unbearable discomfort, that it will not immediately be deduced that I am merely ready for psychoanalysis, a method I respect and which I consider to aim for nothing less than the expulsion of man from himself, and from which I expect other exploits than those of a bailiff. (Breton, quoted in Cohen, p. 73)

Her reading here actually caught me by surprise, as being the opposite of what I had thought on reading the novel; I had interpreted Breton as criticizing psychoanalysis by saying that it “expels a man from himself,” but according to Cohen, he is in fact saying that it should do this but does not, instead locking him in like a bailiff. The issue here is that Cohen has departed from Howard’s translation, something she usually indicates but here does not. Here is Howard’s translation of this passage:

… it will not immediately be supposed that I am merely ready for psychoanalysis, a method I respect and whose present aims I consider nothing less than the expulsion of man from himself, and of which I expect other exploits than those of a bouncer. (Breton, 1960, 24)

The actual word in French is huisser, which can have either meaning, but from the French original we can see that Cohen’s interpretation is correct:

… on n'en déduisît pas immédiatement que je suis, en tout et pour tout, justiciable de la psychanalyse, méthode que j'estime et dont je pense qu'elle ne vise à rien moins qu'à expulser l'homme de lui-même, et dont j'attends d'autres exploits que des exploits d'huissier. (Breton, 1998, 24)

A pun is being made on the word “exploit;” “exploit d’huisser” means a kind of writ which is served by a bailiff or process server. So the “bailiff”/psychoanalyst is neither confining nor expelling the subject, but serving them a writ to appear in court, which could be understood as another metaphor like Althusser’s “interpellation.” [After all, psychoanalysts are priests, as D&G would say.] A vignette of Breton and Freud’s mutually dissatisfactory encounters at the beginning of the chapter had illustrated Breton’s impatience at Freud’s deeply bourgeois agenda; in contrast

Instead of using psychoanalysis in the service of the ruling bourgeois order, Breton is interested in pressing it into the service of revolution, although the distance between his conception of this notion and the event as under­stood by orthodox Marxism remains to be defined. (73)

[Breton has reasonably good leftist cred, but this did make me laugh, remembering a passage in which the narrator/Breton, who repeatedly insists in the novel that he is “not a public person” and wants to disappear, etc., looks at the people of Paris around him, shaking hands and talking on the morning sidewalk, and observes morosely, “No, it was not yet these who would be ready to create the Revolution.” (Breton 1960, 64). Alas! If only it was circa 1991 and I was young, black-clad, and smoking arirangs because they’re too cool for anyone, I could see myself shouldering through a crowd, muttering, “Allons, ce n’étaient pas encore ceux-là qu’on trouverait prêts à faire la Révolution...”]

The novel Nadja is full of contradictions, as numerous scholars have noted and made hay of. To begin with, it is named after the female lead character, but the male narrator begins it by asking, “Who am I?” and this is indeed the primary theme of the book. Breton announces at the beginning his inspiration by Huysmans’ plotless stories, and the novel shares certain features with automatic writing. Much of it revolves around serendipity and coincidence, and the characters wander the streets of Paris in a way that at once evokes the dérives of the Situationalists several decades later, and yet is distinct in that while the Situationalists felt they were exposing and challenging the workings of capitalism and the Spectacle, for their Surrealist forebears it appears to be more about exposing the truly haunting and ephemeral character of the self, or the unconcious. In the light of (for instance) D&G’s discussion of interpellation, Breton’s exploration of the ephemerality of the self, refusing to return it to a unity, and his exposure of its changing nature in relation to Nadja [who serves as his “point of subjectification” in D&G’s terms], seems less like a challenge to subjectification than a cogent understanding, and illustration, of how it works.

I’ll throw in my favorite quote from the book for no special reason; a great summation of life and love in the [second world]:

How does it happen that thrown together, once and for all, so far from the earth, in those brief intervals which our marvelous stupor grants us, we have been able to exchange a few incredibly concordant views above the smoking debris of old ideas and sempiternal life? (Breton 1960, 111)

Breton, Andre (1960) Nadja. Translated by Richard Howard. Grove Press, New York.

Breton, Andre (1998) Nadja. Editions Gallimard, Paris.

Mayer, Ruth (2017) “In the Nick of Time? Detective Film Serials, Temporality, and Contingency Management, 1919-1926" The Velvet Light Trap 79:21-35.

Ungureanu, Delia, (2020) “What Dreams May Come: Marguerite Yourcenar, Van Gogh, Akira Kurosawa.” Renyxa 10:227-44.

A Thousand Plateaus, Chapter 7

Review of Chapter 7: Year Zero: Faciality

In chapter 5, the concept of faciality had briefly been discussed in relation to the two RoSs, signifiance and subjectification. That chapter had also identified those two RoSs, along with the body or organism, as the three “principal strata binding human beings.” The main point in this chapter is to explore faciality as an abstract machine operating in the mixed semiotic (signifiance/subjectification) of modernity, and their relation to the third stratum of the body, which is subordinated. The year refers to the founding of the Anno Domini calendar based on the presumed death of Jesus (though of course, that would have started with a year one; perhaps the zero could be taken to refer to some kind of lack or black hole at the heart of the system, a zero inside the one, but they don’t explore this.)

This chapter gets a lot of mixed reactions from readers; Dave Harris, for instance, confesses, “I grew seriously weary reading this though and I don’t recommend it to anyone really,” and yet still managed to write not one but two fairly lengthy expositions.

The face is a “white wall/black hole” system, in which the white wall corresponds to signifiance and the black hole to subjectification. They note that “the wall could just as well be black, and the hole white” (169), but later on they identify the white wall/black hole system explicitly with racism and the imperialist world order. The face is not natural, it is something that has overcoded the body/head and covers the head like a hood. The face is more powerful than the gaze, which is secondary.

They delineate four “Theorems of Deterritorialization, or Machinic Propositions:”

1. “One never deterritorializes alone,” there must be at least two terms, “hand-use object, mouth-breast, face-landscape ...” (174). This of course makes sense with all that we learned about deterritorialization in past chapters. Reterritorialization is not a return to the past; this will become an important point later on.

2. Deterritorialization has to do with intensity, not speed.

3. “the least deterritorialized reterritorializes on the most deterritorialized.”

4. “The abstract machine is therefore effectuated not only in the faces that produce it but also to varying degrees in body parts, clothes, and objects that it facializes...” (175).

Faciality is linked to imperialism and racism; it is formed through “the collapse of all the heterogeneous, polyvocal, primitive semiotics” into the modern capitalist mixed semiotic of signifiance and subjectification (180), in the course of which the body (as the third of the three principal strata) is “decoded.” Faciality works similarly to (or can be viewed as a corollary to) the Althusserian notion of interpellation: this is explored through limit-faces, representing the despotic and authoritarian aspects of faciality. They draw on a number of literary, psychological, and artistic sources in making these distinctions, but a key source appears to be the art historian Jean Paris, whose work has not been translated into English. Drawing on Paris, they give as an exemplar of the despotic face that of the judgmental, Zeus-like Christ Pantocrator staring down from Byzantine church ceilings – “with the black hole of the eyes against a gold background, all depth projected forward;” for the authoritarian or pastoral face, that of Christ calling his disciples in a Duccio painting, “faces that cross glances and turn away from each other, seen half-turned or in profile...” (184-5). The despotic face thus commands, puts you in a state of submission; the authoritarian face, in contrast, draws you into a narrative that is also that of the loved one (etc.) as point of subjectification (as discussed in chapter 5), the narrative of loss and redemption, betrayal and hope, etc., of the modern subject. “This authoritarian face is in profile and spins toward the black hole,” (184) which could identify the black hole with the vanishing point in the Renaissance image. Numerous other links are made, of the despotic face with the proliferation of eyes in magic images, the role of closeups in the films of Griffith and Eisenstein, and the way objects are used in a way akin to that of film closeups in literature; liberal helpings of Henry Miller and Proust; as well as the Arthurian romances of Percival, and of Tristan and Isolde, mediated, it seems, through the works of Wagner.

The face, in their account, is not a natural or inevitable, nor even a truly human [but rather an uncanny] phenomenon; it is tied to the origin of the modern state and subject, and to racism, the history of imperialism, and the capitalist world order. How, then, to escape its power?

if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations, to become imperceptible, to become clandestine, not by returning to animality, nor even by returning to the head, but by quite spiritual and special becomings-animal, by strange true becomings that get past the wall and get out of the black holes, that make faciality traits themselves finally elude the organization of the face... (171)

They warn that this is not about a return to the past; you cannot escape modernity by going back to the pre-modern condition of “primitive heads” (before the separation of the face from the head and body). The escape is not backward, but forward:

Only across the wall of the signifier can you run lines of asignifiance that void all memory, all return, all possible signification and interpretation. Only in the black hole of subjective consciousness and passion do you discover the transformed, heated, captured particles you must relaunch for a nonsubjective, living love in which each party connects with unknown tracts in the other without entering or conquering them, in which the lines composed are broken lines. (189)

The point is to try to make use of the abstract machine of faciality, to get out of the trap of arborescence and relative and negative absolute deterritorializations (which it regularly produces) to positive absolute deterritorializations (which it sometimes produces, or is capable of producing). There have been references throughout the chapter to a bouncing ball, from a Kafka short story, which as Dave Harris points out, stands for a complete lack of significance or interpretability; they also point to failed attempts to break through the wall (of signifiance), much like those failed attempts at creating a BwO in the previous chapter; Christ himself is an example, having “bounced off the wall” instead of making it through (187). Successful attempts to break through the wall, in contrast, transform into “probe-heads” (têtes chercheuses, “guidance devices”), that destroy strata, binaries, etc. to attain the plane of consistency. They then end nevertheless with a question (191): “Must we leave it at that, three states and no more: primitive heads, Christ-face, and probe-heads?"

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Prefaces and Introduction

Raoul Vaneigem, (1967[2001]) The Revolution of Everyday Life. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Rebel Press, London

[I first read portions of this excerpted in AJODA, then took out a library copy in 1989. I read the line "we have nothing in common except the illusion of being together" to my roommate Ducky Heins (RIP), and he laughed and called it "pseudo-intellectual." That is a bit unfair, however.]

Translator's Preface

Nicholson-Smith thanks earlier translators he has relied upon, and notes that the title is not the best, “I would have preferred The Rudiments of Savoir-Vivre: A Guide for Young Persons Recently Established in the World, or more simply The Facts of Life for Younger Readers” (5). Nevertheless he sticks with the old name under which the work has become familiar in English. He embarks on a defense of his relation to the SI, since he was expelled in 1967, though he feels this “parting of the ways” was mutual. 

 

French preface from 1991/2:

In the 1990s preface, Vaneigem gives his take on the failure of 69:

In the end the economy picks up whatever it has put in at the outset, plus appreciation. This is the whole meaning  of the notion of ‘recuperation.’ Revolutions have never done anything but turn on themselves at the velocity of their own rotation. The revolution of 1968 was no exception to this rule. The commodity system, finding generalized consumption more profitable than production, itself speeds up the shift from authoritarianism to the seductions of the market, from saving to spending, from puritanism to hedonism, from an exploitation that sterilises the earth and mankind to a lucrative reconstruction of the environment, from capital as more precious than the individual to the individual as the most precious capital. (10)

“Even the critique of the spectacle has now been travestied as ‘critical’ spectacle.” Nevertheless he insists that the 1968 revolution, unlike all previous, more violent revolutions, did not fail because it did not ever really end; the system responded with “the official world’s recognition of pleasure – so long, of course, as the pleasure in question was a profitable one, tagged with an exchange value and wrested from the gratuitousness of real life to serve a new commodity order” (12). Besides pushing capitalist recuperation into a new, presumably less stable position, the 1968 revolution also gave birth to a new, anti-hierarchical form of mass movement, which poses new problem for authority/power: “a coming together of individuals in no way reducible to a crowd manipulable at will” (13).

He describes his work and writings as “the persistent attempt to create myself and reconstruct society at the same time” (13). He notes with optimism the conditions for revolution in the 1990s: the falling rate of profit continues, the various dissatisfactions of the present day.

Something is taking place today which no imagination has ever dared speculate upon: the process of individual alchemy is on the point of transmuting an inhuman history into nothing less than humanity’s self-realisation. (14)

Introduction

The introduction sets up a list of related binaries, listed here with the preferred term first:

• subjectivity, objectivity
• living, survival
• positive, negative
• transcendence, power
• freedom, oppression

Vaneigem claims “a humility that should not be hard to see” and notes various limitations in his work, and his attempt to intervene with it in this world (17). Perhaps this book can contribute to the ideas in it becoming someday better and more clearly formulated, and thus more effective. His point is not about creating novelty, but since everything has already been said, he means to put this to use, to “escape the commonplace by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity.”

He notes that while his argument is largely subjectivist, it will have impact beyond this: “Everything starts from subjectivity, but nothing stays there” (18).

The struggle between subjectivity and everything that corrupts it is about to widen the terrain of the old class struggles. It will revitalise it and make it more bitter. The desire to live is a political decision. Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?

He seems to see the modern subject of his day reduced to a “man of survival,” “ground up in the machinery of hierarchical power....” However, this subject of survival is also one of self-unity, of “absolute refusal;” there is a constantly-experienced contradiction, for this modern subject, of oppression and freedom, as the capitalist system attempts to deliver on promises it simply cannot fulfill. The rest of the book will have two parts, “Power’s Perspective,” and “Reversal of Perspective,” but this order is purely for convenience; V wants the reader to see them as synchronic, and wishes that “a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.”

This work is part of a subversive current of which the last has not yet been heard. It constitutes one contribution among others to the reconstruc­tion of the international revolutionary movement. Its significance should escape no one; in any case, as time will show, no one is going to escape its implications.

A Thousand Plateaus, Chapter 5

 

Summary of Chapter 5: 587 BC – AD 70: On Several Regimes of Signs

In this chapter D&G discuss four regimes of signs, then discuss their concept of the diagram/abstract machine, and finally lay out a fourfold pragmatics. The dates refer to the destructions of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem.

The four regimes of signs are signifying, presignifying, countersignifying, and postsignifying; the first three correspond at least initially to the despotic State, foraging societies, and pastoralist societies, respectively; the third begins with the ancient Hebrews, developing through Christianity to modern subjectification. They of course then deny this historical or evolutionary scheme, and have only laid out the different regimes [as sort of maps, at least how the term was used in the previous chapter]; they only ever actually exist as mixed or hybrid regimes, interacting with and translating each other [they are strata, after all.]

They start off with the signifying regime, in which signifiers always point to other signifiers, in an endless cycle they start referring to as circles. On page 114, they add a new level; the first had corresponded to the despot, the second one, interpretation, to the priest; interpretation expands the circle and fights entropy, but just results in another endless cycle of signifiers. “The ultimate signified is therefore the signifier itself, in its redundancy or ‘excess’” (114). They coin the word, “interpretosis,” [evidently a synonym for apophenia, and of course relevant to the “post-critique” debates.] They introduce several concepts which will remain significant touchpoints throughout the chapter: Peirce’s icon, index, and symbol, and the concept of faciality which in this first RoS refers to the Despot, but which shifts in meaning through the later regimes. The face of the despot here corresponds to the relation between the bodies of the sovereign and the condemned from the beginning of Discipline and Punish, a text they will remain in conversation with throughout the chapter.

They conflate and dismiss several competing perspectives somewhat at once, by asserting that the signifier is “pure abstraction,” and thus “nothing,” so it does not matter whether the signifier is lack, or excess, or if there is some “supreme signifier” (115). On page 117 they list the eight aspects of this signifying regime of the sign (here verbatim but spaced for easier parsing):

(1) the sign refers to another sign, ad infinitum (the limitlessness of signifiance, which deterritorializes the sign);

(2) the sign is brought back by other signs and never ceases to return (the circularity of the deterrito-rialized sign);

(3) the sign jumps from circle to circle and constantly displaces the center at the same time as it ties into it (the metaphor or hysteria of signs);

(4) the expansion of the circles is assured by interpretations that impart signified and reimpart signifier (the interpretosis of the priest);

(5) the infinite set of signs refers to a supreme signifier presenting itself as both lack and excess (the despotic signifier, the limit of the system's deterritorialization);

(6) the form of the signifier has a substance, or the signifier has a body, namely, the Face (the principle of faciality traits, which constitute a reterritorialization);

(7) the system’s line of flight is assigned a negative value, condemned as that which exceeds the signifying regime's power of deterritorialization (the principle of the scapegoat);

(8) the regime is one of universal deception, in its jumps, in the regulated circles, in the seer’s regulation of interpretations, in the publicness of the facialized center, and in the treatment of the line of flight.

After this they go on to posit two other semiotics. The three are all tied to different society types: presignifying semiotic to hunter gatherer nomads; countersignifying to pastoralist nomads; and signifying to state systems. [Much later these will be called lineal, numerical, and territorial.] They introduce the ideas that the pre-signifying semiotic is based on segmentarity, and the countersignifying one on “numbering number,” which is a mode or use of number very different from that of the state; this is linked to the idea of the war machine opposed to the state.

“In this countersignifying regime, the imperial despotic line of flight is replaced by a line of abolition that turns back against the great empires, cuts across them and destroys them, or else conquers them and integrates with them to form a mixed semiotic.” (118)

They spend a paragraph on page 119 walking back their claims so far: all the semiotics are probably really mixed all the time, and they do not really belong to specific periods, societies, etc.; they don’t want to give the impression of evolutionism, rather they are creating [anexact] “maps” that help them identify the assemblages that produce each semiotic. Shifting their approach a bit, they say they will now delineate the difference between a “paranoid-interpretive ideal regime of signifiance” [aka, the signifying RoS they started off with), and a “passional, postsignifying subjective regime” (120). They then give definitions of each:

The first regime is defined by an insidious onset and a hidden center bearing witness to endogenous forces organized around an idea; by the development of a network stretching across an amorphous continuum, a gliding atmosphere into which the slightest incident may be carried; by an organization of radiating circles expanding by circular irradiation in all directions, and in which the individual jumps from one point to another, one circle to another, approaches the center then moves away, operates prospectively and retrospectively; and by a transformation of the atmosphere, as a function of variable traits or secondary centers clustered around a principal nucleus. (120)

The second regime, on the contrary, is defined by a decisive external occurrence, by a relation with the outside that is expressed more as an emotion than an idea, and more as effort or action than imagination (“active delusion rather than ideational delusion”); by a limited constellation operating in a single sector; by a “postulate” or “concise formula” serving as the point of departure for a linear series or proceeding that runs its course, at which point a new proceeding begins.

[I tried constructing a table to lay out the differences in those two descriptions, but was thwarted by the non-parallel sentence structures. In any case one important point is that interpretation has been replaced with proceeding.]

These two semiotics are linked to two kinds of delusions in the history of psychiatry, which are discussed for a few pages. The signifying regime is despotic, the postsignifying is authoritarian; the Egyptian pharoah, versus Moses and the Hebrews, are given as exemplars. The dates for the chapter are the two stages of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem; the Hebrews are significant as nomads who founded a state, and thus created a mixed semiotic.

At the bottom of page 127, they delineate three differences (or “three diverse realms”) between the two semiotics; these three realms are then illustrated (p. 128), thus making a table much easier this time:

Signifying Regime	Post-Signifying Regime	illustration/example
a center of signifiance connected to expanding circles or an expanding spiral	a point of subjectification constituting the point of departure of the line	The Jews as opposed to the empires
a signifier-signified relation	a subject of enunciation issuing from the point of subjectification and a subject of the statement in a determinable relation to the first subject	So-called modern, or Christian, philosophy [Descartes’ cogito is discussed in particular]
sign-to-sign circularity	a linear proceeding into which the sign is swept via subjects	Nineteenth-century psychiatry

D&G now proceed to throw Lacan and Althusser together with a dash of Foucault, to produce their own theory of subjectification. They begin with Lacan’s concept of the doubling of the subject in language, as a subject of enunciation [sujet d’énonciation], i.e. the speaking subject, and as a subject of the statement [sujet de l’énoncé], the “I” referred to in language [and as is later made clear, corresponding to or enabling the subjection aspect of subjectification]. The second is not really the speaking subject, it is just a shifter, a word that continually changes reference depending on who uses it; and confusing the second for the former is Descartes’ error according to Lacan, in what could be considered a more updated and sophisticated version of the old “lightning flashes” criticism going back to Lichtenberg and Nietzsche. Add to this the point of subjectification which derives from Althusser’s Absolute Subject of interpellation; the difference is that the point of subjectification, for D&G, does not have to be the State, a police officer, or some other speaking subject, it can be anything: examples they give include food, clothing, a loved one, physical beauty, etc.

It must only display the following characteristic traits of the subjective semiotic: the double turning away, betrayal, and existence under reprieve. (129)

This is because we are still in that passional, post-signifying semiotic governed by betrayal and anxiety. The dominating and inescapable faciality of the ancient despot, or of a god like Zeus, has become a lack or betrayal, a turning away, in the Christian worldview, such that the ancient Christian mystic suffers endless anxiety in trying to prove themselves to an unknowable, faceless God, whom they at the same time betray by having doubts, remaining sinners, and so on. (The “existence under reprieve” means that the end is put off, instead of meeting judgment there is a continued time for suffering, remorse, penance, and hope). The argument is that this model or relationship applies to the relationship between any modern subject in the passional regime, and whatever point of subjectification they are fixated on, including lovers, psychoanalysts, capitalism, etc. One might say that to Foucault’s panopticon model of modernity (the prisoner internalizing the surveillance of the invisible guard), they have added an element of anxiety (indeed, passion) which could be linked to their critique of Foucault (that it is really not about “power,” but desire; this is buried in an important footnote to page 141 (529n39)). They describe these as two axes of the passional regime, on page 131.

The subject of enunciation recoils into the subject of the statement, to the point that the subject of the statement resupplies subject of enunciation for another proceeding. The subject of the statement has become the “respondent” or guarantor of the subject of enunciation, through a kind of reductive echolalia, in a biunivocal relation. This relation, this recoiling, is also that of mental reality into the dominant reality. (129, emphasis original)

To take Althusser’s “You there!” example, you as a consciousness/subject of enunciation “recoil” into the “you” of the officer’s statement, that is, “you” as subject of the statement. Your mental reality thus “recoils” into the dominant reality of the capitalist state, etc.

[An interesting set of relations and contrasts could be explored here in relation to Bakhtin’s distinction between authorititive and internally persuasive discourses. D&G’s concept of a regime of signs is more specific than Bakhtin’s concept of “language” or social language, though the latter does bear a reference to a unifying national language which [overcodes] social languages while they de- and re-territorialize it.]

One point they make sure to emphasize several times throughout the chapter is that the subject does not predate and thus somehow found language:

... a subject is never the condition of possibility of language or the cause of the statement: there is no subject, only collective assemblages of enunciation. Subjectification is simply one such assemblage and designates a formalization of expression or a regime of signs rather than a condition internal to language. (130)

They now relate the signifiying and postsignifying semiotics back to the concept of strata, by identifying them as two of the three “principal strata binding human beings”: 1) the organism; 2) signifiance and interpretation [aka the signifying RoS]; and 3) subjectification and subjection [the postsignifying RoS] (134). These strata bind us by separating us from the plane of consistency: D&G now lay out what could be called, perhaps somewhat simplistically or reductively, their liberatory or revolutionary agenda, a sort of post-humanist manifesto:

The problem, from this standpoint, is to tip the most favorable assemblage from its side facing the strata to its side facing the plane of consistency or the body without organs.

Subjectification is this “most favorable assemblage” because it “carries desire to such a point of excess and unloosening that it must either annihilate itself in a black hole or change planes.” Subjectification could thus be used as a means for abolishing subjectification:

Destratify, open up to a new function, a diagrammatic function. Let consciousness cease to be its own double, and passion the double of one person for another. Make consciousness an experimentation in life, and passion a field of continuous intensities, an emission of particles-signs. Make the body without organs of consciousness and love. Use love and consciousness to abolish subjectification ...

The diagram or diagrammatic is their means for going beyond signification, subjectification, and the other regimes of signs; it is itself not a fifth regime of signs, because it is on the level of the virtual, the plane of consistency, the abstract machine, etc. They mention some concepts/examples from earlier and later in the book: becoming-animal, becoming-woman, stammer language. They distinguish between three types of deterritorialization:

1. relative deterritorialization, that used in the signifying regime of signs;

2. negative absolute deterritorialization, in subjectification; and

3. positive absolute deterritorialization, “on the plane of consistency or the body without organs.”

The first two are linked to the ways that those RoSs recapture or dispense of [whatever the right term would be] lines of flight (the first through the sacrifice and scapegoat, the second through the endless, segmented beginning-again procedure of the subject).

On pages 135-6 they summarize their main arguments so far, listing the different RoSs, and reiterating that every semiotic is a mixed semiotic, always translating, feeding off and capturing bits of each other [because this is what strata do, after all]. They distinguish different ways that translation occurs between the different semiotics/RoSs:

1. analogical transformations into the presignifying regime;

2. symbolic into the signifying regime;

3. polemical or strategic into the countersignifying regime; and

4. consciousness-related or mimetic into the postsignifying regime.

finally, transformations that blow apart semiotics systems or regimes of signs on the plane of consistency of a positive absolute deterritorialization are called diagrammatic.

They discuss how transformations or transformational statements (in translation between regimes, a condition of hybridity) are distinct from statements having meaning solely within one regime; this could easily be related to Bakhtin’s discussion of interpenetrating social languages (though D&G are stating this at an implicitly higher “regime” level, they have also made clear that what really exists are hybrid assemblages (like Bakhtin’s dialects and social languages), and the regimes they articulate are a kind of map or typology, not a pure or deeper form). “There is no general semiology but rather a transsemiotic.”

Though they take the concept of the diagram from Foucault, they use it in a much more positive and open manner than it appears in his work. IIRC for Foucault, the diagram is an aspect of the disciplinary mode of power (or presumably of other modes as well); Bentham’s panopticon, for instance, is a diagram of the disciplinary mode, helping set in motion a number of reforms, etc. which bring about the “disciplinary archipelago” of prisons, schools, military discipline, and so on that imperfectly and incompletely substantiate the diagram. The failures of disciplinary society are referred back to the diagram, such that the way to improve education, or prisons, is to make them more education-y or more prison-y, in an endless cycle.

For D&G, in contrast, the diagram is an abstract machine, something openning up and de/re/territorializing strata. It is thus something more like a condition for the existence of the disciplinary society (to stick with Foucault), than a mere aspect of how it works. And, like subjectification (or rather, because the diagram is a part of the process of subjectification), it forms a sort of possible opening or Trojan horse, a part of the system which could be turned against the system and used as a means to transform it. This again seems to have to do with their insistence that “desire” is more basic or important than “power” in the Foucauldian sense; this is something that will be discussed in future chapters.

[In notes to earlier chapters I was wondering when the rhizomatic etc. was going to be seen as something fed on and captured/exploited by fixed strata of power or whatever; now we see the abstract machine/deterritorialization is 1) in fact inherent to the way strata etc. operate, and 2) is the key to their defeat/overthrow. I can’t decide if it is surprising or unsurprising that, after all this verbiage, bending around and thinking and looking at things differently, the underlying argument bears this key resemblance to Marxism.]

The transsemiotic is all about figuring out where a given utterance fits within the interplay of fixed and translating semiotics.

For example, it is relatively easy to stop saying “I,” but that does not mean that you have gotten away from the regime of subjectification; conversely, you can keep on saying “I,” just for kicks, and already be in another regime in which personal pronouns function only as fictions. (138)

Turning Chomskyan linguistics somewhat on its head, they delineate the generative (“how abstract regimes form mixed semiotics” (139)) and the transformational (“how these regimes of signs are translated into each other”) as two components of pragmatics, thus continuing their repositioning, outlined in a previous chapter, of pragmatics as being at the core of language, instead of being treated as peripheral, as they accuse traditional linguistic theory of doing. On page 140 they discuss semiotics/regimes of signs from this pragmatic perspective, and revisit the content/expression relation from earlier chapters.

They discuss the difference between a “semiotic,” or “regime of signs,” and language; the regime of signs is a particular assemblage which forms the condition of possibility of a language or multiple languages, but is not reducible to it; the RoS is “simultaneously more and less than language” (140). “Regimes of signs are thus defined by variables that are internal to enunciation but remain external to the constants of language and irreducible to linguistic categories.”

They reiterate the difference between, and independence of, contents and expression, and note that their interaction needs to be explained by something that is “still more profound,” namely, the abstract machine (141). In a footnote (530-1n39) they attribute their inspiration here to Foucault, who explained the relation between content and expression by appealing to an abstract machine, which took the form in DP of the “diagram,” and in HoS of a “biopolitics of population.” They state their two differences with Foucault, namely, 1) desire is more fundamental than power, and 2) “the diagram and abstract machine have lines of flight that are primary, which are not phenomena of resistance or counterattack in an assemblage, but cutting edges of creation and deterritorialization.” (In other words, they hold promise for transformation.) They delineate their position from that of Chomsky and other linguists who want to propose an abstract machine at the level of language; however, this is not abstract enough, being trapped in the opposition between content and expression, instead of being open to the plane of consistency. Returning to some of their previously-introduced terminology, they explain that the abstract machine operates by matter and function, which are primary, not by substance and form, which are derived.

"Substance is a formed matter, and matter is a substance which is unformed either physically or semiotically” (141). Function, in turn, has only “traits.” D&G differentiate the abstract machine from various other concepts, most notably Peirce’s icons (“which pertain to reterritorialization”), indices, (“which are territorial signs”), and symbols (“which pertain to relative or negative deterritorialization”) (142). (In a note (531n41) they discuss their inspiration by, and difference in position from, Peirce.) Abstract machines or diagrams are the Real-Abstract, and have proper names and dates, “which of course designate not persons or subjects, but matters and functions."

Lest the abstract machine/diagram be confused with some kind of fifth RoS, they make the distinction very clear: “... there are no regimes of signs on the diagrammatic level, or on the plane of consistency …. There is nothing surprising in this, for the real distinction between form of expression and form of content appears only with the strata, and is different on each one” (142). They distinguish between the diagrammatic, on the plane of consistency, and the axiomatic, the “program of a stratum” (143). The axiomatic is the attempt to block and subordinate lines of flight, to the program of a given stratum. The history of science, physics in particular, in the 20^th Century is described as a contest, or rather as shaped by the competing forces of? axiomatics and diagramatics (though this is not a simple opposition, as axiomatics appears to recuperate diagramatic creativity; “We shall see in what sense this is the ‘capitalist’ level” (144).

Naturally, D&G throw this “dualism” out the door as soon as they have delineated the distinction. Abstract machines exist, not only on the plane of consistency, but within strata, in which they organize forms of expression and content:

Thus there are two complementary movements; one by which abstract machines work the strata and are constantly setting things loose, another by which they are effectively stratified, effectively captured by the strata.

Strata, in turn, could not organize themselves without captured, relative deterritorialization (which makes te and re possible); every RoS remains a “diagrammatic effect.” Strata must always remain open to the plane of consistency and of lines of flight which they need to capture and “prolong themselves following these lines” (145), but they “at the same time open out onto a properly diagrammatic experience” beyond the stratum. Both these recuperated and [liberatory] “states or modes” of the abstract machine are actualized or exist in the machinic assemblage, which has two “poles or vectors,” one toward the strata, and the other toward the plane of consistency. Along its stratic pole it appears as a “collective assemblage of enunciation” and delineates forms of expression, and as a “machinic assemblage of bodies,” which delineates forms of content; these are the two sides of the machinic assemblage, facing strata.

But along its diagrammatic or destratified vector, it no longer has two sides; all it retains are traits of expression and content from which it extracts degrees of deterritorialization that add together and cutting edges that conjugate.

They now delineate an expanded concept of pragmatics, as the approach to understanding four components of any RoS. These four are generative, transformational, diagrammatic, and machinic. This last is “meant to show how abstract machines are effectuated in concrete assemblages,” in other words, moving on from the abstraction of the diagrammatic, to the concrete actuality of the machinic (146). They illustrate this fourfold pragmatics with a circle, with “four circular components that bud and form rhizomes.” Pragmatics studies each of these components, in turn, through tracing, map, diagram, and program. They illustrate this by taking an analysis of the propositions “I love you,” and “I am jealous” through these steps. In conclusion, they dismiss approaches such as Chomsky’s or Russell’s that seek to transcendentalize language and subordinate pragmatics, etc. to it.

The opposite is the case. It is language that is based on regimes of signs, and regimes of signs on abstract machines, diagrammatic functions, and machinic assemblages that go beyond any system of semiology, linguistics, or logic. (148)