Cartesian Planes: This is not a networkology (illustration from Descartes 'Optics')

It’s time for the history of philosophy to get messier. And to learn to unforget a bit. In the last few posts I’ve been articulating some of the contours of what a networkological history of philosophy would look like, but in this post I’d like to try to bring this all together and describe the big picture a bit, and in the process, articulate a symptomatic reading of some of the dominant histories of philosophy at work today.

From such a perspective, we can begin to see the philosophies of individual access (ie:Descartes, Locke, Kant) as aberrations within a networkological backdrop that largely starts with Plotinus, mutates through the Islamic, Jewish, and early modern Christian contexts, mutates again a little with Renaissance Platonism, and then ends up as the return of the repressed of Descartes (via Spinoza and Leibniz), Kant (via Holderlin, Schelling, Hegel, Marx), phenomenology (via renegades from within like Bergson), semiotics (via Peirce), twentieth century science (via Whitehead), etc. Of course, there’s been some devious systems as well (cybernetics, for example), but either way, philosophies of the network seem to me to be reflections of globalized times, whether Plotinus in the Hellenistic age, or post-structuralism in the society of the spectacle. Philosophies of the individual, however, seem to me to be then odd symptoms of capital which obscure even more than the networkological models may.

But that’s getting ahead of ourselves a little, so let’s start with symptomatically rereading some of the standard histories of philosophy, and see how it can help get us to the place in which we can start talking about constructing such networkological histories of philosophy.

Today’s Histories of Philosophy Considered as Symptom

Most of those of us who studied philosophy in ‘the West’ (a suspect concept given reality only by the force of geopolitical power), we were likely introduced to it through one of two models, namely, the so-called analytic/anglo-american or continental approaches. It’s pretty easy to tell which of these introduced you to philosophy.

If your intro courses were issue based (ie: epistemology, ontology) and composed of many short essays, mostly written in the last century, with a strong preference for sounding like social-scientific, scientific, logical, or mathematical texts, it’s likely you studied in an analytic tradition. If your intro courses were period or thinker based (ie: Kant, Medieval Philosophy), and the class was mostly composed of extended readings of a few texts, often from before this century,  then it’s likely you were in a continental program.

Of course, analytic programs do the history of philosophy, as they call it, but often by systematizing these thinkers of the past in ways that don’t quite fit them, which is to say, making use of the influence of social-scientific, scientific, logical, or mathematical types of scaffolding. And continental philosophers, so called because they are dominant on the European ‘continent,’ do deal with social scientific, scientific, logical, or mathematical issues, but often on their own terms, warping these influences in the process.

But both of these approaches, when they deal with the history of philosophy, have a curious time-line to their view of this history. The story of ‘Philosophy’ seems to go something like this. One starts with perhaps a few tibdits from the so-called ‘Pre-Socratics’ like Parmenides and Anaximander, quickly proceeding to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle,then one moves to Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, and the 19th century. A few words may be said about the dark ages, perhaps some Aquinas thrown in just to show how silly and religious philosophy got for a while, and an adventurous history might even throw an ‘Eastern’ text in, perhaps a little bit of Lao-Tzu’s Tao Te Ching during the Pre-Socratics period, just to show how similar early western philosophy was to eastern, after which we learned how to deal real, non-mystical philosophy. And while many of the thinkers involved didn’t only write ‘strictly’ philosophical texts, these other texts, whether on issues from what today would generally be called science or magic, is generally excluded.

To anyone not brought up within this odd system, the narrative that frames it might seem really, really strange. Firstly, and perhaps most symptomatically, where did the nearly 2,000 years between Aristotle and Descartes go?! Did people stop doing philosophy?! Oh, it became religious. Does that stop it from being philosophy? Yes, some would argue, but there are many who study these texts and call them philosophy, and see this as disciplinarily distinct from theology and other religious fields.

And so specialists in medieval Christian, Islamic, and Late Antique philosophies generally end up in departments of Religious Studies, Near Eastern Studies, and/or Classics, respectively. And so, it’s likely if you take a course in a philosophy department, you simply won’t hear about these types of ‘philosophy’ in basic intro historical survey courses. At most you may get a mention, but it’s very likely your professor doesn’t know much about these areas either, and was likely not trained in them.

What’s more, ‘eastern’ philosophies are often studied in places like East Asian studies departments, South Asian departments, African Studies departments, etc. I know when I was an undergraduate I had to take the only class on Chinese philosophy offered at my school in the history department. And the professor, while sympathetic to me as a poor philosophy major, kept telling me to try to write history papers rather than philosophy papers.

And without question, no-one taught Kant’s Anthropology in relation to his First Critique, Leibniz’s works on mechanics, Aristotle on the heavens, etc. These works were seen as marginal, outside the scope of philosophy, or simply bad science, and little to do with philosophy. All of which is really, really problematic.

The Individual as Symptom of Modernity, or Why The History of Philosophy Generally Skips from Aristotle to Descartes

While the dominant history of philosophy goes from Aristotle and then Descartes, this is largely symptomatic of our current age more than anything else. We live in the age of what Jameson has called ‘late capitalism,’ of which the doctrine of the individual, isolated, atomized human subject, the citizen of the nation-state and the subject of individualized psychology and economics (a rational choosing agent maximizing utility in a vacuum, of course!) is perhaps the primary ideology. While this formation has always been tenuous at best, and clearly has come under assault in our networked, postmodern age, most historians have argued that ‘the individual’ as we know it is largely a product of the early modern period. Most theorists of the ‘rise of the individual’ trace its early formations to the interior psychologizing texts of figures like Montaigne and Castiglione, and compare this to works of Descartes and Locke. Of course, most of this sort of comparative work gets done in literature or history departments, since we all know that philosophy only deals with concepts, removed from context lest they be impurified in the process.

Going further, we see that this early modern period is in fact not only that of the rise of the individual (what a fortuitous accident!), but also the same time period that gave us both Descartes and capitalism, as well as linear perspective in the visual arts, zero in western mathematics, the start of modern nation-states in politics, colonialism and the so-called ‘age of exploration,’ as well as modern science, as well as ‘the west’ as we know it. Might these accidents perhaps all be connected?

There are many historians who show precisely how ‘the west’ was sculpted out of the rest of the world during what we often now call ‘the Renaissance.’ Of course, if you read most traditional ‘western’ histories of ‘the Renaissance,’ everyone was simply ‘sleeping’ during those long, dark ages, but then for whatever reason, decided to wake up on morning, and have a Renaissance! Let’s go back to Greece, and tone it down on the religion a bit, let’s trade and have some fun!

Specular Mirroring: According to psychoanalytic film theory, looking at an object of desire sculpted to our photo-negative by our social power is a relation of 'specular mirroring.' An example can be seen in most mainstream films, in which men contemplate their own image, in reverse, which they force women to incarnate, in a sadmasochistic game in which one side clearly has more fun than the other. Writing history is similar, we remake the past in the image of the present, and like to pretend it's not really us in drag. Of course, in a queered cinema, or historiography, we could perhaps begin to see the man as in drag as well, and only pretending that's not the case, a fiction allowed by his social power (image from Rene Clement's 1964 film 'Les Felins', mirroring by Jane Fonda and Alain Delon) . . .

This sort of abrupt, non-motivated set of transitions between movements only happens when history is told in straight lines, rather than as shifting constellations of networks. For example, if you look at literary movement in isolation, it will seem that people across Europe just started idealizing daffodills and Nature (capital ‘N’) for no real reason one day, and decided to call it Romaniticism. But placed within the context of the industrial revolution, and the rise of what Blake called ‘dark Satanic mills’, the enclosure of lands and shifts in political economy on a global scale that lead to the rise of dirty, dank over-crowded cities, all of a sudden Romaniticism seems symptomatic of larger shifts in the culture.

Philosophy is hardly different. None of which is to reduce one set of changes to another, however. An overly mechanical approach to a Marxian style economic determinism doesn’t really get us anywhere. While it does seem that changes do ripple up from more material economic and political concerns into the more abstract aspects of culture (ie: visual arts, philosophy, mathematics), these then form much of the raw materials whereby the culture reads the material shifts and brings about new ones. If there is any priority to be given to the material, it is small indeed. While it does seem that physical exigencies and technological changes do often seem to be the cause of large scale shifts, these are immediately coated by culture like grains of sand turned into pearls.

Which is why any history of movements, in philosophy or beyond, needs to be seen as a violent gesture of periodization, one which tells us as much about the periodizer and their desires as about the period in question. The same can be said with the delimitation of discipline and space involved. To study Romanticism in the traditional way, to return to our example, is to delimit not only a time period (early 19th century), but a spatial domain (Euro-America), and a disciplinary set of interests (literature, visual arts, but not engineering). Why would anyone carve this sort of slice out of history and its artifacts to study? How curious!

Such a model has been articulated in various ways by theorists as diverse as Walter Benjamin (his ‘constellatory’ approach to history as articulated in his famed “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” to his Trauerspeilarbeit), Michel Foucault’s genealogy of epistemes moving from pastoral to soverign, disciplinary, and biopower, or the wonderful metahistorical works of Hayden White (ie: The Content of the Form, Metahistory) or Michel de Certeau (the criminally underread, psychoanalytically inspired The Writing of History).

Bringing insights from such theorists into discourse with a networkological approach to these issues, we can begin to see history is a set of networked constellations, and when we carve it up to grasp some of it, we use some of our networks in present, producing a nexus of networks in the process. Good historicizing needs to be aware of this creative activity of its own act of production in the process. For what is produced in this manner is nothing other than disciplines, spaces, and periods. These are more networks in turn, each of which provides raw materials for the next such cycle of productions, reproductions, mutations, etc. To use the wonderful metaphors of Felix Guattari (ie: his wonderful Machinic Unconscious), it’s all concrete assemblages, all the way down, and potentially infinite levels of scale, desiring productions all.

And wherever there is production, there is desire, which is to say, the expectations and hopes and fears involved in the activity in the present which guide the carving up, warping, and assemblage of the products of cultural detritus around us into something like historicemes, nodes or units which can then be assembled into networks, linear or otherwise, which help us contextualize our present moment with pasts, and thereby sketch out trajectories for our future. For if the present is the site of production, in our production of the past, we produce mirrors that face to the future. Our networks of the past tie into our desires in the present for futures, such that history is simply one of the tools whereby the future is constructed in the present, networking as it goes.

Towards a Networkological History of Philosophy: Starting with Religion, Science, and the return of Neoplatonism

After this brief detour in historiographical issues, let’s now return to the specific issue of the history of philosophy. From a networkological perspective, it makes sense to want to historicize the networkological project, to look for precursors and their antagonists, to frame the history of philosophy networkologically. And of course, this is an act of production, desire, and creation, for it’s my sense that a networkological approach to our futures is a beneficial one, but to do so, I need to intertwine this approach to the world various aspects of world around it, some drawn from philosophy, others from fields beyond philosophy, some from the past, others the present, all the present a ‘case’ for this worldview. The production of a networkological history of philosophy is simply one part of this attempt to ‘dialecticize’ the past (to use a Lacanian term), to make it work for the networkological project in the present.

What would such a networkological history of philosophy then look like in miniature? Of course, this all depends on what you mean by philosophy! Taken in the broadest sense of attempting to make sense of the world by abstract networks applied to more concrete ones, various forms of human enterprise seem to function in this capacity as attempts to frame the world in the most abstract sense possible from within a particular culture. And it certainly seems that philosophies as we now know them, whether from the Indian, Chinese, ‘Western,’ or other traditions, all find their original genesis in two primary meaning-making activities, which are religion and science. And since most early cultures didn’t divide these, linking what in the west was called ‘natural philosophy’ with everything from theology to various practices that today might be called by scientists forms of magic, we need to study how abstraction, as a process of meaning making, occurs in all its diverse forms.

Proto-Science: The Neoplatonic Mediologies of Robert Fludd (see Siegfried Zielinski's wonderful media archaeologies for more)

For if philosophy is the most abstract worldforms a culture produces, the place in which it reflects on abstraction as such, then it must relate to the various forms of abstraction from which it emerged, and in relation to which it remains in constant dialogue. We can call these various practices, tied to physical and material activities, practices, and when these reflect on their own activities praxes, such that when praxes reflect on their own reflexivity and the conditions of this, they become philosophy.

And so it seems that if we want to chart the history of ‘western’ philosophy, we should hardly start with Ancient Greece. As Martin Bernal and the Black Athena controversy have shown, there is strong reason to believe that ancient Greece was just a perfect storm for the influences from all over the ancient world, drawing its sources from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Phonecia,  Persia, and India, if not beyond. Of these sources, the extensive historical record of Egypt provides a treasure trove of inspiration for a historian of philosophy, so long as they know what to look for. As historians of religion have shown (and here I think Richard Wright’s excellent The Evolution of God provides some great guideposts), pantheons are often formed when local gods are brought together under others when one city conquers another, and as these systems get more elaborate, they are often used to represent concepts as much as people.

The continual abstraction of gods into ideas leads to the formation of systems which are philosophies in all but name. Anyone who has studied the role of Thoth and Ma’at in ancient Egypt knows that the grammatology developed is nearly as complex as those described in Derrida’s Of Grammatology, and result in a system of balanced forces which anticipate many of our most complex fractal generators (ie: iterated function systems, or IFS’s). Similar models can be found in various forms of sub-Saharan African thought, as Ronald Eglash nicely describes in relation to various central African religious systems, and how they give rise to fractal patterns in all sorts of material products from housewares to textiles and architecture in his book African Fractals.

It is only within these wider parameters that the ancient Greek explosion should be understood. And from there, it needs to be contextualized within the shifting parameters of the late antique world. The Hellenistic period, often passed over as a fall of philosophy into religion, mysticism, and magic, needs to be seen as a mutation, not a fall. For in fact, attempts to understand the world via abstraction were proliferating, not contracting! Of course, the fact that the center of Greek inspired philosophy soon shifted from the increasingly backwards Latin speaking countries to the Arabic speaking world, even as it was continuing to mutate in its Indian and Chinese efflorescences, providing in many ways the two major parallel tracks which developed along side what would eventually come to be called ‘western’ thought.

Unfortunately, for reasons which Jared Diamond describes in his amazing text Guns, Germs, and Steel, cultures in the Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Austronesia simply weren’t able to get far beyond the stage of conceptualizing gods in the manner described above, largely for reasons having to do with the material conditions present in these parts of the world. That said, each developed conceptual systems of gods in ways that are quite similar in complexity to those seen in, for example, ancient Egypt. All of which can perhaps make us wonder if philosophy comes about with the rise of the city state, market, exchange, etc.

Paradigms and Vanishing Mediators of Philosophy’s Historical Mirrors

But to return to the vagaries of Greek inspired thought, it seems that the period generally known as Neo-platonism, which lasted in one form or another from about the birth of the so-called ‘common era’ until the rise of capitalist individualism and it’s ‘modern’ science (of individuals doing atomized yet reproducible experiments that can be individually duplicated), ends up being the ‘vanishing mediator’ of modern thought. As I’ve argued in many other texts, a vanishing mediator, a terms which comes from thinkers like Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Zizek, is something which needs to be forgotten (‘vanishing’) in order for a paradigm to come into dominance, for it forms its constitutive exclusions.

These constitutive exclusions tend to come back to the surface periodically as crises in a given paradigm (‘returns of the repressed’), and and in periods in which there is about to be a shift in paradigm, the vanishing mediator seems to return in full force, until a new paradigm arises to take the place of the previous. And so, on both sides of a given paradigm, which is essentially a worldview, this temporarilly vanishing set of notions ‘mediates’ the relation a paradigm has to what comes before and after it.

For example, western democracy had to ‘forget’ that slavery was undemocratic as it formulated the notion of citizenship in the nation-state, just as it seems that the most crucial critiques of democracy ever since is that it’s notion of citizenship abstracts the economic and social concerns out of the equation of equality. If we are to ever solve the issues that haunt western capitalist democracies, we need to come to terms with precisely what it had to exclude from consideration within the purview of the state in order to form itself as a paradigm in dominance.

Neoplatonism is the great big vanishing mediator of the history of what would eventually be called ‘western’ philosophy. And this is because it is anti-individualistic, the individual is simply an effect of a giant network like system called God, which can be read as an abstract mirror-reflection of the conditions of multi-ethnic empires in late antiquity. The resonances with the present are evident, as increasingly the atomized individual is coming to be seen as the primary fiction which allowed capitalism and its various analogues to become a paradigm in dominance. And so it makes sense that neoplatonic networkological worldviews needed to be forgotten! As well as anything which mediates between subject and world, hence, purify philosophy, get rid of religion and magic (truly the precursor of more effective techniques for pratical intervention in the world that go by the name of ‘science’ today), economics or the arts, leave only the subject and its world! Plato and Aristotle are able to harmonize with Descartes and Locke nicely, but Plotinus not so much, and Hegel, Spinoza, Leibniz, these are the return of the repressed, the networkological neo-platonic synthesis trying to peer through the ideology of the atomized individual which has become the dominant paradigm for disciplines as seemingly disconnected as neo-classical economics, analytic philosophy, functionalist sociology, etc.

And of course, it doesn’t help that Neoplatonism was given form by Plotinus and his successors (ie:Porphyry, Proclus), reshaping other crucial precursor movements such as Epicureanism and Stoicism,  yet its center soon transfered to a ‘non-western’ culture, namely, the Arabic speaking world. No wonder the ‘west’ wants to forget this! But this Neoplatonic synthesis is in fact where ‘the west’ came from. For it was this networkological worldview that built the raw materials which mutated in Jewish thinkers of the medieval period, and the early Christian scholastics.

Neoplatonism then finds its last flowering in the early modern period in so-called Renaissance Platonism, in figures like Pico della Mirandola, Marcellus Ficino, Nicholas of Cusa, etc. As Plato was increasingly being retranslated from the Greek, his texts were nevertheless read through the Neoplatonic and often Hermetic lens, as these early ‘mages’ were experimenting with correspondances, alchemical techniques, number-magic, and various other techniques to impact the physical world, the clear forerunners of modern science. And in fact, so many early ‘scientists’ were as steeped in these methods as those we use today, and why not? How could we rule out the impact of the planets until we could observe them more closely? Even today, it’s not possible to fully rule out the role of the planets, their magnetic and other forces, even if there seems to be little credible evidence for this.

But we need to begin to recover these proto-scientific technologies, from number-magic to alchemy and the like, as vanishing mediators of the history of science. For it is by the divorce of these from the history of science that science is able to maintain the facade of objectivity, the individual scientist in the lab, as opposed to the truly networked and collective enterprise which it is (and so deftly described by Bruno Latour and his actor-network theory in works like Science in Action and The Pasteurization of France).

Of course, the grand irony here is that just as the networks of capitalism began to sew the world together, networkological philosophies went into eclipse, for the ideology of the isolated, atomized individual is what allowed the networks of capital to take hold as they did. Which is why I’ve argued elsewhere that we need to look at the renegade networkologists like Spinoza and Leibniz as counterparts to Descartes and Kant if we are to attempt to think of ways out of the ideologies of the present, which is to say, we need to retrieve the vanishing mediators of the past to help us imagine new futures.

And if Spinoza and Leibniz are modern incarnations of networkological thinking developed at the dawn of capitalism, symptoms of the nascent network (Spinoza’s Dutch mercantile republic and Leibniz’s ‘republic of letters’) at its dawn, these are only the most recent inheritors of a networkological tradition which goes back, nearly unbroken, for nearly 1500 years before them. Which is why if Leibniz and Spinoza seem novel to us today, we simply haven’t done our homework. For while they clearly provide masterful, contained, and coherent systematizations, they are both synthesizers of the various developments of Neoplatonism as it mutated through nearly a thousand years of Jewish, Muslim, and eventually Christian mutations. Theirs is one networkology amongst many, for in fact, the Neoplatonic period in the history of philosophy presents us with a combinatory of possible networkological worldviews, a wide variety of philosophemes which can be drawn upon, mutated, warped, and recombined with aspects of others in our attempts to develop networkologies for the future.

In all this, it seems essential that we never divorce philosophy and its history from what’s around it. How can we understand Cartesian individualism in isolation from his optics, its relation to the radical shifts in visual perspective in the arts, or his mathematics and its relation to the new cartographies of empire, or both of these to the new ‘ratios’ which were rapidly coming together in everything from the trigonometries used to map oceans and starts to those used to equate currencies?

Philosophy is ever only an abstraction from these intertwined networked processes, and we describe its histories, its paradigms and vanishing mediators, its crises, interactions, and mutations, only ever in relation to others. Only when we understand these intertwined issues, it seems, can we begin to write a history of philosophy that can truly speak to the needs of our increasingly networked futures.

Many thanks to Mark de Silva and Chris Lee who compiled the list and seem to be the guilty parties. Woohoo!

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/stone-links-15/

———————–

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/stone-links-15/

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Mini-Essays: Networks and Networkologies

• Resonance Machines: From Reflection to Refraction in Protest Movements, Carbon Credit Markets, and Radio Stations
• More on Transvidual Subjectivity: Quasi-Life from ‘The Human Mic’ to Facebook
• Towards a Networked Unconscious: Lacan, Deleuze, and Fairbairn, from Film Theory to Contemporary Cognitive Science

Mini-Essays: Full Online Guide to Reading Deleuze’s Cinema Books

Plotinus: Theorist of the Virtual?! With that wide-eyed stare? Don't worry, it might not even really be him . . .

Plotinus as the philosopher of the future?! In the last few posts, I’ve worked to explain some of why this is. Strange historical accidents of various sorts have erased much of his name from the history of philosophy, even as his ideas have proliferated under the names of others (most importantly, his indirect influence on figures like Spinoza and Leibniz). I’ll explain below some of the difficulties with reading Plotinus today, and why it takes some work to see the insights in his texts.

But most importantly, I want to explain here why Plotinus is a philosopher for the present, and the future. So first an appetizer of where this is going before I lay some of the necessary groundwork. Plotinus is a ultimately a set-theorist, and at the core of his thought is an attempt to deal with the same issue as has dominated twentieth century mathematics, namely, how to settle the score with Russell’s famous paradox and its reworking in Gödel’s famous incompleteness theorum. But Plotinus doesn’t stop there, because he is not only a set theorist, but a dynamic set theorist, which is to say, he’s concerned with time, process, and duration as well, with putting these sets into motion as series. For his texts manage to bring the issues raised by Gödel’s incompleteness theorum into touch with that which Derrida famously called ‘originary repetition,’ which is the core of the dilemma which Lacan discusses at length, in his own terms, in his theorization of the difference between S1/S2, and how this links symbolic, imaginary, and real. When seen in the context of the many aspects of Plotinus’ philosophy which resonate with Deleuzian theory of the virtual, as well as Plontinus’ highly develop theory of images, which can be used to link him to contemporary media theory, we have a philosopher ready to be rediscovered and put to work as a guide to our image-laden, networkological futures.

In what follows, I’ll explain precisely what I mean, and why I believe all this to be the case. First I’ll give a quick summary of Plotinus’ major ideas. From there, I’ll show how these ideas can be read in light of both the issues of set-theory as described by Gödel and Russell in the early twentieth century, as well as how these apply today in more dynamic form to the issues of ‘originary repetition’ in relation to signs, bodies, and processes in the present. Finally, I’ll describe why I think so many have missed these insights in Plotinus before.

Why Plotinus Matters Today: Plotinus as Dynamic Set Theorist of the Virtual

Why should we read Plotinus today? In order to explain this fully, let me first paraphrase much of his basic system.

All that is derives from The One. This One is like Aristotle’s First Cause and Prime Mover, as all motion and cause depends on it, and were it not there, everything would come to a halt, if not cease to exist. The One is therefore the ‘Necessary of Existence’ whose essence is to exist (to use terms for these notions later developed by Ibn-Sina/Avicenna). Because The One is perfect, it has no parts, no desires, no lack, and this creates the conundrum of why it ever needed to give rise to anything beyond it in the first place.

Plotinus argues that anything perfect always gives rise to copies of itself, not out of lack, but out of plenitude. This is his famous notion of emanation, and each of these levels of copies express the greater power underlying it and which gave rise to it, without subtracting or taking anything away from this. In this way, The One is virtually present in all around it, if imperfectly so. This imperfection isn’t the result of The One, but of that which copies it.

Each layer down from The One is more imperfect than that which comes before it, so while The One is completely simple, every other layer of reality is split, pulled towards the perfection of The One by its inherent desire for perfection, but also pulled by its seduction towards the material world of imperfections, confusion, and weaknesses. Because these others layers are always less perfect than what comes before them, they often cannot handle the unity and complexity of higher levels, and so they fragment what comes before them. These various levels are often called hypostases, emanations, etc.

For Plotinus there are three primary levels above those of bodies. The One is the first level, and it is followed by Intellect and Soul. If The One is completely perfect and unified, Intellect is split in two, and is the source of duality in the world. The two parts of Intellect are the copy that emanates from The One, and the part of this copy which splits off and views it from afar. Intellect is this splitting in two and attempt to contemplate unity, and this emanates down to all lower levels. Because Intellect cannot process the unity of The One, because it lacks the sufficient power and complexity to do so, it shatters into the Forms, which are each logoi which express themselves via emanations on lower levels. This is why Plotinus sometimes refers to Intellect as the One-Many, and as a circle whose center is The One (though likely he intends its image here rather than The One itself, which cannot be contained in this manner). For rather than a simple principle of binarity, Intellect is a binary between unity and multiplicity.

Of its two primary parts, Intellect is composed of the Limited and the Unlimited. The Limited is closer to The One, as it is an image of its unity, while the Unlimited, though it sounds more powerful, it shapeless, and hence is poorer copy of the unity of the Limited. Together these two are the One-Many, and in their intertwining braiding, the proliferation of forms emerge, each of which is a power to emanate further.

After Intellect we have Soul, which at some points Plotinus refers to as the matter to Intellect’s form. But if Intellect contemplates itself and The One in an intuitive circuit (what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the ‘infinite speed’ between concepts, Spinoza as the ‘intuitive’ grasp of concepts, and Hegel as the atemporal grasp of aspects by the concept), Soul contemplates itself, Intellect, and The One by means of dynamic unfolding in the world.

Like Intellect, Soul has multiplicity within it. There is the composite World Soul, but also all the individual souls, which are dynamic principles that advance in time, actualizing the forms which are so many intellects within Intellect. Because the World Soul cannot contain Intellect and the forms/intellects within it, it too shatters into many souls, and these all yearn for unity with The One as communicated to it by layers of imaged emanations.

If the intellects are dynamically-static, contemplating themselves and The One in immediate intuitive vision, souls have to go through processes to do so, they need to learn how to overcome their desires. And because like always attracts like, however, whenever there is a desire to go higher, this naturally attracts that which is lower and wants to be higher from the next layer down.

This is why the dynamic desire of souls pulls bodies towards them, just as bodies pull souls into them. Each body has a soul, which may be composed of vegetal, animal/appetitive, and intellectual parts. Humans are the only souls that have intellectual parts, which are themselves images of intellects, themselves images of Intellect, themselves images of The One. Imperfection creates the descent into matter, and learning to move beyond desire brings one closer to The One, and the possibility of ascent via theorizing.

Are you in there, Plotinus? The famously fractal Romanesco Broccoli

Here we see precisely why Plotinus will sometimes refer to the series of The One, Intellect as The One-Many, and Soul as The One and the Many. What we are seeing is a continua of differentiations from virtual unity to multiplicity, and from intellectual multiplicity to dynamic material force in the physical world.

It’s also worth noting that perfection emanates images which pull bodies to them to embody them in cycles and layers emanating from the perfect productivity and simplicity of The One to the multiplicity, materiality, and desiringness of the many imaged bodies. Considered as a mediology, we have here a complex description of economies of desire, materiality, and image production, circulation of simulacra, and circuits of abstraction, similarity, condensation and proliferation.

In all this, I don’t want to deny that Plotinus had this system on its head, at least from a Nietzschian-Deleuzian perspective. That is, he certainly disdained the world of created things, and considered the otherworldly as the only ‘real’ world, and so had little care for the body, this world or life, etc. But if we simply flip this all on its head (to use Marx’s famous metaphor regarding Hegel), we see the Deleuzian virtual peering out from behind the multiplicities of the material world, a this-worldly, immanent pantheism of the creative power of the virtual, one which dissolves reified approaches to the world in the face of the radical futurity of creation within every aspect of what is. As has been argued by many theorists, this is precisely what happens when Plotinus’ theories are adopted, through indirect influence via Islamic philosophy, by medieval Jewish thinkers, leading up to the eventual influence on Spinoza nearly twelve hundred years after Plotinus.

Plotinus as Theorist of the Virtual

But how do we get from this to the radically contemporary ideas I described above this summary? It is essential to note that Plotinus describes the One as ineffable, beyond language and description, such that any attempt to describe it will lead to contradiction in our attempts to discuss it. Hence, he talks about it as beyond being, beyond good and evil, today we would say that it is beyond binaries and distinctions of any and all sorts.

This is why it makes sense to think of The One as similar to the notion of ‘the virtual’ espoused by Deleuze. And in fact, Plotinus often speaks of something like ‘virtuality,’ though he doesn’t use a single Greek word for this (ie: Aristotle’s ‘potentia’), but rather, uses strange circumlocutions to describe how things can be present in things while not being present in them (and which Armstrong often translates simply with a word like ‘virtually’).

But many have described Plotinus’ philosophy as a negative theology of sorts, precisely because the only evidence we have of the one, and the only access to it, is through the things before us, and the aspects of them which seem to exceed any immediate, reified experience of them. This is precisely the Deleuzian notion of the virtual. And here we begin to see why this philosophy, which seems like a Platonic dualism of a transcendent, otherworldly realm, is in fact the very opposite. That is, Plotinus’ notion of The One is an attempt to make Plato’s dualism shift form to a Spinozist-Deleuzian style expressivist immanence of intensities rather than dualities. Rather than dualism, we get a monism that is ‘thick,’ so to speak.

Of course, it is true that Plotinus, like another very religious thinker named Emmanuel Levinas, speaks of the absolute transcendence of God, as do many religious philosophers of the Islamic world. But so does Spinoza, even as God seems for him to paradoxically everywhere. In all this, however, the difference between a dualist transcendence and an immanent transcendence is that theorists of immanence use the infinite transcendence of all that exists to establish its virtual potential for creative difference here and now. And this is why Deleuze argues, in Difference and Repetition, that is is precisely the bar against access to The One which protects its infinite productive creative expressivity on the plane of beings we can access.

A Fractal section of plant cells in the process of differentiation: fractals with a difference.

That is, Plotinus’ The One is virtual, and an avatar of the virtual, in a full Deleuzian sense. It is expressed by processes in bodies by souls, which are themselves the way in which abstract machines, which is to say, intellectual forms, organize concrete assemblages, or bodies in dynamic processes. In this sense, souls are the actualization in bodies of virtual potentials which are the abstract aspects at any moment of the intermediate level abstract machines that Plotinus calls souls. From virtual abstraction to dynamic potential unfolding to actualization in bodies and back, Plotinus’ three levels sync up with Deleuze’s thoughts on becoming.

A Quick Detour Through Russell’s Paradox

The most famous visualization of the idea behind Russell's Paradox: Magritte's image has the caption "This is Not a Pipe." Is an image of a pipe a pipe? If you say yes, no, or it depends, you end up in some pretty unsatisfactory situations. This is the same as what Russel was arguing in relation to sets in mathematics. Both ultimately come down to the attempt to try to understand precisely what we mean by representation.

What’s more, Plotinus is continually attempting to think the question of sets. Each level of being, which is to say, each emanation or hypostasis, can be thought of as a set. From the set of processes which have green aspects (bodies), we abstract the set of green bodies (souls), from which we can abstract the set of qualities of greenness as such (ideas), from which we can abstract the set of abstract notions as such (Intellect/Nous), and from this, we arrive at the set of all sets. Each of these layers, composed of what Lacan would call S2′s, are organized by an extimate signifier, an S1, or, to use the language of set theory itself, we would say that there is the set of elements, and the set itself which organizes them.

Russell saw the paradoxes inherent here, and in his theory of types, argued that so long as each set depends on other more encompassing sets, and these form a dynamic network, that the system will eventually eat its own tail, and this circularity will avoid the issue brought up from his famous paradox. Gödel famously showed that this is not the case, and modern mathematics was born with his incompleteness theorum. Let’s examine this a bit more closely.

Russell’s famous paradox can be expressed with his famous paraphrase: “If everyone in the village either shaves themselves or is shaved by the barber, does the barber shave himself?”If he doesn’t shave himself, then he’s not the barber anymore, somebody else is. If he does shave himself, he’s both barber and villager. If he doesn’t get shaved, he’s not a villager. No matter how you look at the situation, the terms being used to describe things stop fully making sense when we encounter this particular set of distinctions.

To put back in the language of set theory, every set is made up of elements. But is the set itself as a whole one of those elements, or is it outside of the set itself, or something odd and in between? Incompletion, incoherence, or inconsistency are the only choices, and each applies depending on how you frame the question. The problem is that if you are trying to found the coherence, completion, and consistency of mathematics on set theory, as Russell and his compatriot Whitehead were trying to do, this creates an insurmountable problem. Gödel radicalized Russell’s famous paradox, showing that no matter how the problem is phrased, whether in the language of set theory or not, that it is impossible to try to do what Russel wanted. After this, most mathematicians were pretty sure that the foundations of mathematics was of necessity unable to be placed on a foundation which was completely consistent, coherence, and complete. Not that this stops mathematics from working, and mathematical research has exploded since this happened in 1929. It simply means that the type of foundation that Russell and Whitehead were trying to give mathematics was misguided. Russel never fully found a way to deal with this, and Whitehead became a famous (networkological) philosopher of a very different sort.

Plotinus as Theorist of Sets, via Frege

Bringing this back to Plotinus, if we think of each of Plotinus’ levels as a set, we begin to see that each level pushes Russell’s paradox to the next highest level. That is, the question of unity is displaced upwards. Here Plotinus’ sets start to look a bit like what we see in Fregean number theory. According to Frege, all numbers are emanations of a sort from zero. That is, if zero is the first number, then we can think of one as the set which contains zero, two as the set which contains one which contains zero, three as the set which contain two which contains one which contains zero, etc. From this series, all the natural numbers are engendered. In this sense, we can think of The One as Frege’s zero, Intellect as Frege’s One, Soul as Frege’s Two, and bodies as his Three.

And it was Frege who inspired Russel to develop his paradox. As Plotinus describes the various levels in his work, each level is split radically between its virtual side facing the one, and its actual side pulling towards incarnation in the world of matter. Bergson saw Plotinus as a crucial precursor, and here we can see why.

As Douglas Hofstadter has argued, many of Escher's drawings describe Russel's paradox in visual form, because what's really at issues is recursion and the paradoxes this creates. In fact, these issues are foundational to the production of the physical world by means of fractals, many of which occur by means of a process which feeds back some of its output into its input and multiple levels of scale.

Where Plotinus becomes a dynamic set theorist, however, is that his sets aren’t merely static entities, like the sets described by Frege and Russell. While Intellect is relatively static, soul is not. And whenever Plotinus traces back the origins of his layers as a series of temporal progression, he’s quite clear that what humans describe as time, of before and after, doesn’t quite apply. We have something similar to what Lacan would call ‘logical time,’ rather than the standard time of clocks. This is why when Plotinus says that Intellect came ‘before’ soul, he often qualifies this by arguing that before in the human temporal sense can’t quite describe what he’s getting at here.

Read in light of contemporary theory, it seems that what Plotinus gropes at, in chapter after chapter of the Enneads, is precisely what Derrida has described as ‘originary repetition,’ the paradox which some contemporary philosophers have described as ‘atemporal genesis,’ which Lacan articulates with the retroactive temporality of fantasy in regard to his notions of the binary signifier and unitary trait and the play of S1 and S2′s on his ‘graph of desire’ (and which Lacan rightly described by the notion of topological non-orientability in figures like the Klein bottle), etc. Others have called this the ‘founding’ or ‘sovereign’ violence of political and epistemic paradigms, the extimate foundations of temporal series which are both inside and outside of these series.

And in this way, the verticality of the The One to Intellect and its intellects becomes the horizontality of process in Soul and its souls within their bodies. This shift from space to time and back brings together the Deleuzian virtual, intensive, and actual, in a manner complex enough to describe the paradoxes of contemporary set theory, as well as some of the most intricate arguments of contemporary post-structuralism.

This is why I believe fully that Plotinus needs to be taken seriously today. In future posts I’ll spell out some more of the details of what I’m arguing above, with citations from particular examples in Plotinus’ text.

However, there are many reasons why it might be hard to pull what I have described here out of Plotinus’ texts, and its for this reason that some pretty extensive contextualization, and textual commentary, is necessary if new readers of Plotinus are to be able to see where I’m getting this all from. And it’s to this context, and how it relates to the project of a networkological history of philosophy, that I’ll now turn.

Towards a Networkological History of Philosophy

In the last few posts, I’ve been describing the project of a networkological history of philosophy. Who are the great theorists of networks before the networked age? If we consider the start of the networked age to really begin with the rise of the internet, then in the twentieth century, Deleuze and Lacan, each in their way, can be seen as networkologists, Deleuze by means of his networks of singularities (see my post on this here), and Lacan with his networks of signifiers, images, and subjects as various formations of jouissance within the social symbolic. Many of the other post-structuralists and structuralists have networked aspects as well, but these two are the most important for the networkological project I’m developing on this website and elsewhere, Lacan exploding subjectivity by means of networks from within (for more, see how I propose to do this in my post on the networked unconscious here), with Deleuze doing this from without (for more, see my posts on Deleuze and the Cinema books on the sidebar on the lower right).

Tracking this back through the early twentieth century, Whitehead and Simondon stand out as networkological thinkers, with Whitehead as a clear example of a networked view of the cosmos, and Simondon as the theorist of the various individuations of the virtual. Bergson’s cosmology of light, described by Deleuze in his Cinema books, as well as Peirce’s universal semiology are clear precursors, as are the Nietzschian network of forces described in Deleuze’s Nietzsche book, and the Marxian-Hegelian-Schellingan post-Kantian return to Spinzoism when its more totalizing sides is filtered out.

As opposed to this is the individualist stream of ‘modern’ philosophy, truly founded by Descartes, and perfected by Kant and various neo-Kantians. These theorists reify the individual, and as Lukacs clearly shows (building on Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism), the individual of modern philosophy is the objectifying tendences of capitalism turned inward into the soul.

This is why, as I’ve argued in several places, Spinoza and Lebiniz are the path of the future, for they are not only both clearly media theorists, buy present complementary sides of the contemporary dilemmas of our increasingly post-Cartesian, post-human world. Leibniz is the theorist of ultra-reification by the net, of the internet connection and mobile monadic resonance chamber of the Debordian society of the spectacle of late-industrial image-capitalism. And Spinoza is the way out, a path for immanent liberation from within a cloudy reified enclosure, and outwards towards the system beneath it towards the potentials for the infinite creative powers of immanent robustness. If we understand the theological metaphor of the absent center of their systems as a metaphor for our contemporary media-capitalist worldsystem, Spinoza and Leibniz together can help us imagine paths to chart potential futures to help navigate the perils of our contemporary capitalist mediascape.

When linked together by means of Jean-Joseph Goux’s fantastic synthesis of Marx and Lacan (see his incredibly smart book Symbolic Economies), we begin to see how the networkologies described by Leibniz and Spinoza can be layered, with Leibniz as the surface layer and Spinoza as the foundation and potential for liberation, with the Goux and Deleuze to tie it all together, Goux for the more Marxist-Lacanian ‘quantized’ aspects of our contemporary worldsystem, and Deleuze for the flows.

If we follow this set of paradigms back in history, surely Spinoza and Leibniz are the theorists of networks which were there at the inception of capitalism and bourgeosie democracy, providing the flip side of the coin to the Cartesian individualism which is, in many ways, its symptom. But if we track the influences upon Spinoza and Leibniz backwards, we find Leibniz’s influences coming from Malebranchian occasionalism and the Christian medievals, and Spinoza’s from Maimonides. Both of these paths lead back to Islamic philosophy, and as I’ve argued in other recent posts, many of the conceptual innovations that make Leibniz and Spinoza seem so innovative actually were debated and theorized by a wide variety of thinkers throughout the flowering of Islamic philosophy, itself a giant networkology of sorts, which reached its peak with figures like Ibn-Sina, Suhrawardi, Ibn-Arabi, and Mulla Sadra, and which found various paths of indirect influence on the thought of the Latin west. Spinozist intensities find a precursor in Mulla Sadra, Ibn-Sina is the source of the one ‘Necessary Being’ whose essence is existence, Ibn-Arabi’s immanent and existentialist account of the expressivity of God’s attributes is a clear proto-Spinozist system. The Asharite radically immanent atomism and Suhrwawardi’s folded worlds of light prefigure Leibniz in fascinating ways as well. I’m not arguing these debts are conscious, but rather, that by indirect means, shards of concepts and moves migrated from the Islamic world to the west, by means of transitional figures like Maimonides, Aquinas, Scotus, etc., eventually to influence Spinoza and Leibniz, who if the flurry of recent books is any indication, are two of the hottest philosophers around for thinking through the challenges of our post-human, networked age.

But if you examine the sources which inspired Islamic thinkers, it seems that many of their conceptual innovations are reworkings of various Neoplatonic sources. I’ve described many of the details of this in other recent posts, but the reason why the Neoplatonist innovations were transmitted, while their names were often erased from the histories, is nearly as convoluted as the Christian anxiety of influence around Islamic influence. The major route of Plotinus’ Enneads into the Arabic speaking world was The Theology of Aristotle, wrongly thought to be written by Aristotle himself, while the major route of Proclus’ geometric Spinozist proto-Ethics text Elements of Theology into the Arabic speaking world was a The Book of Causes, also ascribed to Aristotle. Both were supposedly accounts of Plato’s ‘secret, unwritten’ doctrines, which Aristotle does mention once as having existed in works we now take to be authentically his. Combine this with the widespread belief that the Neoplatonic texts of the spurious Corpus Hermeticum were more ancient than the works of Plato, and the source of not only Greek learning but also Jewish and Egyptian traditions, and you have a perfect recipe for the wide dissemination of Neoplatonic ideas, even as the names of the innovators were erased.

With modern scholarship it’s become apparent who actually wrote which texts, and the confusions have been largely resolved, but the fact remains that history was massively influenced by such accidents. All of which contributes to the fact that the works of the Neoplatonists are rarely read by philosophers today, at least outside of those who generally study their influence on the history of religious thought.

But if we look for the origins of networkological thinking, and of many of the profound conceptual innovations that make Spinoza and Leibniz so relevant today, it is in fact to Plotinus that we must turn. Reading Plotinus today can be shocking, because it’s like hearing Spinoza, and to a lesser degree Leibniz, nearly a thousand years beforehand. And perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us, because Plotinus was writing in an age of globalization as well. The fact that he was trying to synthesize things together should hardly surprise us.

But Plotinus has a terrible reputation today, and for several reasons. He is often considered a totalizing thinker, and most of us raised in the tradition of post-structuralism have been trained to reject any philosophy with totalizing tendencies as simply the voice of power. And yet, from the sparse mentions of Plotinus in Deleuze’s Difference and Repeition (1967), he clearly sees that there is more going on with Plotinus, for Deleuze reads him as a thinker of immanence, in the way he so famously read Spinoza. Keith Ansell Pearson starts his excellent book Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual  (2001) with a discussion of precisely this observation. As I’ll try to show in the next section, those who read Plotinus as a theorist of totalization have likely only read him superficially.

Plotinus also has a terrible reputation as a bad reader of both Plato and Aristotle, and as an obfuscating, irrationalist mystic. There is no question he was a mystic, but also a pantheist in a proto-Spinozist fashion, and if he went into mystical trances when Spinoza (as far as we know) did not, this was his way of putting into practice what he theorized as the higher type of knowledge which Spinoza would famously later describe with his notion of amor intellectus dei (“intellectual love of God”).

It is also worth noting that Plotinus’ primary teacher, the shadowy Alexandrian Ammonius Saccus, introduced Plotinus, according to his biographer, to “the wisdom of the Persians and the Indians.” Some have speculated that Buddhism may have reached Plotinus this way, and reading Plotinus’ texts, there are clear Buddhist aspects. Considering that Buddhism was nearly 700 years old at this time, and was a dominant school of thought in India and much of the East beyond Persia, this would hardly be an unthinkable development. And with the conquest of these domains by Alexander, contact with these lands had been semi-regular by the time of Plotinus for nearly 300 years. Add to this the fact that Plotinus served in some military campaigns in Persia, and that these failed, and he was largely abandoned to his own devices in Persia, needing to find his way home, and that this was after he had already studied these concepts with Ammonius, and we see many possibilities for influence of Eastern thought upon him.

In order to understand why Plotinus has a reputation as a terrible reader of Plato and Aristotle, I highly recommend the introduction by Gerson and Dillon in their anthology of Neoplatonic texts, for it explains how, in light of the widespread belief that Plato’s unspoken theological doctrines had to be read allegorically from his dialogues, and a nearly thousand year tradition that used this as the frame with which to harmonize and ‘fold’ Aristotle into this theologized Platonism (a process often called Middle Platonism), mixed with Stoic and other late-antique readings of Plato and Aristotle, provide a context for many of the readings of Plato and Aristotle that might seem strange to us today. From the perspective of a presumed oral teaching of Plato, an allegorical reading of Plato’s texts in light of this, and a thousand year tradition of trying to massage Aristotle into this, Plotinus’ readings of Plato and Aristotle need to be seen as selective and productive, as well as representative of a fantastically complex tradition, rather than the simply sloppy aberrations of an individual thinker.

A Short User’s Guide to Reading Plotinus Today

All these issues notwithstanding, probably the biggest obstacle to reading Plotinus today remains the texts themselves, after struggling with what’s available, here what I think can help readers find a way into his incredibly important yet terribly underread works.

First, readers need to know that the text of The Enneads, his major work, was a complete mess when his study Porphyry put it in order. Plotinus supposedly had terrible eyesight, so he couldn’t really revise his texts. He was able to write them and read them, though, and over a period of seventeen years, he wrote various short texts which generally take the form of a question, and then a methodical answer to it. The tale is that he used these to prepare for lectures, and in his lectures. These texts were completely without order, and Plotinus hated editing his works. In fact, he so disdained things of this earthly world (one clear difference from the Spinozist-Deleuzian tradition), that he told no-one about his past, and refrained from having images made of him.

After his Plotinus’, Porphyry attempted to put all his disparate texts in some semblance of order, editing the texts to an extent to which we will never know. And so it is difficult to tell to what extent The Enneads is a product of Plotinus or Porphyry, though not to the extent of this type of issue as seen with Socrates and Plato, largely because there are many second-hand accounts of Plotinus’ beliefs, and Porphyry wrote texts under his own name that have allowed later scholars to distinguish the thoughts of these thinkers to a greater degree than Socrates and Plato.

But it needs to be kept in mind by all readers of The Enneads that it is still only semi-organized, and that the writing of the original Greek is often odd itself, because Plotinus wasn’t concerned to polish this. In this sense, it’s like reading Whitehead’s Process and Reality (another thinker who hated to revise), or the fragmentary works of the Stoics, or the largely oral teachings of Lacan (or his semi-intentionally cryptic Ecrits). One needs to extract the concepts from the sometimes odd shell.

The biggest obstacle, however, is likely to be the translation. Currently two translations are available, that by McKenna and that by Armstrong. The McKenna translation is poetic, flowery, and quite old. It also emphasizes the theological side of Plotinus, and while many in the new-age movement seem to find this translation glorious, for the serious philosopher, it is simply unbearable. This isn’t to say that Plotinus doesn’t have a theological and mystical side, he clearly does. But reading the Armstrong it’s evident the extent to which McKenna’s choices are a bit odd.

The problem is that Armstrong’s translations are odd as well. And while McKenna’s text is widely available in very cheap form (don’t even try to read them without reading McKenna’s introduction, which helps describe some of his strange choices for translating terms), Armstrong’s translation is only available in six separate hardbound volumes from the Loeb classical library, totally $300 for the full text of the Enneads (which you can get for $15 if you go with the McKenna). Luckily, a 50 page chunk of some of the most crucial parts of the Enneads is in the anthology of Neoplatonic texts by Gerson and Dillon, but it’s simply not enough.

Help with the Translations

Point is, the McKenna translation is I think much of the reason why no-one studying philosophy seriously reads more than a few paragraphs of Plotinus today without getting completely turned off. Read the Armstrong if at all humanly possible, and a radically different thinker emerges. And I even find the Armstrong translation needs some explanation.

So, here’s a mini glossary to help with reading, with Plotinus’ concepts in the original Greek, and how these are often translated by both translators. Keep in mind that I do not read Greek beyond the knowledge of crucial terms necessary for anyone working in philosophy, so I hope to update this section as my research on these issues deepens. That said, I found that I could only understand Plotinus once I mentally substituted these terms in my head for the ones in the text.

- The One: ‘to hen’ in Greek, but Plotinus often uses synonyms, including ‘arche’ (which Armstrong often translates as ‘principle’ and McKenna as ‘the first’).

- Intellect: ‘nous’ in Greek, likely best translated as Mind or Spirit. McKenna uses ‘intellectual-principle’, ‘divine mind,’ etc.

- Forms: generally ‘logoi’ in the Greek, equivalent here of Plato’s ‘eidoi,’ generally translated as ‘forms’ or ‘ideas.’ McKenna uses intelligibles, intelligences, divine ideas, etc., while Armstrong goes for ‘expressed principles.’ When Plotinus links these together with gods of the Greek tradition, McKenna will sometimes translate this as ‘the supernals,”the celestials,’ ‘the divine or blessed spirits,’ etc. As for the use of the word ‘intellects’ here, and intellect for ‘nous,’ these actually aren’t unreasonable, but I found as I read that as soon as I substituted in my mind ‘logos’ whenever I saw any of these terms, the text just opened up. It’s important to note here that the forms take on a much more dynamic aspect than seen in Plato, which is why the use of the term ‘intellect’ is used, because this was generally the term used for these notions later in the Islamic and Latin medieval traditions.

- Soul: ‘psyche’ in Greek. McKenna generally goes for All-Soul, First and Only Principle of Life, Vital Principle, Amrstrong uses World Soul. Soul also shows up as ‘souls.’ McKenna will often translate as ‘The Divine Realm,’ ‘The Supreme’ or ‘The Beyond’ the combination of Soul, Intellect, and The One.

- Theorize/Contemplate: A term used for the active beholding at a distance which is thought. It has two forms, the intuitive form (giggnoskein, related to gnosis), and the discursive form (epistemein), and both of these are opposed to the mere sensory form (doxa). This word ‘theorein’ is the root of our contemporary words theory, but also theater, and is highly visual in nature.

Other Oddities: McKenna will sometimes call the union of soul and body the ‘couplement.’

Overall, I think the Gerson/Dillon anthology has enough of the Armstrong translation in an affordable form to allow readers a strong grasp of what Plotinus is getting at. Supplementing this with 1-2 volumes of the Armstrong from Loeb (particularly Vols. 5 & 6) would be a next step, as would be reading some in a library, though supplementing with the McKenna can be helpful as well, though I’ve found it can be quite distracting to read.

In all this, it’s my hope that with this background and short glossary, any reader will be able to approach Plotinus and pull from him the general outline of what I’ve described in the earlier parts of this post. Plotinus as the first immanent networkologist, and a crucial guide to help us understand the potentials of our networked age.

Hermes Trismegistus: Image of Hermes on the Floor of the Cathedral of Sienna (1215-1263). Hermes, a mythical Egyptian-Greek figure, basically managed to mess up the history of philosophy.

A radical assertion: Plotinus is a essential, even liberatory, important thinker that we start to need reading seriously again. If we want to understand Leibniz and Spinoza, who I think are crucial to understanding our networked age, and point the path beyond Cartesian-Kantian individualism in philosophy, then all roads lead back to Plotinus. Really.

I realize this is not a common set of assertions. And there’s many reasons why Plotinus isn’t generally high on anyone’s reading list these days, not to mention those of us who study philosophy. So in what follows, I’ll explain my sense of why he vanished, why it might be hard to at first see how radical he is, why we need to rediscover him, and how to do so.

Usually the reason why nobody reads Plotinus today is that they get a quote here or there, and it seems so terrible or far fetched, and seems to justify the general story about him. I’ll explain why this quotation problem exists, but first, I want to describe the general story it tends to support. The standard take on Plotinus is that he’s an irrationalist mystic in Platonic clothing, and that he turns Plato’s rigorous thought into little more than new-agey mystical nonsense of a quasi-pan/monotheistic sort. What’s more, Plotinus and his school began the deification of Plato, and even believed in various forms of magic, mixing this with their philosophy, in the process setting the progress of rational inquiry back such that it took nearly a thousand years to once again separate science and philosophy from alchemy, and nearly as long to separate Plato and Aristotle from his school’s many influential yet distorting misreadings of them. And as for his possible uses today, as a thinker of ‘the One,’ isn’t Plotinus the perfect example of the sort of totalizing philosophy so many of us have been taught to react to with little more than horror?!

Turns out, Plotinus has been seriously misread. But to explain why will involve a story of mishaps that is often as strange as it is funny.

Some Cases of Mistaken Identity, Mixed with Hidden Doctrines

To start with, Plotinus’ massive major work, The Enneads, had it’s widest readership for nearly a thousand years after the fall of Rome by means of it’s Arabic translation, in which it was called The Theology of Aristotle. Oops. And while it is unclear precisely who did the translating, paraphrasing, and misattributing, some believe it was within the circle of Al-Kindi (for more, see the lengthy article on this here).

So that’s the first problem. What’s more, however, the highly systematic, massively proto-Spinozist tract, really a proto-Ethics if there ever was one, in which Proclus geometricized Plotinus (and threw a few of his own ideas in as well), known later in Latin as the famed Liber de Causis (‘Book of Causes’), was also attributed to Aristotle when it was translated into Arabic, and then into Latin.

And this helps to explain both why Neoplatonism seems to vanish from the scene even as its ideas seemed to be everywhere, as well as why the Arabic and early medieval interpretations of Plato and Aristotle seems so damn odd. Because everyone seemed to think that the works of Plotinus, Proclus, and Aristotle were written by the same guy. For those who know these texts, just imagine trying to read those together assuming they were all coming from the same mind. Yikes.

But there’s more, and this helps explain why Plotinus gets a really bad rap as a terrible reader of Plato and Aristotle, one that fundamentally distorts them. It was widely assumed in the Hellenistic world that Plato didn’t put all his teachings in this writings, that he had a ‘secret doctrine’ which was largely mystical, and hence, that his texts had to be read allegorically for clues of this deeper tradition that tied him back into the Pythagorean tradition more firmly than would be apparent on the surface. Much of the justification for this was a passage in Aristotle in which he mentions that Plato had an unwritten teaching of this nature.

What’s more, in the nearly thousand years of reading of Aristotle and Plato, Hellenistic scholars found various ways of defeating Aristotle’s criticisms of Plato, and in the words of many critics, ‘folding’ Aristotle’s insights into Plato. And Plato and Aristotle were generally read as two sides of one approach, Aristotle leading the way with logic and the physical world, Plato for the spiritual and transcendental (for a great summary of all this, see Gerson and Dillon’s excellent and short introduction to Neoplatonic Philosophy: Introductory Readings). The result was an oral and written tradition  melding Plato and Aristotle such that they represented two aspects of a larger, Pythagoreanized synthesis. Which is why the often selective reading of Plato and Aristotle used to justify the implicit and oral ‘secret teachings’ of Plato, assumed hidden in allegorized form, became simply taken for granted at this time, and wasn’t an odd quirk of Plotinus and his school.

Plotinus was, however, the first to put these ideas in treatise format. While he’s certainly known to be quite original in his own views, his take on Plato and Aristotle seems to have been pretty standard for the readers of these texts at the time. In all this, Aristotle was reconfigured as a semi-wayward Platonist, and Plato as a quasi-Pythagorean mystic. Those who leaned to the Aristotle side tend to be called Peripatetics (for the way those in the Lyceum supposedely liked to walk when they taught), while those who leaned to the more mystical side were Neoplatonists or even Neopythagoreans. But in fact, all of these had what ultimately would be considered Neoplatonistic traits today, due to the wide influence of the notion that Plato’s unwritten, secret teaching, of largely Pythagorean cast, was the frame in which both Plato and Aristotle were to be read. It is a grand synthesis of all these models that Plotinus puts forward in his Enneads, even though it’s unclear the extent to which the massively disorganized sets of treatises and notes were reshaped by his student Porphyry when put into the shape we have today. And it is this text, and those inspired by it, such as Proclus’ systematized version of Plotinus’ views,  which then went on to exert such a massive if often unacknowledged influence on both Christian and Islamic philosophy.

And this is why you end up with all these strange doctrines being imputed to Aristotle and Plato during this time. Plato ends up being used for largely Pythagorean aims through the Latin Rennaissance up to and including into the Enlightenment. Which helps explain why a lot of bad readings of Aristotle and Plato are laid at the feet of Plotinus and his school, which in all actuality isn’t quite Platonic or Aristotelian at all, but rather, some new, strange thing that simply use Plato and Aristotle to create something completely different, really a mystical Neopythagoreanism mixed with all of the above, with some late Roman influences like Stoicism and Epicureanism thrown in for good measure.

But it only gets stranger.

How A Mythical Figure Wrecked Havoc With the History of Philosophy

Up until around the 1600′s, all the Greeks were read, within not only the Christian tradition, but often in the Islamic tradition as well, within the larger context of Hermeticism. In fact, it’s not until around the 1600′s that it was proven that the so-called Corpus Hermeticum was not one of the most ancient books ever written, but actually written around the same time as Plotinus and other Neoplatonists composed their primary works. And we don’t even know who wrote the Corpus today, yet this text (really a collection but often treated as a unit), was so widely understood as more ancient than the dialogues of Plato, that Cosimo de Medici on his deathbed famously had Marcello Ficino stop his new translations of Plato’s dialogues from the Greek, so that the could translate for him instead the newly acquired works of the Corpus. It wasn’t until Isaac Casaubon came along, a few years before Descartes wrote his Meditations, that a strong argument was made to disprove the authenticity and dating of the Corpus, as well as the faulty reading of the Ancient Greeks and others based around it.

According to the books of the Corpus, the works of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and all the Greeks were the inheritors of a secret wisdom, which could only be put in riddles to protect its knowledge from the masses, and which was bequeathed to the ancient Greeks by Pythagorus. What’s more, Pythagorus himself supposedly studied in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and it was supposedly in Egypt where he learned these deep truths, as did Moses, who passed them down to the Jews, which is why the Ancient Greeks and Jews eventually produced montheistic philosophies that overcame the polytheistic tendencies of their people. Pythagorus and Moses were taught this deep monotheism by descendents of the most ancient sage, Hermes Trismegistus, often depicted as the origin of the Greek god Hermes, and either as a student of the Egyptian god of writing named Thoth, or sometimes even Thoth himself. From Thoth/Hermes to Hermes Trismegistus to Moses to Pythagorus, the order sometimes shifts around in the Hermetic tradition, but the basic idea of a deeply philosophical, mystically mathematical monotheism comes to be in something like this fashion (and for more on this, see Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s excellent The Western Esoteric Tradition: A Historical Introduction, along with the classic works of Frances Yates).

In hindsight, it seems obvious that the Corpus was a book influenced by Neoplatonism, mixed with the religious ideas of late Hellenism. Causabon simply pointed out that there were parts of the Corpus that couldn’t have been quite so ancient, because they were anachronistic, and dated the text in the Hellenistic period. But up until this point, Thoth, Hermes, Moses, Pythagorus, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and all the Greeks were most often seen as avatars of what was generally called the prisca philosophia, the ‘perenial philosophy’ of which monotheism, astrology, number and geometry worship, and Neoplatonic synthesis were all a part. That these figures were all sides of the same larger tradition, with many branches leading off into specific philosophies and monotheisms, was simply widely accepted as fact.

All of which helps explain a bit of why it may be difficult get a sense of why these texts seem so strange today. Rather than simply descry this context as a terrible misunderstanding, we need to understand the impact this all had on the history of philosophy. To read Plotinus today is also to disentangle him from all this, and attempt to get a sense of his texts within yet also beyond this very odd reception.

For anyone interested in where I think a reading of Plotinus can go today, linking him to everything from Deleuzian virtual philosophy to decostruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and issues in the philosophy of mathematics, check out my next mini-article here: The Philosophy of the Future: Plotinus as Dynamic Set Theorist of the Virtual (Realy!!)

The Statue of Maimonides in the Jewish Quarter in Cordoba: The Legacy of Islamic thought in Maimonides lives on in Spinoza

No-one, it seems, is more contemporary than Spinoza. The flurry of books on Spinoza in the past few years is starting to reach tidal proportions. And Leibniz, another long ago forgotten rationalist, is also making a comeback. The reason why seems to be that Cartesianism, with its mind-body split, is being called into question by everything from artificial intelligence research to the post-human and transvidual forms of subjectivity which are the result of various forms of global capital.

Add to this the fact that Leibniz and Spinoza were there at the birth of capitalism, and can be retooled with minor effort as media-theorists, and you’ve got something quite powerful. In fact, I believe that Leibniz and Spinoza are, in many ways, the guides we need today to help understand our capitalist mediascape.

I read these figures as two sides of the same. Leibniz’s theory of monads seems perfectly designed for the age of internet terminals, while Spinoza’s radical politico-ethics of immanence provides a pathway for thinking liberation from within an oppressive network structure which seems, oddly, in many ways like Leibniz’s atomized and terrifying (dys)utopia. If Leibniz is the theorist of the now, Spinoza is in many ways the cure. These two supremely networked theorists describe two complementary sides of our contemporary world. One describes a hyp0erreified netscape, the other a way to find the deeper logic beyond reification. If Leibniz is a thinker of superficial, harmony, then Spinoza is the thinker of logic within massively multiple creativity, radical difference. Read together, they provide a roadmap beyond the Cartesian roadblocks that are increasingly being called into question.

Leibniz and Spinoza: Back to the Post-Cartesian Future

In many ways, however, Leibniz and Spinoza are throwbacks, and certainly this was how they are often read. That is, after the radical advent of the Cartesian break, with the focus on individual subjectivity that became the foundation of so-called ‘modern’ philosophy, Leibniz and Spinoza are often seen as an attempt to turn the clock back to medieval theorizings of God using quasi-scholastic methods dressed up in semi-scientific methods. Descartes is the theorist of the individual, and the empiricists that fought him used his own tools of individual observation against him, while Kant simply radicalized him, and all modern philosophy, except that odd aberration of Hegel, another throwback, in many ways, to Spinoza, is merely a footnote to Kant. Or at least, so many contemporary historians of philosophy would have it.

But today that model is being called into question. Certainly Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, and Freud are still seen as the great ‘hermeneuts of suspicion’ that called the Cartesian-Kantian model into question, but it wasn’t until the ‘linguistic turn’ inaugurated by Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and radicalized by analytics, cyberneticists, deconstructionists, structuralists and post-structuralists of various stripes, that we see the subject begin to fade. But a faded, deconstructed, shattered subject, even if part of a structure, is still a subject, and it is only today that we’re starting to see networked formations begin to truly rework subjectivity so that it no longer seems to be the province only of things reified in a tiny Cartesian cogito.

Today our very notion of subjectivity is increasingly being viewed by contemporary cognitive studies as embodied and emergent, and panpsychism is being taken seriously once again. From such a perspective, Leibniz and Spinoza seem, if anything, prescient, and the time of Descartes and Kant is seeming ever more like the efflorescence of bourgeois individualism that the Marxists so often said it was.

And so Leibniz and Spinoza are back, and with a vengeance. But as with any philosopher, you only understand them when you understand their sources, and how they mutated and warped these, synthesized them for their own unique needs. The process of knowing a philosopher so intimately that you can see what they stole, and how and why, often takes them down from the pedestal at first, as they seem radically less original and interesting than before. But I think it’s necessary to really get what a given philosopher is doing, their gesture in relation to the history from which they emerge, and their attempt to speak to their times and issues through the languages and materials provided to them by their understandings of the past.

All of which lead me to Islamic philosophy, for in fact, both Spinoza and Leibniz, unlike Descartes, are the children of Islamic thought, whether they know it or not. And from what we can tell, if they had an awareness of this, it was incredibly slight.

The Genesis of Spinoza and Leibniz’s Competing Networkologies: Classical Islamic Philosophy

If we look at Leibniz’s primary influences, they seem to be Descartes and the various medieval philosophers he was reacting against, as well as occasionalists like Malebranche who like Leibniz tried to unify Descartes with medieval models. Leibniz attempted to synthesize this all, but with a version of modern science much more flexible than the Cartesian mechanistic view of the cosmos, and which could sync up with his infinitessimal view of the world as composed of infinitely tiny invisible magnitudes, crucial to his notion of the calculus.

As for Spinoza, he seems to get much of what makes him a networked thinker from Moses Maimonides, who he mobilizes against Descartes to produce a counter system which can go beyond the limitations of Cartesianism. While Spinoza created a novel, secular, and geometrically organized system, many of the individual elements, as well as the over sense of coherency, come from Maimonides. And Maimonides, who originally wrote in Arabic, was himself transferring many of these elements, with his own twists, from Islamic thinkers of various sorts.

If we look at the roots of Leibniz’s theorizations of God, these derive from Malebranche and the various medieval schoolmen, such as Scotus, Ockham, and Aquinas. But the general approach of these thinkers to philosophical questions, the very language of concepts they used, all find their origin in Islamic thinkers as well. Leibniz and Spinoza are in many ways the dual inheritors of a tradition of networked thought, with God as the metaphor for the net, which has a common source in the Islamic world which, according to Laura Marks, can help us theorize the most contemporary of networked phenomena (for more on this notion, see my post here).

A Combinatory of Networked Philosophical Models: Theorizing God in Arabic/Islamic Thought (and a Guide to Self-Study)

The history of Islamic thought can in fact be viewed as a fast discussion on precisely what it means to be a network, and many of the most crucial thinkers in this tradition develop one or several of the elements in a vast combinatory of moves from which later network thinkers like Scotus and Leibniz, Ockham and Spinoza, Maimonides and Malebranche, will pick and choose. Most working within philosophy today are barely trained in medieval philosophy at all, though it is likely that folks may have a passing familiarity with some of the basic ideas of Acquinas, Scotus, or Ockham. But Islamic philosophy is completely left out of most contemporary discussions of philosophy, relegated to scholars of religion. When Islamic philosophy is discussed, it is as a vehicle whereby Plato and Aristotle came back to the European nations as they began to develop philosophy again after the Dark Ages. It is time this begins to change.

For those looking to learn more about this tradition, there are luckily an increasingly good set of resources for this. After reading Laura Marks’ excellent Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (2010, for more, see my post on this book here), I began to track down her sources. I found two books complemented each other nicely. The first was the excellent Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy (2005) by Adamson and Taylor, with its focused essays on major figures and trends by different scholars. The second was Majid Fakhry’s Islamic Philosophy: A Beginner’s Guide (2009), which does a nice job of filling in the blanks, providing a more flowing historical narrative, even if it gets off to a slow start. What’s also nice is that this is a short and more user friendly version of Fakhy’s monumental History of Islamic Philosophy (2004), which can be used to supplement his shorter text whenever there’s a desire for more. Beyond this is the massive, 1232 encyclopedic Routledge History of Islamic Philosophy (2001), edited by Seyyed Hossain Nasr and Oliver Leaman, which while I lust for, is simply too expensive at nearly $100 for the paperback version.

After reading much of the Cambridge Companion and all of smaller Fakhry, I feel like I have a decent enough handle to dive into primary source materials, and I’m excited to do so. I’m starting with the McGinnis and Reisman anthology Classical Arabic Philosophy: An Anthology of Sources, but I’m also planning on diving into primary source texts by some later favorites not really covered in this volume. In particular, the new translations by William Chiddick seem great, and Mulla Sadra’s (also known as Al-Shazari) The Elixir of the Gnostics, Suhrawardi’s The Philosophy of Illumination are texts I’m really looking forward to. I’d also like to dig into some Ibn-Arabi. Also fascinating is the work of the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwan al-Safa), though unfortunately, the translations of their works are just too damn expensive for me right now.

If there are crucial precursors of Spinoza, and to a lesser extent, Leibniz, within the Arabic speaking world, it is in many of these later sources. While neither of them realize it, many of their most crucial conceptual tools were developed and honed in heated arguments between rival schools in the Arabic speaking world, often by means of rival systems as complex as theirs.

For example, Suhrawardi’s Illuminationism is a philosophy of light, with much in common with that proposed by Bergson, and elaborated on by Deleuze in his Cinema books. For Suhrawardi, there are many types of light, and the way they intertwine gives rise to the various physical bodies and potencies of our world. Ibn-Arabi’s radical empiricist, existentialist immanence of being, as well as his way of discussing God’s attributes, provide a clear precursor to Spinoza. Mulla Sadra builds upon Ibn-Arabi’s approach, but adds the notion of intensities, so central to an immanent metaphysics. Many of the additional crucial moves made by Spinoza, such as the essence/being distinction, the notion of God as the only necessary being for whom essence is existence, and a radical notion of emergence, all come from one of the most influential of all Islamic philosophers, Ibn-Sina (known in the west as Avicenna). And the Brethren of Purity were a neopythagorean sect that combined Sufi mysticism with a worship of numbers whose philosophy can find many analogues in contemporary group theory, as well as in the Kantian notion of the ding-an-sich. And the radical atomism, combined with a notion of God as unity, as advocated by the Asharite kalam theorists, while radically different from many of the others and any sort of Spinozism, does echo in the future in some ways in the atomistic side of the Leibnizian monadology (though likely not via any sort of even indirect transmission).

Islamic philosophy is a vast combinatory of networked models. Should we think about God and his many nodes this way or that way? Are nodes dynamic, static, fixed, inside God, outside him, what operations are permitted, what gates are there, what types of processing, how many levels? And there were political stakes to all of these moves. Some of these philosophies were seen as radically dangerous, while others were endorsed at various times even by the Caliph. Many took on different valences when they were absorbed by the Jewish and Christian traditions. For example, the relatively minor systematizer of Aristotle named Ibn-Russhd became known to the Latin countries as Averroes, second only to Aristotle himself. Along with Avicenna, he was seen as the primary source of the wisdom of the ancients until Ficino and others under the Medici began direct translations of Aristotle, Plato, and other Greeks into Latin. Only then did the Latin speaking countries finally start to emerge out of their tutelage by the Arabic speaking world.

As I tracked all this further back, I also came to learn just how much the notions of what was considered a good reading of Plato or Aristotle had changed over the years, and both Fakhry and Cambridge Companion describe how this happened. And in fact, it seems that much of this finds its roots in the much maligned movement known as Neoplatonism.

The Neoplatonic Legacy of Classical Islamic Philosophy

For if there was anything that classical Arabic philosophy was, it was Neoplatonic. This might not be immediately apparent at first to the outside observer. Many of those trained in traditional ‘western’ philosophy know the Islamic tradition as the manner in which Aristotle reenetered the Latin speaking countries, primarilly via Averroes, and the rise of interest in Platonism, representing the shift from scholasticism to the Renaissance, while spurred in minor ways by Avicenna, was largely due to the direct retranslation of Platonic texts, with heavy emphasis on the Timaeus, in Italy under the Medici.

All this is true, but it is an understanding of how the Latin speaking countries read the philosophy of the Islamic world, which is radically different from how it was understood within that world, as well as the way it related to the Greek texts before it.  Some corrections are definitely in order now that we have much more complete textual and critical resources. For example, Averroes (Ibn-Russhd), was a minor figure in Islamic philosophy, with almost no impact on those who came after him, it was only in the Latin speaking world that he had such a large impact, largely because of his paraphrases of Aristotles work, which were as of yet untranslated into Latin. Avicenna (Ibn-Sina) was a minor influence in the Latin speaking world, but arguably the singularly most important philosopher in the history of Islamic philosophy. And both of these figures can be classified firmly as Neoplatonists, at least, as we understand the term today.

Ever since Al-Kindi introduced Greek philosophical models to the Arabic kalam theological tradition, not long before the massive translation movement supported by the Abassid Caliphs in Baghdad in the 9th century, the crucial filter for all this was the reading of Aristotle and Plato put forth by the Hellenistic world, primarily the teachings of the inheritors of the Academy and Lyceum in Alexandria and Athens. And all of this bears the firm stamp of Neoplatonic readings of both Plato and Aristotle, which are widely different from how we generally read these texts today.

I’ll say more about why this is, and its implications, in a forthcoming post about Neoplatonism.

Winnicott and Play-Therapy: A Network of Raw Materials for Neural Network Construction

Recently I was asked by a reader to say more about how I was planning to bring Deleuze and Lacan together in the manuscript I’m working on called The Networked Image: Lacan, Deleuze, Film, and Beyond, so I’m going to sketch this out here, and show what networks have to do with this. In the process, I’ll outline why I think the notion of a networked unconscious can bring together film theory and various models of the mind proposed by contemporary cognitive science, with ramifications for therapeutic practice and visual studies in the process.

For those looking for the core of the argument in this blog post, skip ahead to the section below called “Lacan, Deleuze, Cinema, Subjectivity.” For those who need a little historical context of this all, particularly any students of mine, just keep reading.

To give a sense of where I’m coming from on all this, the first two parts of this upcoming book will be based on a popular course I teach at Pratt called Advanced Film Theory: Lacan, Deleuze, and Film. This year I’m expanding this into a full course on each, the first called Psychoanalysis and Film (Spring 2012), the second Deleuze and Cinema (Fall 2012), and I’ll be using this as an opportunity to expand those aspects of these I normally teach, and structure the writing process. For those curious on my intro to Deleuze, see the full online guide to reading Deleuze’s Cinema books on the sidebar to the lower right of this website. For those curious to see how I tend to use Lacan in relation to film, check out the mini-articles on Audition, Pandorum, Spartacus, and more under the Film and Visual Culture heading on the lower right.

Lacan Versus Deleuze: Some Historical Context

It’s hardly a secret that Lacan and Deleuze were rivals, and for those new to this, a bit of history may be helpful. My favorite detail in all this is that Deleuze used to send his wife to Lacan’s seminars to take notes for him. Early on, Lacan was a clear admirer of Deleuze’s work on psychoanalysis. In Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze exploded Freud’s theorizations of sadism and masochism from within, much like Lacan was doing with other Freudian notions. And in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze quotes Lacan with great admiration, even building upon his insights in crucial ways, and Lacan has nothing but high praise for Deleuze’s book. And The Logic of Sense is truly a masterful, wild book. Deleuze’s project is to rethink the Freudian notion of the limits of sanity, namely, psychosis and schizophrenia, by means of examining the non-sense works of Lewis Caroll, the radically experimental writings of Antonin Artaud, who struggled with schizophrenia for most of his life, and develop a new, expanded notion of subjectivity and language by means of philosophical models drawn from ancient philosophy.

So even though Lacan was a practicing analyst intimately involved with training other analysts, and Deleuze had experience neither as analyst or as patient, their work increasingly had much in common in the late 1960′s. That is, Deleuze’s project of expanding psychoanlaysis from without had quite a bit in common with Lacan’s attempt to pluralize it and transform it from within. It’s natural that soon they would have to get to know more about each other, and develop a rivalry in their often competing attempts to rework the Freudian legacy.

The real shift came about with a defection. Lacan’s young protege Felix Guattari, who many saw as a possible heir apparent to Lacan’s legacy, began to stray to far from Lacan’s teachings, and question many of his teacher’s prized theories, though he was concerned about being explicit with Lacan about how radical his ideas were getting. So after reading The Logic of Sense, he met with Deleuze, showed him some of his notes, and they developed an immediate partnership which is now the stuff of legend, and which produced the incredible books they wrote together. By the time they co-wrote Anti-Oedipus in 1972, the break with Lacan was complete, Guattari was disowned by Lacan, and his radical approach to group therapy at his own clinic, as well as his activities with various activist organizations, provided more inspiration for his psychoanalytic theories than Lacan. While Deleuze and Guattari praised Lacan in Anti-Oedipus, they also criticized him, and Lacan did not take that well, and Deleuze and Guattari continued to develop a model much more radical than Lacan, the rift growing stronger each year (for more on Guattari, and Deleuze’s relation with him, see Roudinesco’s excellent biography Intersection Lives: Deleuze and Guattari).

When all this came to the United States, the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari were presented as radically distinct from that of Lacan, and very few were able to do both of these theorists well. In my own personal trajectory of study, I spent years working on Lacan, and even spent two years training as a clinical psychoanalytic psychotherapist, spending one year seeing patients in a low-fee clinic as part of my training. While this wasn’t a Lacanian psychoanalytic program, it was certainly inspired by the Freudian tradition, and it gave me a direct and intuitive sense of how therapy works from both sides. All the while, Lacan became an obsession for me, and understanding Lacan, as well as his resurrection by Slavoj Zizek, really occupied several years of my life.

It was only after this that Deleuze came to displace him. I’d read Deleuze sporadically over the years, and enjoyed him, but always saw him as too disorganized and light. It wasn’t until later that I got a sense of the fact that Deleuze as a philosopher was much deeper than the surface level manifestations that made so many people find his works interesting. After spending years on Lacan, I found myself drawn to what seemed like potentially a deeper truth, one that could explode many of the limitations of the Lacanian project, and which seemed a natural extension of the paths that the later Lacan was himself pursuing. And so I spent years diving into Deleuze and things Deleuzian, using his sources as a guide to expanding my own knowledge of this history of philosophy. If Lacan was my first ‘master,’ then Deleuze was certainly the second.

Hiding behind all of this, of course, was Hegel. Lacan was openly enamored of Hegel, but Deleuze saw Hegel as the source of much of what was wrong with the philosophy of his day. And as Zizek brought Lacan into the present day, it was by means of Hegel, such that today, Lacan/Zizek and Deleuze are often seen as divided precisely by Hegel. But many use these Lacan/Zizek in tandem with Deleuze, and increasingly, the old disagreements are falling aside as folks are looking to get beyond the old conflicts, and build new things. As I’ve argued elsewhere, I think Deleuze’s hatred of Hegel is often misunderstood, and in many ways, Deleuze is much more Hegelian than he likes to admit. And many forget that Lacan’s first love was Spinoza (see Roudinesco’s biography Jacques Lacan), even as Spinoza  was a crucial inspiration for both Hegel and Deleuze. All of which is why I’ve argued that the time has come to try to think these theorists together, and see what can be built from the insights all of them bring.

Lacan and Deleuze? From Transvidual Subjectivity to Film and Beyond 

How might it be possible to bring Deleuze and Lacan productively together? One place to start would clearly be cinema. It seems pretty clear to me that the two most important theoretical approaches to film today are those presented by Lacanian versions of psychoanalytic film theory, and the counter models proposed by Deleuze. Many film theorists draw upon both of these theorists, even if for radically opposed purposes.

And this is because these two models are divided by a radically different approach to subjectivity. While many would see this as reason to keep these approaches separate, I feel they are in fact complementary, precisely because they differ on this point, even as they decompose subjectivity, Lacan from within and Deleuze from without, in ways which sync nicely with various reworkings of subjectivity occuring in our post-modern times, and with many potential links to networked forms of subjectivity.

That is, if Lacanian/Zizekian theory explodes subjectivity from within, Deleuzian models shatter it from without, and they meet in the middle at cinema. Ultimately I believe these can all be knit together by means of networked models, and the bridge I see helping us do this is the work of the relatively obscure psychoanalytic theorist W.R.Fairbairn. By means of Fairbairn, I think we can begin to weave together a model which can help synthesize the insights of both Lacan and Deleuze, bringing together both film theory and contemporary cognitive science within a networked model of mind, world, and experience.

But who was W.R. Fairbairn, and why haven’t most people working in film theory, philosophy, or therapy heard of him? Ronald Fairbairn was a Scottish psychoanalyst, most of whose works were written in the early 1950′s, the time during which Lacan was just starting to formulate his work in his public seminars. Working within the object-relations tradition which grew from the work of Melanie Klein after she moved to London to avoid Nazism, Fairbairn was a contemporary of D.W. Winnicott, someone whose work was crucially influential on Lacan, particularly in his development of the concept of the object a out of Winnicott’s notion of transitional objects. Lacan was also in close dialogue with the work of Melanie Klein, and in many ways, his notion of a subject occupying the registers of the symbolic and imaginary, as stages of development and also psychic positions, is developed from Klein’s notion of the depressive and paranoid positions, respectively.

Not too many pictures of Fairbairn, but here's one in middle age.

There’s no evidence that Fairbairn knew anything of Lacan. Most of Fairbairn’s key texts were  written between 1940-5, after Lacan had delivered fragments of his mirror stage essay to the IPA conference of 1939, but before he presented his famous Rome discourse in 1953, or began his weekly seminars in Paris. While Fairbairn’s work impacted object-relations theorists after him (particularly theorists like Harry Guntrip, Michael Balint, or Christopher Bolas), unlike Winnicott and Klein, few outside the object-relations traditions seem to know of his work. While the object-relations tradition is often the dominant mode of treatment in some South American countries in which Melanie Klein’s work seems to have found its most fervent admirers, in much of the therapeutic community beyond this, objects-relations practitioners tends to be a visible minority but no more, and amongst those, only those with a philosophical bent seem to be attracted to Fairbairn’s often baroque models of the mind. I would’ve never heard of him myself, had I not spent time studying clinical psychoanalysis, in which his works were briefly discussed. Unlike many of my peers, I found his work utterly fascinating. And as I found out, this is likely because in addition to the influence of Winnicott, Klein, and Freud on his theories, he was crucially influenced by the writings of Hegel, most likely from the British Idealist tradition that indirectly influenced folks as varied as John Dewey and T.S. Eliot, before he trained as a psychoanalyst.

While most of Fairbairn’s work was written before that of Lacan and Deleuze, there’s no evidence that either of these theorists had heard of Fairbairn’s work. For much of his professional life, Fairbairn had a relatively quiet psychoanalytic private practice in Edinburgh, commuting by train down to London for conferences and to deliver his papers. He didn’t like traveling, and found the journeys to London difficult, because he had an anxiety disorder relating to urinating that made this difficult. In addition, he was a relatively shy, reserved man, and he only published a handful of papers, most of which are collected in the unassumingly titled volume Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality.

Fairbairn as a younger man.

For those wanting to know more, much of the details of what follows can be found in two crucial, lengthy papers published in this volume. The first is “A Revised Psychopathology of the Psychoses and Psychoneuroses” (1941), in which Fairbairn attempts to systematize the Kleinian model of subject-object pairs, as well as the accompanying splittings of these into good and bad aspects, into a fourfold pattern which can help account for hysterical, obsessional, paranoid, and phobic modes of defense. The manner in which he does so anticipates many of the ways in which Lacan built upon Winnicott to formulate the ways in which subjects develop defenses in regard to their positioning in fantasy in relation to the object a. The most interesting paper, however, is 1945′s “Endopsychic Structure Considered in Terms of Object Relations.” This is the paper in which Fairbairn advances perhaps the most important concept for our purposes, and which can help provide a link between Lacan and Deleuze, namely, his theory of multiple egos.

Deleuzo-Lacanianism: The Networked Ego Model of W.R. Fairbairn

Fairbairn's Diagram for Endopsychic Structure: My description simplifies a bit, getting rid of the terms 'Internal Sabateur' (as he later did) and 'Exciting Ego' (using 'Stimulating Ego' for a more common contemporary psychoanalytic term), but the structure is the same

According to Melanie Klein, subjects deal with traumatic experiences in their lives by splitting the ambivalent contents of these experiences into their acceptable, ‘good’ parts, which are integrated into the ego, and their unintegrable, ‘bad’ parts which are repressed into the unconscious. Because these aspects of a subject’s world are ‘objects’ to it, even if these are people or aspects of people, Klein refers to them as objects (building on the Freudian split between the ways subjects relate to partial-objects of their drives as well as the ‘full-objects’ which are complete people), hence the term ‘object-relations theory’ which has come to be applied to this entire school of psychoanalysis.While some later schools have reworked the notion of objects described here to call them ‘self-objects’ (particularly the ‘self-psychology’ of Heinz Kohut), in traditional object-relations theory, any object or desire or fear, which is to say, both objects and people, are referred to as objects, no matter how strange this may be to those trained in other schools of thought.

For Klein, when subjects are in what she calls the paranoid-schizoid position (a precursor of Lacan’s notion of the imaginary), they compose their egos of only good objects which are ‘contained’ in the ego, while they continually ward off attacks from the ‘bad objects’ lurking in the unconscious, and often brought to the surface by unsettling experiences in the outside world in the present. Often these experiences occur when a person who ‘contains’ bad objects in fantasy interacts with the subject, activating the bad objects lurking in their own unconscious to attack them. The subject defends by splitting things, creating ‘schizzes’, walling themselves off from the sum of the attacking bad objects by means of a large wall which is defended in full paranoid fashion, whether the subject uses what Freud would have called psychotic or neurotic modes of defense.

In Klein’s model, both good and bad objects exist between the subject and their world, and here we see how the subject is really ‘outside itself,’ for the ego of the subject is nothing more than the ‘precipitate’ of its object-relations. Lacan crucially built upon these notions in his own work. For Klein, the only way to proceed to psychic health is to try to integrate one’s bad objects, but in order for this to happen, the subject needs to leave the paranoid position, and enter the depressive position. This position is called this because often the subject can only begin to heal when they realize that in order to heal, they need to not only accept the bad objects they have been defending against, but relinquish the good objects, in order to build their ego from whole objects which aren’t split, but rather, formed of ambivalence. The defense against ambivalence is what drives the paranoid position, while the depressive position requires an understanding of the extent to which the subject itself was partially at fault for that which attacks it. Only by giving up on the fantasy that dad was an angelic presence is it possible to integrate his bad sides which contradict this, and only by integrating these aspects of one’s past does it become possible to stop being haunted by a split dynamic in the present when people reactivate this old object-relation. The role of the therapist is to incarnate the troubling object-relation via the transference, and this helps the subject to work through this object relation, and work towards integration. The only way to do this, however, is to have a depressive realization that they must give up on a crucial, ‘good’ fantasy in their past in order to stop the ‘bad’ attacks in the present. We see here precursors of Lacan’s notion of the way subjects in analysis can only move past imaginary fixations when they ‘traverse the fantasy’ that binds them to troubling relations with the object a which haunt their present, allowing a transition to a more symbolic relation to the object a, one less plagued by the aggressivity of mirror-dynamics.

Who's Afraid of Melanie Klein? Lacan sure was, I can tell you that! Just read his account of her case studies, the phallic mother really gave that anal father the creeps . . .

Fairbairn saw Klein’s model as a starting point in need of structure. In his “Psychopathology” paper, he argues that there are four primary psychic positions of defense, all of which are variations on Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position. He calls these the hysterical, obsessional, paranoid, and phobic position, and each of these has a particular relation to good and bad objects. For Fairbairn, a subject with a phobic mode of defense has internalized a good object (ie: “I’m mommy’s favorite”), yet fears an attack from an external bad object (ie: “spiders are terrifying!.” Like phobic subjects, paranoid subjects fear attacks of a bad object coming from without. But they also often have fantasies of good things coming their way, devising elaborate delusions of grandeur, dreams of saving the world, if only those evil schemers don’t get in the way! Thus, while feared objects are without, so are the good objects trying to get in.

Hysterical subjects focus on themselves, and as such, feel continually attacked by bad objects from within (ie: psychosomatic pains), but also feel they are the site of everyone’s attentions, and hence have internalized good objects that they feel everyone is after (the stress of which may then lead to the psychosomatic pains). Obsessionals, on the contrary, are fixated on things outside of them, in that they fear attack from the outside (ie: contamination fears), but desire outside stimulus even as they are frigtened of it (ie: spending large amounts of time making plans for a voyage to see the world they are too scared to do because of these very fears of contamination).

Fairbairn radicalizes this all in his 1945 paper on “Endopsychic Structure.” This is the paper in which Fairbairn moves beyond the notion that there is one subject with many object-relations, and simply says that for each object, there is also a subject or ego that relates to it. That is, there are multiple egos, and what’s more, these form a network like structure. Fairbairn shifts in this essay from talking about good and bad objects, and moves fully to a fourfold terminology of accepted/rejected, stimulating/rejecting.

For example, when a young child deals with an inconsistent parent, who is generally preoccupied but occasionally showers attention on the child, the child may accept the stimulating parent that showers attention on them, while reject the preoccupied side of the parent that seems to reject them. Later in life, they may then tend to reactivate the object relation with the stimulating object by finding a partner that showers attention on them, but very often, those who shower tons of attention in short bursts just can’t keep it up all the time, and it is very likely this will lead this person to recreate the old object-relation in the present life, by finding a person who has a similar dichotomy as their parent. Therapy would then consist of realizing that the ‘stimulating object’ of the fantasy of someone who would shower attention on them is ghost of the past which haunts the future, creating unrealistic expectations in the present, which set the subject up for a repeat of the return of the rejecting object in the same partner. Only by finding partners that are more balanced will the subject be able to have healthy relationships, and this means giving up the attempt to reincarnate the fantasy of the (over)stimulating parent in present relationships. The therapist works to incarnate this relation, and by being more balanced, helps the subject to integrate their ambivalences, in the hope that this will transfer to the wider world.

For Fairbairn, as we go through life, we are showered by experiences, and these provide raw materials from which we build our egos. At first, there are only ego-nuclei, but eventually, two major nuclei form, a stimulating nucleus and a rejecting nucleus, and these are united by a central nucleus, each of which eventually forms full egos which then do war with each other. The central ego is mostly conscious, and is composed of non-split, fully-developed object relations. But it is full of links to the two primary subsidiary egos. The stimulating ego is formed from the integrated aspects of the primary ego which are connected to unconscious, repressed stimulating aspects which often ‘supercharge’ (a modern term often used in object-relations literature to describe this sensation) our relation to a conscious aspect of an object. If a patient comes to date someone, and stays with them even though they treat them poorly, they may start to wonder if there are unconscious attractions which keep them with this person despite themselves.  To an object-relations therapist, the goal of treatment is often trying to figure out which ‘stimulating object’ unconsciously keeps this person bound to someone who treats them poorly,  thereby bringing to consciousness the attacking objects the subject often wants to keep unconscious. And here we see the other ego, namely, the attacking ego, which has not only the objects which attack the subject, which are often conscious, but also the unconscious parts of the subject that relate to this. And here we see that for Fairbairn, wherever there is an object, there is a subject, we always have an object-relation, and any aspect of such a pairing can be conscious or repressed. These fragments form the components of the central, stimulating, and rejecting ego, each of which, though primarilly the final two, have unconscious aspects whose integration form the work of therapy.

These egos, composed of various selves and objects, some conscious and some unconscious, them form the agencies which, to use Fairbairn’s terms, ‘metabolize’ incoming experiences. That is, any new experiences are shattered into terms of subject-object relations that already exist, and these shattered fragements are used to bolster, repair, and reconstruct already existing parts of these egos. Because subjects tend to operate out of fear, particularly when stressed, there is a fundamentally conservative, defensive cast to ego formations, and they often only change when they feel everything is already. Analysis is an attempt to get the subject to the point at which they can rework their own egos in ways that satisfy the conscious, central ego, rather than have the conscious, central ego obey the dictates of the often unconscious aspects of either their stimulating/seducing ego or rejecting/attacking ones.

Cognitive Science and Networked Egos

Embodied Cognition Studies: A Hierarchical Artificial Neural Network

What Fairbairn is describing here is oddly supported by advances in contemporary cognitive science. Many theorists have argued that what we call consciousness is simply synced firing between groups of neurons in the networks of our brain. Things which sync together attempt to increase the cascade of sync, and when a synced part of the brain gets big enough, it may eventually come into sync with the largest synced firing group at work in the brain at any given moment. This group of pulsating neurons in sync, continually shifting in membership yet forming a shifting core, is the part of our mind which we call conscious awareness. As the membership of the core changes, and parts of our brain go in and out of sync with the largest group, these parts go on or off line, producing the sensation of thoughts coming in and out of awareness. This notion, called the ‘dynamic core’ hypothesis, has many adherents, and is described at length in books as diverse as Randy Cotterill’s Enchanted Looms: Conscious Networks in Brains and Computers (2000) or Christoph Koch’s The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach (2004), or Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, by Steven Strogatz (2004).

One aspect of all this that’s quite interesting is that if consciousness is a dynamic shifting network, more like the membership of an online web-community or of protest movements like Occupy Wall Street than traditional notions of a stable, fixed ego, then not only is the ego continually shifting, but its various parts are always in contact with parts of our brain, which are outside of conscious awareness. For the way the brain is wired, according to a general model called ‘spreading activation,’ is that all neurons are connected to many others, so that when one neuron fires, it immediately sends messages to excite or inhibit the firing of other neurons. These connections strengthen with use. So if a particular neuron fires in sync with the dynamic core of conscious awareness, this is only because all of these in sync are linked by firing patterns which loop out of this and are out of sync with the general pattern. That is, there are contradictory firing patterns which in many ways cancel each other out, thereby allowing those which become conscious to fire without those around them inhibiting this.

What this means is that each neuron that fires is tied to an unconscious network that loops into and out of that which is not conscious at each moment. These unconscious networks support the conscious self. And since the conscious self is continually mutating in its parts, we can say it is in many senses multiple, just like the unconscious is. There are many selves, and though they have much in common, for there are patterns in the activation of the mind that are built into its wiring structures, the patterns of mutual excitation and inhibition, there is no question that Rimbaud had it right when he said “I is another.” Each of us is multiple and fragmented, as well as built out of the fragments of experience, and much of this is unconscious, with the various fragements of which we are composed connected to various unconsicous fragments.

And clearly, there are centers within these, dense transfer points, nodules which function as common modes of processing our experience. We can think of these as subsidiary egos, patterns of reading stimuli and reacting to them, subject-object pairs. And much of these structures may involve loops into other parts of the brain that cancel each other out, but whose cycles are necessary additional processes, and which may trigger others that operate outside of awareness.

Thus, it is perhaps not surprising when we say things like, “when I’m around that person, I just term into a person I don’t like, it’s like I’m someone else.” Because in fact, you are someone else, which is to say, a subsidiary ego has been activated, and this is often supported by object-relations which remain unconscious.

A Networked Cognitive Unconscious

Let’s now put this all in network terms. All parts of the brain are composed of neurons and their various nertworks, each of which can function as a hub linking others. Since the brain increases the connections between areas that fire together (a notion known as ‘long term potentiation’ or LTP, often described as a form of ‘neural Darwinism’ by figures like Gerald Edelman), these nodes and hubs not only form structures, but dynamic structures which serve as nodes within the networks between subjects and aspects of the world they encounter. And because aspects of the brain are continually trying to predict what others are going to ‘say’ to them (Jeff Hawkins calls this ‘memory-prediction,’ which he describes as the primary task of the neocortex, a process which others describe by means of notions of efference/afference copies), what we experience is in many ways shaped and filtered by our previous experiences.

The result is that there is a ‘planetary’ aspect of the way the mind seems to function. We can imagine these processing networks as planets of sorts, and new experiences as bits of space debris that get sucked to these centers of gravity that warp the spacetime around them the more mass they have. In neural terms, those processing modes with more neurons and interconnections (the dual result of LTP) tend to dominate our modes of processing, and weaving new ways of processing from underutilized networks can change this. This is often actively inhibited by networks of connections which are outside of our general awareness, and which may be difficult to hold in consciousness at the same time as others because inhibitory firings of various sorts may make this difficult. But this is why it often literally feels like our world is becomes warped, its spacetime curved, when we approach certain things in our experience that scare us, attract us, etc.

And because many of these networks are tied into parts of the body which release more globally modulating chemicals, from limbic system neuromodulators like serotonin (the ‘happy chemical’) to cortisol (the ‘stress’ chemical) and adrenaline (the ‘flight or fight’ chemical which is linked to cortisol), it may feel like our very bodies are resisting the attempt to activate certain underutilized networks in the brain. Hence, what we generally refer to as un or semi-conscious phenomenon, experiences of resistance, defense, etc. For when simply thinking a thought, even unconsciously, makes your body release chemicals that make you feel uncomfortable, even below the threshold of conscious awareness, might it not make sense to try to avoid these unconscious networks, even if one is unconscious of these very processes? And since the brain is a pattern recognizing machine, and since narrative is one of the most encompassing types of patterns we use, might we not them come up with all sorts of elaborate justifications for why we did these sorts of things, so as to protect ourselves from having to think it may have been done by parts of ourselves outside of our control? For in fact, anyone who studies the brain speaks extensively of parts of the brain that operate below conscious awareness (think of the systems that recognize the letters you’re reading, such that you don’t have to consciously recognize each letter). While therapists speak of unconscious entities, and these notions are quite useful for therapeutic purposes, this is increasingly finding support in the very findings of cognitive science, even though it is unlikely that therapists and cognitive scientists will speak in similar language about these issues any time soon, mostly because their goals are often radically distinct.

Networked Subjectivity and Film Theory

All of which brings us back to film theory. If Lacan’s model of subjectivity describes the experience of subjects in cinematic terms, as a product of fantasies that subjects continually engage with as if they were playing an interactive video-game of sorts, Deleuze describes the entire world, in and beyond human awareness, as cinematic in nature. Human experience is only one type of experience, and since Deleuze argues that all entities in the universe, following Bergson, can be thought of as various forms of refraction, absorption, transmission, and reflection of light, then bodies and their various modes of experiencing are simply complex intertwinings and foldings of light and its various impediments, refractions, transmissions, and reflections. When images absorb light rather than pass it on, the absorb sliced sections of the this light, called images, and they themselves become images for others to experience in the process. When these absorbing images keep aspects of images they absorb within them we speak of memory, and when memory links up with various new incoming images, we have the basic components of consciousness, self-consciousness, etc. For Deleuze, not only is experience cinematic, the world is cinematic.

All of which can be linked with networked models of the world, inspired by complex systems studied, particularly when combined with aspects of quantum physics which literally argue that the various aspects of our world of experience can be thought of as modulations of various vibrations of various rays and waves of the stuff of what is, of which light is a major component. Spacetime then becomes a function of these vibrational patterns, and the networks formed within these are the basic stuff of all that is. Consciousness is simply the folding of this basic stuff onto itself, such a network compares past modifications with present ones, and self-consciousness is the comparison of past comparisons with present ones.

If all the world can be thought of as networks of patterns within vibrational waves, there is no reason to split mind and body, for experience is simply what all the world does, even if it does it more intensely when networks of this vibrational stuff are more complexly intertwined. This notion, that all matter has the potential for more developed forms of awareness, is known as ‘panpsychism,’ and is increasingly finding adherents within cognitive studies from researchers who find the mind-body dualism increasingly unable to explain various aspects of mental phenomenon, due to evidence from the study of organic minds or in artificial intelligence. Panpsychism has nothing to do with psychics or new-age phenomenon, on the contrary, it is increasingly the position of serious and respected scientists and philosophers. Often describing themselves by means of the less ‘out there’ sounding term ‘emergent cognition theory,’ mainstream theorists from Antonio Damasio, Andy Clarke, and David Chalmers have been powerful advocates for such an approach.

A lot of work remains to be done if this scientific set of models, which embrace everything from complex systems science to research on artificial neural networks and experimental mobotics, can productively come together with fields in the humanities like film theory and various philosophies, but one of the tasks of the networkological project is start doing this.

Building on Fairbairn, it becomes possible to begin discussing the various self-object pairs which link subjects and their world, which operate in the space between them, extimate formations which can occur in the world of external ‘physical’ experience, inner ‘mental’ experience, and/or ‘virtual’ filmic experience. These self-object pairs, often parts of scenes and narratives which comprise what psychoanalysis calls ‘fantasy,’ which film often works to stage, or the fragmented and shattered parts thereof, are really the ways our brain attempts to organize its own self-perception of its dynamic processes in relation to the world beyond it. And these self-object pairs, which are really multi-pole networks which represent temporary stable patterns within the dynamic networks of the world, exist in various degrees and types of complexity so as to compose the world beyond us, the world within us, and the experience which encompasses all and in between.

I plan to develop these models more in future works, but the basic outlines are here. It’s likely that I’ll want to integrate this more with the work of Felix Guattarri’s account of sub-subjective processes of parts of signs and various assemblages and abstract-machines, as well as unformed matter, in his fascinating text Machinic Unconscious (1978). There’s also Hjelmslev’s fascinating notion of purport, and how this relates to sign production via expression and content, a model employed extensively by Deleuze and Guattari in Thousand Plateaus (1981). There’s also a lot by Russian semioticians that I think is useful for think about the ways signs circulate within masses of people. In particular, the work of Yuri Lotman is great for thinking about economies of signs and their fragments, and I also like the world of Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev, two early members of the Bakhtin circle. For all these theorists, subjects are the effects and products of networks, as are the which they use to communicate and form themselves, all from microfragments.

And it is at the level of microfragments that cognitive science once again comes into the picture. For if there is one thing that artificial neural networks have shown us, it’s how figures like letters are composed of microfeatures which are reconstructed on the fly by the brain from dynamic mappings of their shards. In fact, we never remember any scene in memory, we always reconstruct it from the tiniest of fragments of experience, and in this manner, the brain manages to be radically distributed as well as radically efficient. Bergson was right when he argued that memories were nowhere in particular in the brain, but as if ‘everywhere’ in the brain. For in fact, they are. While the instructions for assembling their aspects are often localized in various ways, the parts and the instructions are always in radically different parts of the brain, and often with multiple slightly different copies of each. No wonder we feel like a teeming mass of people inside of each of us – we are!

Occupy our Homes: Cross-Activism

“In contemporary capitalism, race it the modality through which class is lived.” -Stuart Hall

*     *     *

Seems that Occupy Wall Street has, like a living organism evolving to various environments, mutated again. It has now become Occupy our Homes, and in one of the poorest parts of New York City, East New York. From the HuffingtonPost:

BROOKLYN, N.Y. — Until three days ago, Teresa Bolton didn’t consider herself part of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Bolton is 55 and lives in East New York, Brooklyn, an hour’s train ride from the skyscrapers of Manhattan’s financial district, where the movement was born. But when occupiers appeared on her block this week, as part of a new national campaign to help homeless families move into vacant houses and resist foreclosure-related evictions, she opened her door.

“Occupy Wall Street came to me. I didn’t go seek it out,” she said . . . The street was relatively quiet on Friday afternoon. The exception: a few neighbors milling about on the sidewalk and a steady stream of white 20-somethings filing in and out of a house down the street. The neighborhood is home to mostly poor African Americans and Caribbean immigrants; Occupy Wall Street protesters are overwhelmingly white. On Friday, those activists were the only white people spotted in the neighborhood, besides the police officers stationed nearby. The house had a large banner stretched across it that read, “BANKS STEAL HOMES,” and a sign perched on the roof declaring, “FORECLOSE ON BANKS NOT PEOPLE, OCCUPY WALL ST.”

On Tuesday, the street had been packed with hundreds of protesters, community organizers and neighbors who joined a marching tour of foreclosed homes in the area. Out here, there are plenty: East New York has the highest foreclosure rate in the city. The march ended at the house with the banners, where a homeless family of four plans to live. For now, more than a dozen occupiers are staying there, along with the father, Alfredo Carrasquillo, as they make renovations and address lingering security concerns.

How and if the authorities respond to the squatters will partly determine the future of Occupy Our Homes, a national campaign aimed at the nation’s foreclosure crisis. So far, police in East New York have observed but not attempted to enter the premises.

Here we see how activist movements radically grow, mutate, and become more than just about themselves, but a general call for change. In other posts I’ve called this ‘cross-activism.’ Cross-Activism is when an activist group starts to protest for the demands of other oppressed groups, in an attempt to form bonds of commonality.

The Occupy Real Estate movement described here shows us how this works. The largely white twenty-somethings of Occupy Wall Street decide to take someone else’s concerns as their own, in this case, the largely African-American neighborhood of East New York. In doing so, people who may have considered the aims of Occupy Wall Street distant from their concerns now see it in a new light.

There is danger here, of course, namely, colonization. It’s quite possible that the Occupy Wall Street protesters could simply use the poor folks of East New York for their own aims. But that doesn’t seem to be what’s happened here. Reading the rest of this article, it seems that there’s been an exchange, a mutuality of benefit.

Learning from France in May ’68: From the University to the Factory

A similar thing happened in 1968 in France. May ’68 is a monumentally important moment in French history. It began in the university system, when students began to protest against the fact that they had no say in the curricula, and hence, had to learn what old-fashioned teachers wanted, despite the fact that much of this was increasingly out of touch with the needs of modern society. The protesters took over the Sorbonne and various other university structures in the Latin Quarter. And the rest of France saw this as a local issue, between students and faculty.

Until a decisive moment came. Some of the student leaders decided to go visit another protest going on at nearly the same time. At the Renault car factory at the outskirts of town, factory workers were on strike against management. When a group of students showed up to protest with them, for factory worker rights, at first the factory labor union leaders were confused. What were these young, highly educated kids doing at this working class protest full of older workers with little in common with them? The students argued that what they shared was opposition to similar types of oppression, that management of factories and the universities were part of the same larger problem.

The leaders of the workers and the students began to talk, lean each other’s language, and plan to protest together. When they soon called for a general strike all across France, a critical mass had been achieved. Four million people joined the general strike. Paris ground to a halt, as did cities across France. The government nearly toppled. While May ’68 ultimately didn’t change the government, it had a massive influence on France from then on. And it certainly reformed curricula, leading to, amongst other things, the formation of the ‘experimental’ university at Vicennes (now St. Dennis). For more on these issues, see the work of, amongst others, Kristin Ross, in her recent book May ’68 and its Afterlives.

While many have debated whether or not the successes of the movement, there’s a lesson to be learned here. Factory workers were striking for their own rights, students for their own. According to Deleuze and Guatarri, in their work Anti-Oedipus, each of these groups can be called a ‘subjected group, which is to say, they are oppressed, and are fighting against this own oppression. And as I’ve argued before, any idiot can argue against their own oppression!

But it’s much harder to be what Deleuze and Guatarri call a ‘subject group,’ which they describe as a group which is against oppression as such, not merely in content (ie: particular oppressions), but also form.  That is, rather than fight solely against one’s own oppression, one fights against this and the oppressions of others.

Towards Languages of the Oppresed: Laclau, Freire, and Leaning to Speak Each Other’s Language

Political theorist Ernesto Laclau has argued that this is precisely how coalitions which can actually create change ultimately form. He says that it becomes possible to create a ‘counter-hegemonic bloc’ when various oppressed groups join together. The difficulty, of course, is that they aren’t all oppressed in the same way, and they need to literally forget a language which can allow them to organize. This is what I’ve called a ‘language of the oppressed,’ a language that allows group to see common cause and fight against the dominant powers that keep them all separately oppressed. And its important to note that such a language is never unitary, it is always multiple, shifting, changing, for power and oppression are constantly changing, and manifesting differently in different situations. Languages of the Oppressed need to be as multiple as the forms of oppression they seek to fight.

We can look at Occupy our Homes for an example of how this happens, from the same article as before:

On Monday, people associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement knocked on the neighboring door — where James, who declined to give his last name, lives — and explained their plans to move a homeless family into the vacant house. The group spoke with James’ wife, who told him about the plan.

“I’ll be honest,” said James, 44, who has lived on the street for six years. “My first thought was, OK, are the police going to come here, shoot up the place and drag people out the door? Bullets don’t know addresses.”

But there are also five vacant houses on the block, James said. That night, he thought about the number of people who have lost jobs, homes and their sense of security since the financial downturn began.

“Basically, I am always going to be in support of anything that is for people,” he said. “I agree with this concept. It is better to foreclose on banks than it is to foreclose on people.”

James remains concerned that the police may pay an unexpected and messy visit next door, putting his wife, four children, and grandchild in danger. But he also hopes that the idea of occupying foreclosed homes will catch on around the country.

Just before noon on Friday inside Lechonera Restaurante 2, a Dominican restaurant down the road, the lunch crowd is busy with plates of stewed pork, rice and beans, and heavily seasoned fish. While no one appears to be talking about the nearby occupation or its broader goals at Lechonera, an Occupy sign hangs in the front window. On top of the toilet in the restaurant’s only bathroom, a copy of the Occupy Wall Street Journal waited for a reader. The publication is produced by people associated with the movement.

“A man came by on Monday, if I remember correctly, and he told me what they were doing,” said Evcely Olivera in Spanish. She has owned and operated Lechonera for seven years in this spot. “He asked if they could hang a sign in the window, and I said yes, of course. I like the general idea.”

Olivera said that although she is familiar with Occupy Wall Street, she does not speak enough English to follow all its activities and organizing efforts. Still, she likes that someone has come to the neighborhood and said something about all the wasted, vacant houses taken from families who never had much money.

Back at Bolton’s house, her husband, Doyle Coleman, stood on the porch painting the front of their home. The two of them weren’t concerned that the occupiers are mostly white or that someone would be living down the street from them without a lease and not paying rent.

“People come into this country every day from all over the world, so what’s the matter with an American citizen occupying anything in the United States?” she asked.

“Well said,” Coleman responded, nodding.

The couple have been renovating their home as they could afford it. The floors and stairs are currently stripped down to the bare wood. “No credit cards, no contractors, no debt,” Coleman said, dipping his paintbrush and delicately touching up the frame of the house.

Inside, above the computer, hangs a framed photograph of Dr. Martin Luther King. Bolton thinks there’s a strong parallel between the Occupy movement and the civil rights movement.

She was born not long after Rosa Parks refused to obey bus driver James F. Blake’s order to give up her seat to make room for a white passenger. When Bolton was a small child, after the law was lifted — but when racism in the South was still a powerful force — she rode the bus with her mother and wanted to sit upfront, but her mother, worried about her daughter’s safety, insisted they sit in the back. Bolton sees the occupation down the street as a similar gesture of defiance.

“The difference now,” she said, “is nobody is telling them, ‘Get out.’ People here are saying, ‘Stay right here. Stay here. Stay put.’”

Notice that Bolton finds strong parallels to the civil rights movement. Here is a language of struggle that is already there in the local community. Occupy our Homes needs to learn to speak that language. And folks like Bolton can teach them this language. Notice how Bolton says “Basically, I am always going to be in support of anything that is for people . . . It is better to foreclose on banks than it is to foreclose on people.”

According to political theorist Paulo Freire, there needs to be a pedagogy of the oppressed, which is to say, various oppressed people need to teach each other how to understand the ways in which each is oppressed. And in today’s world, all are oppressed in one way or another by the capitalist worldsystem. So the Occupy Wall Street organizers, while often white and twenty-something, need to listen to Bolton and others like him, because he is a teacher, one who can show them how to forge a language of the oppressed suited to the conditions, one that can help broaden the movement so that Occupy our Homes becomes national, grass-roots, and diverse. Systems in dominance always stay in power by means of ‘divide and conquer,’ and only the formation of a language of the oppressed can help bring groups together to have great enough numbers to fight back against tyranny, even if of a majority, one of the greatest fears of the American founding fathers.

For example, we see that Bolton uses the word ‘people,’ and differentiates this from ‘banks,’ even though the Supreme Court has recognized corporations as ‘persons.’ Bolton is teaching us how to broaden the language of the movement. Laclau argues that counter-hegemonic blocs need to use certain terms from various parts of a struggle in a way that allows them to become ‘surfaces of inscription’ for the needs of many different groups. For example, by arguing for ‘people,’ we could easily broaden this movement to fight for immigrants rights. Why are people being denied healthcare, when they work and live here? This allows for a displacement of the rhetoric of citizenship, even as it also displaces the language of corporate personhood. Here is a powerful word that can be deployed in a manner which can bring various anti-hegemonic groups together, while fighting the corporate personhood that is angering the Occupy Wall Street protesters so much, as well as distorting our political system (for example, the Citizens United decision).

Learning the Language of 'People' versus 'Banks'

While the fight for ‘people’ might mean slightly different things for each group in a coalition, they all nevertheless see the fundamental similarities, enough to find common cause. And that’s the point. The term doesn’t have to mean the same thing to all these folks, in fact, it’s best if it ‘refracts’ into local variations, because this allows it to mutate, grow, and develop as circumstances require. Policing purity of word usage is what corporations should do, not activists. Diversity is the strength of activist groups. And that’s precisely why Occupy our Homes is such a great start.

Learning to be Taught, and the Economics of Cross-Activist Protest-Gifting

In all this, it’s essential that the Occupy Wall Street folks approach this as students going to meet their teachers: teach us about how you’ve been oppressed, help us learn the language of your struggle, the symbols of anti-oppression that moved you in the past, and help us find ways to have common cause. And of course, whenever protesters first show up to do some cross-activism, they have to prove themselves to be something other than colonizers, or even tourists. Rather, they need to win trust, and that only comes by time, and humility, the willingness to be taught. Only others are the experts on their oppression, no matter how many facts we have about the suffering of others, first-person testimony is the only way to really learn, the only way to be open to being transformed into an instrument of the liberation of someone else, and potentially, vice-versa.

This is why cross-activism always has to start with an open gift. You go to someone else’s protest, and you ask to join, to show that you want to help something happen which does not directly benefit yourself. Fighting for someone else starts a circuit, where they want to return gift with gift, and this brings about the potential for exchange. You came to my protest, now I’ll go to yours. You asked me about my oppression, so I’ll ask about yours. You wanted to be taught by me, so I’ll allow myself to be taught by you.

Students join Factory Workers' Protest: The Renault Factory outside Paris at Billancourt

And if done right, this sort of politics of refraction can bring about the sort of massive changes that we saw in May ’68. Or when the white-freedom riders joined the civil-rights protests in the American South. This is why queer folks should start protesting for immigrants rights and rights of African-Americans. Even if for nothing more than self-interest! These groups have historically, due to the fact that the Church has provided bulwarks against oppression by whites, been skeptical of LGBT rights. But if queer folks start doing some cross-activism, watch these barriers come down. Al Sharpton, for example, is a strong advocate of LGBT rights. How did that happen? I’m not sure. But I’m thrilled to see his cross-activism every time he argues for LGBT rights.

The only way we can develop cross-activism in others is to start with ourselves. Someone has to take the first step, show up at somebody else’s protest, ask someone else how can I advocate for you?

It all starts with the gift, the gift of protest, of listening, of being humble enough to be taught, even by someone you might not normally see as a teacher, someone without formal education. No-one can teach me what it’s like to be homeless but someone who’s lived it, and I can’t imagine, no matter how many books I read, what that could be like, until I’m willing to be taught by first hand experience. Book learning is great preparation, but we need to train our bodies, our affective systems as well, we need to have faces in our heads so we can visualize who we fight for, real live people that can motivate us to make things right. And that requires person to person contact. According to Samuel L. Delaney, it’s only when we put ourselves in situations beyond those filled with people ‘like us’ that we grow. He calls these ‘contact situations.’ But how do you produce real contact?

Perhaps it can start by showing up at someone’s protest, saying, I’m here to help, teach me.

A Crystal-Image of Refraction: General Form interacting with local conditions to produce differences that share a family resemblance, but without the original/copy dichotomy

In a recent article in The Atlantic, Sara Horowitz, the founder of the amazing organization The Freelancers Union, describes various new forms of economic  subjectivity in what she calls ‘The Sharing Economy,’ here’s some quotes:

Kickstarter. Zipcar. Shareable. Etsy. Kiva. Prosper. Airbnb.

These and other “collective consumption” companies are part of the new economy arising out of necessity, as traditional businesses and government are increasingly unable to meet Americans’ needs and provide basic supports.

This sharing economy is based on people coming together to create their own markets (Airbnb), their own products, (Etsy), and their own currency (TimeBanks). It relies on shared needs, trust, and the belief that the group is stronger than the individual . . . collective purchasing and goods exchange (Zipcar and SnapGoods), solving social problems (Open Ideo), aggregating information (Ushahidi), financial lending (Prosper and Kickstarter), networking and connecting (Connect.me), office space sharing (Loosecubes), teaching (Skillshare), and even child care (babysitting co-ops).

Horowitz describes the ways in which these are creating alternative economies that allow people bypass or act as collective agents within the markets dominated by large monopolistic corporations. In each of these, individuals lend a portion of themselves, a dividuality, to the collective, for as long as they participate, but the result is a consistent subjectivity, despite the fact that its parts keep changing. Ultimately this is like an organism, for our cells all change over, and the nutrients we consume from food enter our system and then often leave, yet we remain the same.

From Mob and Nation to Corporation and Protest-Movement

Is this different from a traditional group like a mob, nation, or corporation? Mobs and nations tend to be composed of a core of sameness over time, such as a territory, or a particular group of people, while corporations often change radically while appearing outwardly the same, even as Occupy-style protests appear to made of completely different actors each time, yet there’s a sameness of purpose, belief, and method. Herein lies the distributedness that differentiates both corporations and protest-movements from nations and mobs, in that they have life-spans despite changes in their physical components. What’s more, there’s a porosity to them. While people are generally either part of a mob or not, and are generally allowed one national affiliation at a time, corporations and protest-movement don’t mind sharing parts with others.

Whether these are truly ‘between’ levels of individual and group depends on what you consider as determining each level, which is ultimately relative. An individual human is a group of cells, after all, and to the US Supreme Court, corporations are persons. But I think its still pertinent to call these types of groups ‘transvidual’ because they don’t have individual humans as their components, but rather, their parts. This is why in previous posts I’ve spoken of Facebook and ‘the wave’ at a stadium as examples of this. While corporations have been around for a very long while, these are early transvidual formations which have only radicalized in form as capitalism has gotten more globalized, informatic, and distributed. And likely there have always been resistance movements (ie: Lollards, Levellers, etc.) like today’s occupy movements, and what we see today is simply a more extremely distributed mutation for the age of the internet.

Robustness versus Cancer

But if even corporations are becoming distributed, how can we tell ‘good’ from ‘bad’ forms of distributed, transvidual subjectivity? Hardt and Negri’s notion of Empire seems to argue that contemporary multi-nationals are often distributed, readily cross borders and change forms, and seem to be everywhere but nowhere. This is quite similar to what Deleuze and Guatarri call a ‘resonance machine,’ in which various different matters in a system end up having similar forms to a dominant power by means of its indirect influence upon them. For example, no-one tells people they must speak in the political memes used by their newscasters, but I hear people talk in soundbites fed to them by the media all the time, exhibiting resonance in content as well as form.

Hardt and Negri opposed to this the notion of a ‘multitude’, of which Occupy Wall Street is a great example. These are aleatory, temporary ‘beings-in-common’ that form in relation to specific situations, and arise at the margins of empire as alternate forms of subjectivity. In many senses, they are also resonance machines, because they seem to form semi-spontaneously, yet what they resonate is the desire for difference rather than sameness. They are anti-empire, so to speak, in content as well as form. For while empire-style resonance machines are distributed, they serve underlying networks that are ultimately centralizing and paranoid. multitude-style resonance machines resonate only in opposition to the pull of centralization they see encroaching into the world around them. They are distributed not only at a surface level, but down to their pores.

Terrorist networks, globalized postmodern monopoly-capitalist networks, and army networks may be distributed, but underneath lies the paranoid, centralizing core, and here we see the ultimate structural difference, which is to say, distributed structure in these cases serves paranoid ends. This is opposed to most living organisms, which use centralizing, paranoid structures, and often rely on them, for ultimately distributed ends. But how can we tell the difference?

Most of life we know of uses a single currency, the molecule ATP, to transport energy. Hardly a diversified economy! And most life we know of uses DNA/RNA to store information, and we all know that the form of a representational system impacts its potential contents. Most forms of life also guard their boundaries as if their lives depend on it, and in fact, they often do.  That said, these systems evolved when life was at its most fragile, and they have turned out not only to be incredibly efficient, but also startingly robust. Which is to say, they can give rise to massive diversity of living forms, and have been used precisely to this end. To mess with them could actually lead to a massive destruction of diversity. These centralizing aspects have given rise to massive diversity, and support it. While we should be open to other forms (ie: forms of life not-based on ATP or RNA/DNA), at least unless they attack us or harm us somehow, it seems that these types of centralization actually serve diversification, not the other way around.

Terrorist networks, monopolistic post-modern capitalist networks, and army networks foster distributedness precisely as a way to short circuit actual distributed networks. Terrorist cells can spring up anywhere, yet they always have the same ideology, and their goal is to enforce resonance with this ideology by means of affective waves of fear. The very distributedness of these networks makes them liable to differences popping up between the groups, and here we see that distributedness has a way of trying to gain the upper hand, so that the resonance has to be incredibly rigid lest reflection become refraction. Army networks often use small, distributed agents, yet they often have a centralized training and protocol to help them operate according to the same form. As Alexander Galloway has argued, protocol is the manner in which control gets soft, yet remains devious and mobile in these types of formations. And capitalist networks use the very algorithms of life, like evolution, to evolve ever meaner corporations, giving rise to products that are memes themselves, and yet they do so not only by means of a centralized information carrier, namely money, but this is also a value carrier (like ATP), which becomes an end in itself. While living organisms always increase their ATP stores and reinvest them in more life, which continually adapts to changing environments, capitalism uses money to reshape environments to the increase of money.

Humans of course are the most able to change their environments of any species. And this eventually become a question of ethics. How do we want to change our environment? Because in doing so, we change the very structures that evolve us, and hence, this becomes a question of values. Do we want to evolve ourselves, and our supra-individual structures, like corporations, to make us money producing machines, or robustness producing machines?

A Reflection Matrix: The Goal of Centralizing Networks

Here we see a key term from network ethics, ‘robustness,’ and this term originates in various complex systems theories about natural organisms, material systems, and economic actors like corporations. A robust system is one which has sustainable complexity. Network ethics is based on the maxim ‘let all your networks operate at maximum robustness,’ where all is seen to include all those with which you are intertwined. A robustness producing machine value complexity, which is a hell of a lot more than money, but rather, the ability to produce sustainable growth, not just in quantity, but also quality of life. And to be sustainable, a system must be distributed to varying degrees, which is to say, everyone must benefit, otherwise, it will eventually collapse from within from its instabilities.

Repetition of the Same or of the Different: Reflection versus Refraction and a tale of Radio

This is why it perhaps makes sense to think of monopolistic forms of capitalist networks as cancerous in structure. They use distributed means to grow, yet growth in exactly the same form is the only thing they seem to desire. The result is the reproduction of only one type of value and the structures that mirror it. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze differentiates between repetition of the same (which he sometimes calls ‘clothed’ repetition, for it hides a core of difference just trying to burst out from underneath the guise of sameness) and repetition with a difference.  Capitalist networks reproduce the same in everything they touch, and if they use differentiation, it is only in the service of this ultimate freezing of everything into one form. As Henry Ford famously said, “have any color you want, so long as it’s black!” Today it’s “have any color iPod, the choice makes you free!” The notion that there’s other types of choice is covered over by this pseudo-choice which only leads to diversity so long as it feeds back into pure reproduction, thereby eclipsing much of what diversity aims to do.

This Pattern is Alive!: Subverting repetition from within. Upon close inspection, there's many centers, many figures, many differences between figure and ground, and fewer repetitions than might appear. Now if only the sizes varied, and the patterns were a little less resonant of each other . . .

We see the effects of this, for example, in the way the deregulation of markets often allows smaller producers to be swallowed up by big-ones, resulting in a homogenization of product. The radio stations in New York City, where I grew up, were decent as a kid, because there was competition between local stations that while not incredibly profitable, had to stay diverse to compete with each other. And since New York is a diverse place, the stations had to be diverse. Once the national radio station markets were deregulated, most stations in the country were bought up by massive corporations, and now most radio in the nation is controlled by 2-3 mega-companies. They’ve largely standardized programming across the nation, so each city has one of each of the most profitable niches. As a result, there’s now no diversity, and each city has whatever is the least-common denominator, and hence, the most profitable. Since profit rather than quality drives the competition, the radio stations now are terrible. This has lead to the rise of satellite radio, which is now incredibly diverse. But one has to pay mega-corporations to gain access to it. Here we see the progressive drainge of diversity from one market, and the monetarization of it in another, as two sides of the same movement.

Previously, however, each station in each city was in local contact with their listeners, and what they considered ‘quality’ varied from city to city. Since ‘quality’ drives profits if there are many small stations with niche-constituencies, as opposed to mass listenership with broad ones because there are no other options, local stations diversified, they ‘refracted’ their contexts, rather than ‘reflect’ a centralized programming algorithm. Here we see the crucial difference between reflection of the centralized same, and refraction which combines local and general. The problem with too much reflection is that it’s not robust. While stations became more profitable, overall listenership started to decrease, giving rise to demand for satellite radio. People want diversity, but while it was previously free, now they have to pay for it.

Architectural Capitalism

This is a pump of sorts, a pump of surplus. People and systems will always demand difference to some extent, and any system which provides pure sameness will, as Marx famously said, ‘dig their own graves.’ Capitalist systems try to maximize the amount of sameness they can get away with, so as to maximize their reproduction. They go between being deadly cancers, and cancers that you can barely survive with. But the question is, why have a cancerous growth in the first place?

How to Avoid Being Maximized . . .

The question, of course, is how we could survive without capitalism. This is where the study of complexity economics is essential. Texts like Eric Beinhocker’s fantastic The Origin of Wealth describe how it’s possible to see corporations as organisms, markets as evolutionary algorithms, and start to question how we could evolve corporations better according to values other than cancerous growth that can put the whole system in danger. Others have argued the need for alternate currencies, based on things other than just reproduction. For example, the ‘cap-and-trade’ model of using carbon credits to help lower pollution creates a market, but one for carbon-credits. This creates an algorithm which has corporations do what they do best, namely, compete, but to pollute less! It uses market dynamics, but in the name of a value, such as clean air, other than pure reproduction. It’s talking capitalism’s own language, yet it does so to make it say different things than just ‘more!’

Some have described this as Capitalism 3.0, and there’s actually a clever book of precisely that title. Whatever we call it, it would be silly to throw market systems away, for they are algorithms for maximizing efficiency. The question, however, is to try to use them to maximize things we value. Otherwise, they will maximize us for their own ends.

One of the most incredible works of architecture I've ever seen: The Hall of the Two Sisters in the Alhambra, Granada. The dome is composed of a multitude of tiny, pixel-like cells known as muquarna.

“The universe is not dualistic, but folded, so spirit is separated from matter only by degree” - Laura Marks, Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (2010, p. 271).

*     *     *

As someone deeply invested in using networks to understand a wide range of phenomenon, I was thrilled to see Laura Marks’ new book Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art. But I had little sense of just how amazing this book was going to be. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Beyond art, this is a work of philosophy, and I’ll get to Marks’ ontology shortly. But it’s worth saying that while not a systematic primer in Islamic thought, but rather a work of radical syncretism, Marks’ text can also nicely serve as an excellent introduction to classical Arabic philosophy (philosophy written in Arabic language), describing everything from Islamic atomism and Illuminationism to crucial figures like ibn-Sina and al-Sijistani. Certainly after reading this text, with its excellent appetizers of various forms of Arabic philosophy drawn from its history (and with clear mastery), I immediately began to research these various schools in greater detail. When you see quotes like the following, you can’t but imagine the sheer wealth of thought we Euro-Americans have been robbed of by not being taught Islamic philosophy as a regular part of our philosophical curricula: ”Know this world is a mirror from head to foot/ In every atom there are a hundred blazing suns” (Shaykh Mahmud Shabistani). One doesn’t have to imagine far to see a forerunner of Leibniz here, and in my introduction to Islamic philosophy so far these moments seem to arise often.

How sameness can give rise to diversity: Interactive architecture that changes shape as you move within it, my own photograph, from the great mosque of Cordoba, Spain.

Marks’ goals, however, are wider than an introduction to philosophies under-studied in the Euro-American world. Building upon a Deleuzian ontology, and making use of Peirce and Bergson as primary interlocutors, Marks develops a series of links between these contemporary philosophers, and the algoritmicity that links new media art, computation, and various forms of Islamic art, architecture, and philosophy. More than a work about art and architecture, or even new media, this is a work about our age and its increasingly algorithmic foundations. The stakes couldn’t be higher, or more general in import.

Marks’ Algorithmic Ontology: Infinity, Information, and Image

Marks starts off her work by describing her ontology of enfoldment. She synthesizes Deleuzian and Peircian models to argue for three levels of understanding computational formations, which she describes as infinity, information, and image. To put this in more familiar Deleuzian terms, these are the notions of the virtual, code, and the actual. In everyday language, we have computational images (ie: webpages), and these are always produced by algorithms (ie: computer code), a term computer scientists have devised for anything that can be thought of as a “set of instructions,” often described as a similar to recipes in a cookbook. Computational images and algorithms are two of Marks’ three levels, but they need to be brought together by something a third level, because there needs to be something to activate code and actualize its potentials, bringing to life what Deleuze and Guatarri might call a ‘abstract machine’ as a ‘concrete assemblage,’ which in this case, takes the form of an image. That which activates code is what Marks calls infinity, which is her third level, along with algorithm and image.

The Legible Universe: Words with Wings (right) or mirrored into Images (left)

Building on the Deleuzian commitment to immanence, Marks works to describe how her notions of infinity, algorithm, and image can be intertwined using Deleuze’s notion of ‘the fold.’ For Marks, images are unfolded patterns/codes, and patterns/codes are enfolded infinity. Or to proceed the other way, infinity unfolds into code which unfolds into image. Taken to its extreme, everything we see can be thought of as simply enfoldment and infinity, with code as the twist in the Moebial band that intertwines the one within the other without ever breaking into an otherworldly dualism. Building upon the Arabic distinction between that which is zahir (surface) and batin (hidden, enfolded) Marks argues that Islamic art can help us see the potentials of an “immanent infinite” hidden in the world around us, waiting to be unfolded in all its potential differentiations.

For an example of Mark’s tri-level model in relation to our contemporary mediascape, when we encounter a webpage, the image on our screen is the result of a code which is the potential for this webpage, which needs to activated by something which can bring potential to life, namely, energy. Energy actualizes the potential webpage within code, and in this sense, the energy can be thought of as a pure virtuality, code as a specific virtuality (a ‘potential to be x’), and image is an actualization of code by energy. But all of this is simply unfolded energy in different forms, which is to say, infinity, information/code, or image. While Marks is clear that she is slightly modifying Deleuze, she does so in a Peircian manner, which is to say, in a manner friendly to Deleuzian methods, and the result is a world composed of energy unfolded into signs and signs into things, even though ultimately these are all versions of the same.

Try to trace a pattern without finding yourself in another one: Virtual Proliferation and the Incompossibility of Control in Geometric Art, Exterior from Registan in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.

And while Marks’ attentions are clearly on new media formations, she seems to also be describing a general ontology which aspects of contemporary theory, classical Arabic art and philosophy, and new media formations echo. Building upon Deleuze’s notion of an ontology of light present in the Cinema books, which itself builds on the Bergson of Matter and Memory, Marks describes crucial links between this model and various forms of Arabic philosophy. For Deleuze and Bergson in these works, the world can be conceived of as a pure interplay of light and various reflectors, refractors, and impediments (a notion not all that far fetched to contemporary quantum theorists), such that impediments subtract from pure transmission of light to give rise to bodies, perceptions, affects, and ever more complex forms of being, So long as we think of this light metaphorically as emanation of rays of influence from God, this notion permeates Arabic thought, particularly in the late Illuminationist school, which builds upon Suhrwahardi’s ‘metaphysics of light.’ Surhwahardi in fact describes all the world infoldings of various forms of light and darkness, with physical light as a less perfect version of the intellectual active light which emanates from God and gives rise to all the forms in the world.

Going beyond Marks’ theories for a moment, it’s perhaps worth noting that theorists working within contemporary quantum physics have argued that it’s not impossible that all the light we see in the world is in fact the result of one light particle, or photon, refracting in spacetime, giving rise to the all the electromagnetic radiation in the cosmos as a result. This refraction of unity into multiplicity by means of its interference with a refraction matrix of some sort is something which seems uncannily to be anticipated by some of the philosophical models described here. Whether or not this is evidence that our contemporary models are permeated with an unintegrated Islamic intellectual heritage, or that ancient philosophers were able to grope by metaphor to what science now seeks to describe with different means is left to speculation.

Whatever the physical analogues, however, according to Marks, the similarity between many contemporary Western models, such as those seen in Bergson and Deleuze, and Islamic predecessors, can be read as potential evidence for a perhaps unconscious and subterranean influence of Islamic thought on the present, often via intermediary chains of influences (ie: Spinoza, Leibniz). And in fact, the Arabic philosophical tradition, via ibn Sina (Avicenna) and ibn Rushd (Averroes) influenced the Christian medieval theologians (ie: Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham) which when combined with Maimonides, who wrote in Arabic and was widely influenced by thinkers like ibn Faradi and ibn Bajja, influenced Spinoza so much. Both Christian and Arabic models were in fact influences of Neoplatonic models propagating from Plotinus to Porphyry, Proclus, Ammonius, absorbing various Aristotelian, Stoic, and Epicurean influences on the way to form a grand Neoplatonic synthesis that dominated philosophico-religious thought from the period of late Antiquity (about 500 CE) to the early modern period (the rise of Carteisianism around 1650 CE). It’s my sense that understanding the neglected genealogies of the west, from Neoplatonism to Islamic thought, can help us to understand some of the potentials of our age, and Marks provides a starting point to bring so many of these threads together.

Neo-Medievalism: Techno-Images and the Return of the Repressed of Capitalist Modernity

While Marks argues that Islamic thought helps provide some of the missing links in chains of transmission of some of the most important trends of contemporary philosophy, her goal seems to not only be provide new genealogies for various philosophers, but to help us understand networked postmodernity itself. If early European modernity found philosophical expression in the individuality given philosophical form in the Cartesian cogito, which was then radicalized via Kantianism, it seems today that with the rise of networked formations, such as global capitalism and the internet, that perhaps the trend to more post- and supra-individual modes of thought, such as structuralism or various postmodernisms, can be seen as a response to the manner in which contemporary networked formations are refiguring subjectivity such that today, individuals are increasingly nodes in nets. From Facebook to GPS systems, product customization and the narrowcasting of news, we’re never not linked in, and at many levels of scale.

Aperiodic Tiling: Anticipating contemporary mathematical discoveries by hundreds of years, and involving the viewer in it's process, as figures look different depending on if you start with them as your eye moves through the patterns. Interactive art, before computers!

While in some sense this has always been the case, perhaps not least via the massive network that is human language, some have argued that we’re seeing a shift in scale in form, the formation of increasingly complex forms of networking, many of which take visual form. Certainly Guy Debord argued that we live in an age perhaps best described as a ‘society of the spectacle,’ but some have even gone as far as describing the coming age as neo-medieval. Villem Flusser, for example, believes that we are entering a ‘second visuality’ in which ‘techno-images’ will increasingly absorb texts into themselves, and become the primary way information is transmitted, similar to how images functioned in the middle ages, but with the twist that techno-images are based on texts, algorithmic codes, while traditional images are not. So in a sense, while perhaps we are entering a second visuality, unlike previous eras of visual dominance, these images all share an implicit, enfolded textual basis, one which isn’t read linearly, but in networked links of commands and executions. And as Bernard Stiegler has argued, since so many of us have no idea how to read these often hidden codes, we are the first generation in history that has hidden its memory of how to produce itself from itself within its own products, a massive form of forgetting which is radically disempowering and which needs to be actively countered.

From such a perspective, thinking of our age as potentially neo-medieval might be true in more senses than one. For if we imagine the world as a network of algorithmicized images, particularly when we use the word ‘image’ in the sense employed by Bergson (and later Deleuze) as any slice of “flowing matter” (thereby including bodies and everyday objects within the notion of images), then simply replace the notion of ‘God’ which centered the medieval world with that of the network formations which are increasingly knitting our world into a fractal network of networks, you have something like a neo-medieval worldview. God serves as a metaphor for the ‘ghost in the machine,’ the distributed spirit in the world of our capitalist mediascape. None of which is to say we are simply going back to the medieval, rather, this is a return with a difference, at a higher level of complexity perhaps, some sort of grand ‘return of the repressed’ of modernity. And this is why I think philosophers with a ‘networked God’ at the center of their worldview, such as Spinoza or Leibniz, can be used to help us think out networked age.

For example, building on some of Max Pensky’s descriptions of Leibniz’s philosophy of monads, it seems that Leibniz’s worldview describes few things better than a network of computers connected to the internet, with a virtual ‘God’ at the center. And Spinoza’s immanent networkology seems to be an ethics of how to deal with this, an attempt to understand the deeper logics of the ghosts within the machines. That is, if Leibniz is perhaps the philosopher of the reified capitalist mediascape, then perhaps Spinoza is a theorist who indicates paths beyond this, towards immanent yet also democratic relationalism based on a God of infinite creativity. And the question then becomes, what sort of God do you envisage, the radically creative one of Spinoza, or the centralizing and hierarchizing one of Leibniz?

Spinoza and Leibniz both wrote at the birth of capitalism,but seem to have grasped its networked structure avant-la-lettre, and largely by reworking medieval sources, largely inspired by Arabic and Neoplatonic Hellenistic philosophies, as a way of getting around the limitations in the Cartesian project. Few things could be more contemporary perhaps than examining the various networked gods that dominated thought in the so-called middle ages. And restoring Arabic thought to its rightful place in the genealogy of contemporary ‘western’ philosophical models can perhaps fill out this genealogy, particularly because it shows us so many of the political, ethical, and aesthetic consequences of various theories in relation to widely different social circumstances than those of Spinoza and Leibniz.

Of course, while the Islamic capliphates and their global trade networks were perhaps an early stage of globalization to those involved, it is the algorithmic use of code which provides one of the many ways Marks links classical Islamic art with new media formations. This may seem anachronistic in some ways. But perhaps the world was always already algorithmic, and only particular historical circumstances bring this to the fore. That is, perhaps our new algorithmically textual times have simply allowed us to see what was perhaps always already there, an algorithmic way of relating to reality ready to reveal itself whenever the socio-historical circumstances shine a light upon it.

Fractalizing Emanation since the Timurids: Dome Interior, Samarkand, Uzbekistan

Deleuze and Guatarri argue, for example, that the world is composed of ‘concrete assemblages,’ any of which can be mapped by an ‘abstract machine’ that can explain how a set of singularities actualize in particular situations to give rise to the assemblage in question. For example, if we think of evolution as an algorithm (and most evolutionary theorists do, often speaking of evolution as a bio-informational  process), we can think of the DNA of any organism as a code which when given energy and an environment, will actualize in a fuzzy set of particular ways. Likewise, even an inorganic molecule, which doesn’t have an ‘instruction manual’ within it like living organisms do with DNA, can be seen as actualizing a virtual, implicit plan that scientists then map out with things like molecular diagrams. And today scientists are increasingly using the algorithmic aspects of our world to produce designer molecules, organs, and even organisms. Maybe then it’s not all that much of a stretch to think of all that is as algorithmic, a massively networked intertwining of potential, algorithms, and actualities. And as Marks indicates, this model finds a precursor, in the very source of medieval European philosophy, namely, Arabic Islamic thought.

Islamic Philosophies as Algorithmic Networkologies

But how might it be possible to think of Islamic philosophy as algorithmic? Much of Arabic philosophy portrays the world as a giant network of sorts, with God as the infinite that powers the whole thing. And as described by Marks, the Qur’an acts in much Islamic thought as the algorithmic code that gives the world order and pattern, such that the individual things of the world are mere incarnations of the forms of this pattern within the degraded world of matter. Many Islamic theorists argue that as the word of God, the Qur’an isn’t created but rather eternal. Furthermore, written forms of the Qur’an are merely traces of the spoken form, which is the act of God which brings the world forth, which is why recitation is so important in Islam. This also helps explain why humans shouldn’t try to compete with God as creator, and hence images which resemble higher beings are often prohibited, a notion commonly known as ‘aniconism’ (an-icon-ism). Within all this, Marks is careful to show the potential political applications of such a notion of God, how it can be repressive of difference, or radically liberating, depending upon how the relation to this infinite is conceived. Here lies the politics of her work, about which we’ll say more shortly.

Within such a model, however, speech is performative action, the means whereby God brings the created world into being, and the written trace is simply there to help humans reactive the link to God. Literally, to recite the Qur’an is like establishing a network connection to the eternal, unchanging source of all creation, that from which all emanates. In this sense, the text can be seen as both information and interface, an enfolding of the virtual potentials which are emanations of God’s eternal creative power. The Qur’an (literally, ‘The Reciting’), as God’s active word, literally then functions as an algorithm, a code that makes things happen, for it is not merely a writing, but a doing. And for a human to recite the Qur’an is then to participate in him and his work, to sync with it, in a sense, even if the agency for it and yourself all comes from God in the first place. The Qur’an is a therefore a sort of master code for actualizing in the world.

And for some theorists, there’s potentially more in the Qur’an there than meets the eye. Some philosophers felt the text needs to be understood allegorically as containing massively more meanings than present on the surface (ie: Shi’a interpretations valued this, indirectly influencing Aquinas in his allegorical readings of Christian scripture), while others felt there is only one way to execute this code (Sunni theologians in fact often argue against all interpretation, for and hence for pure ritualized recitation). At the most radical extreme, and in a manner similar to Jewsish Kaballistic approaches, the characters of the Qur’an could be converted to numbers, producing yet more layers of potential meaning to be unfolded.

Worlding the Legible: Kufic Script, Foliated and then Floriated

Marks describes this attempt to numerically decode the text as as one side of the vogue for ‘computational  magic’ and ‘sacred geometry’ popular since late antiquity, a trend only properly vanquished with the rise of modern science. Then again, it seems reasonable to argue that without such computational and geometric symbologies, with its search for correspondences and affinities between things like planets, metals, numbers, animals, etc., modern science would likely not have emerged. And if in fact these predecessor procedures for having symbolic efficacy on the world are some of the vanishing mediators of contemporary science, then perhaps we’ll need to understand them if we are to move beyond the limitations which contemporary forms of scientism which turn science into technology in the name of its industrial masters.

Whether in more textually fundamentalist Sunni form, Shi’a allegorical form, or Sufism radicalizations of either, Marks describes how the Qur’an can be seen as the code linking God and created beings, thereby linking into her general model of virtual/infinity, information/code/algorithm, and image/thing. After establishing these connections, she then describes twelve primary characteristics that she feels can be seen as unifying the otherwise radically disparate corpus of classical Islamic art, characteristics which are also shared in various ways by new media formations, including art.

From here, Marks then proceeds to a series of semi-historical chapters, which lay the groundwork for understanding the nets of transmission of Islamic ideas to the West. According to Marks, we are the unconscious inheritors of a hidden genealogy of Islamic thought, one which was erased as vanishing mediator of modernity, and which is only now making itself seen again. Marks carefully traces the network of influences between Alexandria, Constantinople, Damascus, and Venice, and describes how Venetian culture during the period of the crusades was absolutely permeated with that of the more developed Islamic world. This Islamo-Venetian network is then largely destroyed when the monopoly of trade to the Far East is broken by Portuguese discovery of a sea route to the Indian Ocean, as well as the discovery of frontiers beyond Europe and Asia, all of which allowed European coffers to eventually develop the surpluses which were able to spur development in nearly every field (eventually giving rise to the Industrial revolution). But as Marks shows, Islamic models nevertheless snuck themselves into everything from carpets to design patterns, more than just philosophical models, often lurking in the collective unconscious of the European imaginary, with influences that can be felt even today. For Marks these traces serve as reservoirs which periodically resurface, and whose effects are being seen today in various new media formations.

Oh No, Husband and Wife are connected by a Giant Islamic Brain-Image!: Islamic Noo-Signs in Western Painting, 'Husband and Wife' by Lorenzo Lotto, 1525

Islamico-Algorithmic Aesthetics: Pixel, Vector/Raster, Arabesque/Fractal, Texture/Screen, Morph/Figure, Figural/Textural

After Marks’ general description of her project, which she then historicizes with her genealogy of Islamic art’s influence upon ‘the west’, the second half of the book truly jumps into uncharted terrain. Synthesizing various aspects of Deleuze’s philosophy into a coherent aesthetic theory, Marks finds analogues in classical Islamic art, philosophy, and aesthetics which can help us understand developments in contemporary new media art and life. Taking the notions of point, line, plane, figure, and text as reworked by Deleuze and his sources from Worringer to Foncillon, Marks links these to new media art formations, such as pixel, vector/raster, texture/screen, image/text, even as she continually shows how these can be contextualized in relation to various forms of Islamic art, and with profound political implications.

For Marks, the pixel is the contemporary equivalent of the atom of Islamic atomist philosophers (ie: the Ash’arites), which finds artistic expression in the unit-like muquarnas from which many Islamic dome interiors are composed. These can also be thought of as the ‘cells’ from which Islamic geometric artwork like tiles are formed. And yet, the muqarna/pixel seems a method to contain the very power to leap beyond its bounds, that of which pixels are formed.

Here she turns to the notion of the vector, which finds historical antecedent in the way seemingly everything in Islamic religion points towards Mecca, and from there to God, such that so much art in the Islamic world, and even the practices of which the art is often simply a trace, take on a fundamentally vectoral form. This finds artistic expression in the ways in which lines often seem to have a life of their own in a variety of Islamic patterns, such that these lines can be thought of as points leaping outside themselves, giving rise to forms by means of the forces they trace. This can either be disciplined, as seen in rigid geometries which represent only highly ordered and stable shapes, which she compares to the raster’s disciplining of vector graphics today, or take the form of the  arabesque, the line which continually breaks away from figures and texts, misbehaving, giving rise to ‘haptic’ textural spaces rather than screen-like planes, often producing a multiplicity of potential readings and patterms. These haptic spaces are somewhere between lines and planes, like lines with depth and planes that introject “the void [crucial to Islamic atomists] into the heart of matter” (p. 177).

This is Not UnVirtual Reality: Against the 'Illusionism' of Western Art, Fragment from a Persian Carpet, Safavid Period

Describing how these lines give rise to proliferation of potential figures, or how various Islamic calligraphies were disciplined by the state, only to keep having various images arise from their edges, Marks describes how there was a constant attempt to tame lines and their voids, to keep images from creeping into words and words from exploding into images, to prevent figures dissolving back into patterns, and to eliminate various other unruly aspects which came about from the productive constraint of aniconism. And when Islamic art did allow for images of people, such as in Persian painting, Marks shows how the defamiliarizing aspects of these works, with their unattached spaces and times, and other generally anti-illusionist forms, has similarities to contemporary virtual reality, which Steve Shaviro has described as manifesting post-cinematic affects by means of what Deleuze describes as ‘any-place-whatsoevers’ and ‘any-times-whatsoevers.’

In all this Marks’ goal is liberation, exploding objects into objectiles, pixels and rasters into vectors, screens into textures, figures into abstract patterns, and texts into psychadelic refractions of images. For if an infinity, for Marks, is something that you relate to “like another person,” her goal is to help us imagine ways that our relation to every aspect of the world can be like this. Which is to say, she wants to help us see the potential for the unfolding of infinity, and its infinite potential for folding and unfolding, within and between every fold.

From Mystification to Engagement: Genealogizing Network Politics of Aesthetics from Classical Islamic Art to Techno-Image

From morphing calligraphies and figures to virtual spacetimes, Marks keeps tracing a struggle between the powers of centralization and those of proliferation and creation. For Marks, “art is a primitive swamp that liberates differentiation as a force in itself” (313), and this force shatters points, lines, planes, figures, and texts to give rise to new differentiations, something which tends to terrify those in power. For some Islamic governments during the classical period, strict measures were taken to rein things in. Some required using ratios to produce a proportioned relation between individual characters and the flourishes allowed in calligraphic inscriptions. Others prohibited allegorical readings of texts, or banned calligraphic writing which turn into images or vice-versa. For others, pure geometric patterns and the void were all that were allowed, and often in austere, centralized forms, producing a mathematical sublime with no sense of connection to human production, leaving only the spectacle of grandeur and complexity stabilized by a deviously omnipresent absent center.

Western Inheritance: How the Indeterminacy of Figure and Ground, and the Haptic Line Invage Western Spacetime via Aubrey Beardsley's Destabilizing Proto-Modernist Foliations

Mystification, for Marks, is a powerful force for repression, and she sees the austere geometric pureness of some Islamic works as similar to some modernisms which emphasize purity of geometry, or new media works that emphasize spectacle rather than interactivity. For example, Marks differentiates those geometrically patterned works of mathematical art that give rise to proliferating refractions of  difference (ie: Mandelbrot fractals, enfolding massive diversity into elegant code) from those which simply echo and reflect a centralized sameness, a difference which, building on Deleuze, could be described as that between reflection and refraction (and for more on this in regard to political formations, see here). And while Marks values the insights of Sufi mystics, both in art and philosophy, she expresses concern that the Sufi notion of fana’ (annihilation before God) might lead to political and intellectual quietism, as evidenced in how some forms of Sufism went from being repressed to endorsed by the State, with political implications for today in the ways in which technology often leads to awe and spectacle, yet also passivity and detachment of the form described by Guy Debord as ‘the society of the spectacle.’

Proto-LeCorbusier: State Architecture, sans Arabesque, the Mosque of Samsarra

Describing the European tradition as one of the depiction of face and body (Deleuze’s notion of ‘faceity’), Marks argues that the emergence of ornament and figural line in modernism (ie: pre-Raphaelites, Aubrey Beardsley, etc.) shows the return of a repressed Islamic influence which, for Marks, had been hiding in, amongst other places, the Venetian patterns that carried algorithmic art forms into the heart of the European visual unconscious. Marks nicely shows how carpets with Islamic patterns show up in a wide variety of European paintings, and can be seen to function as sorts of ‘images of thought,’ what Deleuze describes as ‘noo-signs.’

In all this, the tension between neo-baroque proliferation and the forces of centralizationplays out, from classical Islamic art and philosophy to new media formations. Just as modernism was torn between the drive for purity and that of neo-baroque excess (ie: Corbusier and Loos versus art nouveau, The Union of Socialist Writers versus constructivst rebels in Russia), so new media art is torn between that which fosters proliferation and distributed agency, and that which simply attempts to ‘shock and awe’ us before technological spectacle, all in a manner which can be seen to play out in the formal languages of Islamic arts. In terms of new media, understanding these two types of what Jameson calls the ‘technological sublime,’ that which furthers activity and change versus that which furthers passivity and disengagement, can help us track some of the political implications of the techno-images which seem to increasingly structure meaning in our networked age.

How to Tame a Wild Line: Centralization of Ornament at the Tomb of Isma'ili Samani

Mark’s book is a profound attempt to develop an aesthetics which is also an ontology as well as an ethics, linking Deleuze’s Spinozism to the side of Islamic thought which fought against the powers of centralization.

Haptic, Textured, Folded Space: A Dome that Won't be Tamed, Isfahan, Iran

In the process, she not only provides a guide for navigating our algorithmic times, but also a much needed recurperative work. For as I argued in a previous post, it is time that ‘the West’ and its history to begin to integrate the fact that it didn’t simply ‘go to sleep’ after Rome, but rather, that its heritage crucially runs through the Islamic world. That is, we are all inheritors of the ways in which Greek learning moved from Rome and Byzantium to Alexandria, Baghdad, Cairo, Cordoba, Toledo, Damascus, and other centers of learning in the Islamic world, where it built upon the Neoplatonic heritage, mutating it in the process, and advancing substantially in regard to medical, mathematical, and scientific knowledge, before the leading edge of that tradition moved back to Europe.

Morphing beyond the Figure: Caucasian Dragon Carpets (really, there's Dragon's in there, morphing and demorphing into various things, and between generations of carpet makers, a 4D morph!)

All of which is to say that ‘the West’ as we know it today is the child of Islam, whether it wants to acknowledge this or not. Of course, contemporary Islam is also an inheritor of its own classical period, and understanding the commonalities between these cultures so often at odds today, their common heritage, is something that may help to produce bridges which may help us develop more robust and liberatory futures in common. Marks’ work of radically hybrid scholarship is precisely the sort of thing that can help point us in this direction, while providing us with tools whereby to imagine future work of this sort.

And it’s a great read! I actually couldn’t put the book down, highly, highly recommended. I expect to be drawing from the conceptual resources this book provided for a very long time. A crucial  text to help understand our rapidly changing world.