O
N FACES,
PHASES,
PLACES:
E
XPLORING AND NAVIGATING MANIFOLD FOOTHILLS AS STRUCTUREDSPACES OF POSSIBILITIES IN/
AS WHICH TOPOLOGICAL ANIMALS COULD BEENCOUNTERED
.
Lieselot Versteeg stud. no. 11398965
supervisor: Miriam van Rijsingen second reader: Jeroen Boomgaard
august 2019
Research MA Arts and Culture; Artistic Research Universiteit van Amsterdam
TABLEOFCONTENTS
1. THEMOUNTAIN MEETING 5
2. ON THE TOPOLOGICALANIMAL 6
3. EMANCIPATING SPACEAND IDENTITY 9
4. (HU)MANASMEASUREOF ALLTHINGS 14
5. GEOMETRICAL OPTICS THATREFLECTSAMENESS 18
6. FROM EXHAUSTED TRUTHTOMATERIALOPENENDEDNESS 24
I THEDOOR TOTHEINVISIBLE MUSTBE VISIBLE 27
7. THEBREAKOUT 29
II THEGROUP 32
8. NEW PORTRAITSOF SPACEANDFACES 34
III THECALCULATIONS AND SOMEREASONS NOTTOGO 39
9. UNFOLDINGREALITIES: INTENSITY GIVESRISE TOEXTENSITY 42 10. NAVIGATING INTENSIVESPACE 49 IV EXPERIMENT: THE CASCADECOLLAPSES AT 4 54
11. SOMEDESIRE PATHS 55
12. A COLLECTIONOFFACES 61
١ MERCY 63
ENDNOTES 64
“‘Most of you,’ he went on, ‘already know how I have been able to limit the area of investigation in a frst approximation. But one or two of you are not yet informed. For you, and to refresh everyone’s memory, I’ll go over my calculations again.’”1
This thesis is set in a mountainous landscape. This writing navigates condensed space, compressed grounds and curved planes.
We shall be exploring possible routes and attempt to speak about positionalities and identities that are worthy of the complexities encountered in intensive
spaces.
While roaming rock arrangements, peaks, slopes, traversing valleys and balancing on steep edged ridges, this writing is a performing of a technical
practice, that consists on the one hand of an inquiry as to where to place the feet and where to grab with the hands (stable, steady pieces of rock or ground that can hold my weight) and on the other hand deals with making choices regarding direction and navigating oneself in a world that is continuously unfolding itself. Because space in mountainous landscapes is, per defnition, always both
demanding and giving (acclivitous/cascading), this writing is constantly appealing to the virtues of sensitivity, patience, courage, concentration, determination and perseverance. Exploring paths and mapping possible structures of its unfolding requires the courage to risk facing the abyss, but also allows one to get
starstruck under the darkest skies. It is during these kinds of moments that the technical practice unfolds and turns intense. Only then the specifc material confgurations appear that make a real difference. This writing is the preliminary outcome of an exploration of possibilities in the types of spaces where these encounters happen.
1. THEMOUNTAIN MEETING
From the corner of my eye, it suddenly appeared out of nowhere; it was well camouflaged but its jeerky movements attracted my attention.
An intense mix of piercing disgust and fery curiosity came over me, as I stood there, transfxed, on a hot sunny afternoon in the south of France. It was two or three meters away from me and it was straining upwards on the rocky trail. Oh I saw it, but I wanted to see it better, with more detail. At the same time,
nothing seemed more clear to me that there was no way of moving any closer, so in an attempt to capture what was going on, I took my phone and zoomed in as much as the camera allowed me.
I think it was in a state of survival. This was some sort of emergency.
It used its two sharp foreleg claws, not to pray or grasp prey but to try to get a grip on itself. To get ahold of steady ground. With every reaching of its claws, little rocks came loose and would fall right into its uncommon but strangely familiar face. It seemed as if there was inside of it, some kind of potent force, resisting, pulling it back. It was fghting the dire threat of some sort of fatal tearing apart portending a separateness of things that have to be one in order to
continue persevering.
While persisting the slow struggle uphill, it was gaining an increasing number of long spikes, protruding from its mucky rear part. It also left a slimy trail, that slowly drying up on the gravel, revealed something about the positionalities in its recent history.
I had been investigating topological animals for a while already and later that night when I watched the video, it suddenly became clear to me that I had
happened upon one earlier that afternoon. The footage was shaky, blurry and all pixelated from the excessive zooming. It did not show in the least what I had encountered. Lingering upwards, I had been doubting, detouring, sitting down, standing up, unable to choose direction at moments where paths forked.
Overwhelmed by fear and the view but captivated by the magnetic temptation of the modest peak in sight. When the equilibrium of the moment had broken, I had hurried back down to the village. The moment the video was taken marked the point of my hike that clearly distinguished everything before it as an attempt of ascendancy and everything after it as my descent.
2.ON THETOPOLOGICAL ANIMAL
Topological animals are not some kind of symbolic or metaphorical animals. They are real, material beings that have historicity; each topological animal has a date of birth and a time of death. Each topological animal has a space or habitat it lives in/as. As they live they perform the “productive aspect of the life-death continuum”.2
Topological animals prove to be quite hard to spot and even harder to describe. That incident during the walk, or rather the moment later that evening, when I realized I had crossed paths with something other than a ‘regular’ animal, was the third time I encountered the fgure of the topological animal. The frst two sightings happened shortly after each other, but both in entirely different places. The fgure had already struck me the frst time, but after the second encounter, it had really seized me.
Independently from each other, both Barad and Delanda mention the topological animal. Barad does only once, passingly, in her book Meeting the Universe
Half-Way: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Here,
she describes an animal that it is “not a device assembled out of discrete gears.” She continues that the topological animal “mutates through an open-ended dynamics of intra-activity.” About where it lives she says, “It would not neatly ft into a Euclidean geometrical framework.” And to talk about its habitat “Questions of connectivity, boundary formation, and exclusion (topological
concerns) must supplement and inform concerns about positionality and location (too often fgured in purely geometrical terms).”3
Delanda mentions the topological animal a few times. First in an interview published in the book “Deleuze, mathematics and realist ontology”, Delanda refers to the topological animal as “an abstract animal that can become a human or a horse through a series of embryological operations: foldings, stretchings, invaginations, cellular migrations.”4
Another sighting can be recorded in the book New Materialism: Interviews &
Cartographies by Rick Dolphijen and Iris van der Tuin. In yet another interview,
Delanda describes the great array of appearances that a topological animal can 2 Braidotti 2013, 132
3 Barad 2007, 240 4 Delanda 2012, 240
embody, by suggesting to imagine the topological animal as “a body-plan
common to entire phyla (such as that of vertebrates) that is a structured space of possible body designs. Such a space cannot be metric because each vertebrate species varies in length, area, volume, et cetera, so only topological properties like connectivity can be used to specify it.”5
It seems that both Delanda and Barad agree on two things. Firstly, the
topological animal is capable of mutating or some sort of shape shifting. This capacity to change, however, does not work in a way similar as shifting gears in a machine but the mechanics of the changing of modes, are of another kind, typifed by Delanda as having to do with “embryological operations”.
Secondly, both Barad and Delanda point out that the space related to the topological animal is very particular and “cannot be metric.” It seems as if the topological animal can not be encountered in Euclidean geometric frameworks and lives in less straight forward types of space. When talking about the space that relates to the topological animal, Delanda refers to ‘a structured space of possibilities’ and Barad points out that “topological properties may be informed to navigate it.”6
The topological animals’ indeterminate confgurations and their preferences for non quantitative space could explain the rarity of recorded sightings. As we are mostly accustomed with navigating metric space, their appearances will often remain overlooked and unacknowledged for, and if topological animals are already apparent, they will probably often be held as regular animals.
Apart from the fact that topological animals don’t thrive very well in reality made discursive in geometrical regimes, a further reading of Barad's work extends the critique of ‘habitual’ methods that propose not a true or correct, but a very
deductive view of reality, from metric systems to also linguistic and taxonomical regimes. The topological animals’ capability to materialize in a huge range of embodiments makes it impossible to describe them, but also to give them a taxonomical rank. Common ways of determination, that would include
describing them by their features and characteristics would not work. It is not their size or length, the amount of legs, the shape of their teeth or ears that can help determining a topological animal.
5 Dolphijn, van der Tuin 2012, 45 6 Barad 2007, 240
In fact, the incidental actuality of their embodiment never typifes the topological animal; specifc extensive properties displayed or inhibited by topological
animals can never be a means of identifying it, and focussing on them would merely distract attention from more interesting questions.
3. EMANCIPATINGSPACEANDIDENTITY
Space has long been measured along fxed, transcendental, external and
invisible axes. Not only positionalities but also degrees of truth and identities are calculated and appointed through the use of the representational models and accessory tools, that have somehow obtained an authoritative objeectivity. Through the habitual use of these (mostly binary) systems, we have grown extremely accustomed to individualizing, categorizing and locating all what we measure (or name) by means of indicating how similar or close something is from some sort of universal truth, an ahistorical, preexisting perfect model; usually either an all encompassing god-like ideal or some sort of imagined void. These conceptions, are, in the words of Michel Serres, “invaginated around
nothingness. They need a point zero to be calculated; there has to be a nothingness in their metaphysics.”7 These logics conceive of a binary (all-nothing) world that is made up of a (neutral) empty space or some sort of void flled with things; atoms, phenomena, things, objeects. A world in which things are clearly separated from nothingness. Such a view, in which things are clearly divided from non-things, and from each other, things quickly take up specifc, singular, identities.8 They become ‘fully formed objeects’ and ‘pre-existing individual objeects’ whose identity is often regarded as centered around their
7 Serres 1980, 31
In Serres book The Parasite the notion of void becomes obsolete. He introduces the parasite as noise, interference, interruption, interception. As the nonsense or disorder that surrounds the message. “The theory of being, ontology brings us to atoms. The theory of relations brings us to the parasite.” (1980, 185)
Also see Barad's What Is The Measure Of Nothingness? Infnity, Virtuality, Justice article, in which she discusses the quantum technicalities of the ‘im/possibility’ of measuring nothingness. She demonstrates at once that measurement tools alter and change that what is being measured. I think of the paradox to sticking a thermometer into a void, following that the space which is measured contains a thermometer and thus cannot be a void. She also cites from quantum physics the principle of ontological indeterminacy, which calls into question the existence of a ‘zero-energy, zero-matter state’, by referring to quantum vacuum fuctuations, ghostly non/existences and virtual particles that are “experimenting with the im/possibilities of non/being”. (2007, 13) She concludes that nothingness is a non existent- transcendental concept that is never actually as absolute at it may sound, but exists always in entanglement and in degrees. 8 “With Deleuze, difference, not identity, is motor of genetic process, such that the space
evacuated by God becomes the entire set of divergent virtual worlds that underlie any becoming whatsoever.” (Kelso 2010, 128)
possession of an essence” and within “determinate boundaries and properties.”9 10 These binary logics reduces specifcity to nothing less than a certain degree of sameness and promotes sameness and thrives by the disposition of seeing ‘otherness’ and difference as pejeoration.11
These conceptions, that seem mostly to satisfy a need or urge to master and measure the world in universal or defnite ways, leaves us measuring degrees of truth, assigning names and places to things, as being an act of panic, waving the ruler to ward off the potential danger of unexpected change, the uncontrollable new and ungraspable unknown.
Where we have long been accustomed to give general names and faces to those who we fear most and those who we follow obediently, we shall now put an effort to specify names and faces/phases. Where naive, social constructivist tools need to bring into existence anonymous voids and all encompassing immaterial truths to refer to other worldly ideals, transcendental forms and reifed generalities, we shall attempt to take off the universalizing masks, and to identify either specifc (type of) persons (who invented something, that has happened to gain the status of universal truth) or on the other hand fnd out that, held together by the straps of a mask, are complex, internally contradictory, multiplicities. Rather than jeust assigning another essence (face, phase, place) to them, we shall try to make them materially discursive by attempting to draw out dynamic portraits, or to map ‘phase states’ that do not identify them as the one thing or the other but practice the wish to gain insights into the mechanics of the systems that actually make difference in our lives.
In the following part we shall think along with a few (new)materialist thinkers that help pointing out that the truths and their models, categories and tools that we use to navigate and measure ourselves and the world with, are never apolitical or objeective. They argue that the categories we commonly use to determine
locations and assign things with identities, are part of a system of purportedly unquestionable laws that allude to have always existed and claim to work neutrally in truthfully representing the real or showing an a-priori reality.
We shall notice that these categories are not so neutral or anonymous at all and 9 Barad 2007, 195
10 Delanda 2002, xiii 11 Braidotti 2002, 15
that they actually have names and faces. They are authored, invented by people and originate from somewhere specifc.12 They are situated in time and space and disclose certain geographical, political and historical positions. And thus, regardless of their claims, they are never neutral tools that measure reality objeectively and constitute universal and absolute truths. We shall argue that the measuring tools and representational systems have agency of their own, and that the practices used to organize the world play an active role in forming the matter they purposely represent.
Our attempt of breaking away from a world of ‘words and things’ and instead shift focus to exploring processes, trajeectories, degrees of change, becomings and metamorphoses, allows us to rethink what makes up specifc kinds. These new specifc kinds need not to necessary refer to ‘making a point’ on the axes of the good old truths but rather explore other types of boundary determining
mechanisms.
In order to think about or encounter the topological animal and its habitat, we need to let go of searching for (things in/as) singular positions or univocal identities and be brave and concentrated enough to roam the knife’s edge and recognize and sketch out the inbetweens that are often overlooked.
Roughly, our research areas contain Barad's ‘outsides-within’ and/or Delanda’s ‘possibility spaces’ that actively escape the frm grip of the reductive scheme of binary logics, geometrical optics, concept-bound reasoning, fxed and unitary identities and exhausted classifcation.
The space we shall attempt to sketch out, subverts dominant power structures, promotes ‘the capacity to act differently’, and allows for an open-ended,
intensive, spontaneous becoming and unfolding of the world, which might not always be actual but is nevertheless real and material.
In preparation to exploring ways to approach, constitute and materialize these open-ended territories that inhabit (are inhabited by) topological animals, we shall investigate some of the categories that frame our habitual conceptions of space, how they are organized, what they are flled with and how they subsequently form and dictate not only our thinking but also colonize our imagination.
To do so, we shall discuss a few categories that are often used and considered 12 Invented rather than discovered.
as universal tools that help representing ourselves and our world. Where do they come from? What do they make the world look like? We will start, together with Rosi Braidotti, by having a look at how we navigate, position and identify
ourselves. We are likely to categorize or consider ourselves as individual human subjeects. But as Braidotti asks in her book The Posthuman: Have we always been human? Are we all equally human? And are we only human? Braidotti draws a concise cartography on the matter that grants us a peek view into ‘the making of’ the human subjeect. She traces this subjeect back to Leonardo da
Vinci’s enlightened Vitruvian man. Calling this the emblem after which humanism is modeled, Braidotti argues that the human subjeect is heavily indebted to the legacy of “man as measure of all things” a universalism that turns the ‘human’ in a rather specifc subjeect. Abled bodied, handsome, Eurocentric, white and heavily sexualized, but also a rational, unifed being that is centered around a univocal understanding of the above properties and allows for no internal contradictions.
“It turned out that this Man, far from being the canon of perfect
proportions, spelling out a universalistic ideal that by now had reached the status of a natural law, was in fact a historical construct and as such contingent as to values and locations.”13
Then, together with Karen Barad we shall expand a little more on the supposed neutrality of another important measurement tool we use. She states that
“language has been granted too much power” and has taken on the common appearance of truthfully representing some sort of ultimate reality. Barad explores the consequences of believing in the power of language to represent the world and asks if “the subjeect and predicate structure of language reflects a prior ontological reality of substance and attribute”. In other words; does the world really consist of “representations on the one hand and ontologically
separate entities awaiting representation on the other”?14 Barad follows Rouse in calling representationalism a Cartesian by-product and mentions Hacking, who traces the origins of this ’habit of mind’ back to Democritius’ (binary) dream of the world as “atoms and the void.”
13 Braidotti 2013, 24 14 Barad 2003, 802
The idea of matter being build up by small building block-like entities, was not only the frst time a divide between what could be seen by the eye, and ‘reality’ was brought forward, but also a point zero, or some kind of void, was brought into the equation.15
Barad proposes a method for escaping the geometrical optics that reflect
sameness. This method advocates a worldview starting from doings and actions. Performativity and the studying of practices and their implications reveals an intra-active world of entanglements and ‘cutting apart togethers’.
Finally, we shall check in with Manuel Delanda, for a line of thinking that declares to be rooted in a non-essentialist and ‘non naive-realist’ philosophy and departs with granting the world agency that is independent of the human mind and always full of self-organizing potential. Central to this realism is not what we see or what our senses can actually perceive, but stresses the need to move beyond our perception to imagine the virtual; that what is not necessary actual but
nevertheless real. Following Delanda in his attempt to reconstruct Deleuze's world, we shall continue moving gradually towards a thinking that is fueled by the notion of difference and endows the world as open-ended morphogenetic
becoming. Slowly we shall sketch some routes through a non-metric space of possibilities that construct the structure of an open-ended, fully immanent and intensive topological habitat. A space with indeterminate amounts of dimensions in which the radically unreflected, unexpected, or uncounted(able) is granted the capacity to slowly unfold, spontaneously materialize or to mutate “through an open-ended dynamics of intra-activity.”16
15 Hacking 1983, 140 16 Barad 2007, 240
4. (HU)MANASMEASUREOFALL THINGS
Key to Rosi Braidotti’s work is the emphasis on a “situated, embedded and embodied” positioning of the self. The importance of taking “account for one's locations in terms both of space (geo-political or ecological dimension) and time (historical and genealogical dimension)” is continuously stressed. The positioning of the self, as Braidotti develops in more detail in her book on nomadic theory, should however by no means be understood as being concerned with taking up a static position or defending a point.17 Rather, the affrmative ethics that Braidotti practices are based on, consider a nomadic and non-unitary understanding of subjeectivity and insists on recognizing ourselves as “the internally contradictory multi-faceted subjeects that we have become”.18 In her book Metamorphoses, Braidotti hammers on the importance of the practice when dealing with change: “we need to learn to think differently about ourselves and the processes of deep-seated transformation.19 She proposes that “being worthy of the present” hinges on “accounting adequately for change” and needs to be in search for ways to “represent mutations, changes and transformations.”20
Adequately accounting for change, Braidotti states, is an important challenge that shakes up long-established habits of thought. “The fact that theoretical reason is concept-bound and fastened upon essential notions makes it diffcult to fnd adequate representations for processes, fluid in-between flows of data,
experience and information.”21 Therefore “a theoretical effort is needed in order to bring about the conceptual leap across inertia, nostalgia, aporia and other forms of critical stasis induced by the postmodern historical condition.”22
In her effort to reconceptualize the subjeect and coming up with a “thinking through the body, not in a flight away from it”, a thinking in which the term
‘difference’ is no longer “a term indexed on a hierarchy of values which it governs by binary opposition” Braidotti also constantly positions herself.23 She does so by
17 Braidotti 2002, 2
18 Braidotti’s focus on ‘affrmative’ practices can be seen as an alternative for antagonistic or reactive ways of proposing ‘difference’ or change. Personally, I like to think of this as a strategy to practice non-reformism more joyfully.
19 Braidotti 2002, 3 20 Braidotti 2013, 189 21 Braidotti 2002, 2 22 Braidotti 2002, 3 23 Braidotti 2002, 4-5
drawing “accurate and precise cartographies” that provide with rationality for the positions she moves through.24 In Metamorphoses, Braidotti sets out a genealogy that grounds her theoretical positions in ‘enfleshed or embodied materialism’ that are in turn rooted in the “French tradition that runs [...] from Bachelard,
Canguilhem, Foucault, Lacan, Irigaray and Deleuze.”25 These thinkers build upon empiricist thinkers such as “Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche and Bergson.”26
Especially interested in interweaving Deleuze's theories of becoming and
Irigaray’s ‘mechanic of fluids’, Braidotti gives way to an affrmative reconfguration of ‘difference’ as a negative term, in which being different from.. has come to mean being “less than”. This leads to explorations on positioning the body as a radically-immanent, non-unitary “mobile set of intensities”.27 28 Braidotti
summarizes her intentions when declaring: “My political passion lies with positive metamorphoses, the kinds that destabilize dominant power-relations,
de-territorialize majeority-based identities and values and infuse a jeoyful sense of empowerment into subjeects bent on becoming.”29
In her later book The Posthuman, Braidotti turns more specifcally to the human subjeect. Committed to introducing “a qualitative shift in our thinking about what exactly is the basic unit of common reference for our species” she proposes to have a good look at (how we see) ourselves and invites us to ask and think about questions such as; Are we all human? What makes us human? Are we only human? Are we all equally human? Have we always been human? And who is this human to start with? Where does he come from?
The term ‘Human’ as we know it and use it, is not some sort of a priori category or simply indicating a natural kind, but has historicity and comes from
somewhere. Braidotti proposes the iconic image of the Vitruvian man as emblem 24 Braidotti 2013, 53
25 Braidotti 2002, 5
26 Braidotti points out that the latter genealogy, proposed by Deleuze as a ‘counter-genealogy’ to the ‘canonized version of the history of philosophy, […] dominated by the holy trinity of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger.” is not read by way of a rehearsal of a masters voice. “Deleuze practiced very un-Oedipal relations with his favourite
philosophers” “Faithful to their spirit and the “passions that animated them” but capable of bending them to his own ends and purposes”. (2002, 66)
27 Braidotti 2002, 2 28 Irigaray 1977 29 Braidotti 2002, 265
of the idea that is so central to Enlightenment thinking; the (hu)man as ‘measure of all things’.
“At the start of it all there is He: the classical ideal of ‘Man’, formulated frst by Protagoras as ‘the measure of all things’, later renewed in the Italian Renaissance as a universal model and represented in Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man.” 30
The Vitruvian man represents “Humanism as a doctrine that combines the
biological, discursive and moral expansions of human capabilities into an idea of teleologically ordained, rational progress.” The human category as we know it, is according to Braidotti “a creature familiar to us from the enlightenment and it’s legacy”; it embodies “the Cartesian subjeect of the cogito” and the “Kantian
“community of reasonable beings.” The Vitruvian man exemplars for a universal measurement tool that represents the mutation of humanist ideals to universal laws and interweaves notions of subjeectivity with spatial and geo-political terms.31 Braidotti writes that this “self aggrandizing vision assumes that Europe is not jeust a geo-political location, but rather a universal attribute of the human mind that can lend its quality to any suitable objeect.” “Equal only to itself” this Eurocentric humanist norm, furthermore installs a binary logics between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’.32 The ideal of humanist subjeectivity is “equated with consciousness, universal rationality, and self-regulating ethical behaviour”33 The ideal human, furthermore is most defnitely a he; a white, able-bodied, and handsome Man.34 Those who differ from the norm, are ‘othered’, and subsequently come to matter ‘less than’ human or are not considered fully human. As history has made
painfully clear what the divide between humans and “sexualized, naturalized and racialized others” has brought the world, Braidotti proposes the concept of the Posthuman.
The Posthuman does not hinge on universal terms. It does not propose a fgure 30 Braidotti 2013, 13
31 The Vitruvian Man, posing in a circle and a square refers to geometry as the purest or most perfect forms, modeled after the human body and subsequently as the basis for all of nature.
32 Braidotti 2013, 14-15 33 Braidotti 2013, 15 34 Braidotti 2013, 24
that attempts to applicable for mirroring, measuring others in degrees of sameness to itself.35 As Braidotti carefully provides her standpoints with the “intellectual and personal genealogy” they are rooted in, she declares her interests in feminism, de-colonization, racism affliated with the anti-humanism that runs through, post 1968 radical French post-structuralism of Foucault and meets Said, Irigaray, Kristeva and is practiced by Deleuze and for example Haraway.36
In regard to the Posthuman; one of Braidotti most decisive aims is to free the notion of difference from the negative connotations that history has encapsulated it in. The Posthuman predicament Braidotti proposes an individual as embedded, embodied and enfleshed. Always located somewhere and taking account of its position. Thinking of ourselves as multifaceted, non-unitary beings, nomads that are in constant state of transformation, does not only intend to dissolve binary logics of the self and the other, but also blurs the imposed boundaries between ‘I’ and the world and the individual and the species. Depositing anthropocentric and fxed, unitary, universal notions gives way to a post humanist, post
anthropocentric stance towards our relation to the world we inhabit. Braidotti urges to embrace a future of difference and of complexity, a life in an ever changing world inhabited by multiplicities who’s actions are not coordinated in some abstract center but emerge from multiple positions. We need to learn to live in a world of change and difference, to embrace contradictions of the self and to transform fears of losing control into worthy and jeoyful practices of inventing new, worthy and sustainable paths that are affrmatively propelled by desire and
intensity.37
35 These standards only to allow critique on their own terms, which lead to criticism that works by means of adaptation of terms or opposition of terms, but remain in the same framework.
“An idea opposed to another idea is always the same idea, albeit affected by the negative sign. The more you oppose one another, the more you remain in the same framework of thought.” (Serres with Latour 1995, 81)
36 Braidotti 2013, 16
37 Braidotti does not consider desire as a longing to something that is absent, as something out of reach but as the affective force that is found within, a vitality that remains
unthought and unspoken but is what accounts for a perseverance of oneself. "The desire to know is, like all desires, related to the problem of representing one's origins, of answering the most childish and consequently fundamental of questions: "Where did I come from?"
5. GEOMETRICAL OPTICSTHAT REFLECTSAMENESS
“The idea that beings exist as individuals with inherent attributes, anterior to their representation, is a metaphysical presupposition that underlies the belief in political, linguistic, and epistemological forms of representationalism.”38 In her article Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How
Matter Comes to Matter, Karen Barad addresses another category that according
to her, is too often put forward and employed as if it is capable of truthfully reflecting ‘the underlying structure of the world.’ She states that “the
representationalist belief in the power of words to represent preexisting
phenomena” and the “excessive power granted to language to determine what is real” has lead us not only to believe that language is more trustworthy than the very matter it would not be able to exist without, but additionally, that “allowing linguistic structure to shape or determine our understanding of the world” and “believing that the subjeect and the predicate structure of language reflects a prior ontological reality of substance and attribute” results into reducing materiality to immutable, passive and inert stuff which is “fgured only within a linguistic domain as its condition of possibility.”39
In a world where linguistic categories and other forms of cultural representations are granted so much power, agency and historicity, the logics of
representationalism as a way of interpreting and understanding the world has “taken on such a common appeal. It seems inescapable, if not downright natural”.40 Barad aims to contest the representationalism that has become a ‘habit of mind’ and argues that the world is not composed of preexisting
individuals that are passively awaiting to be summoned by the word, the law, or other mechanisms and apparatuses that claim to represent reality; the right, the truth, or the real.
Barad shows that jeust like the ‘human’ as discussed above, representationalism (Braidotti 1994, 90) She attributes this form of desire to Irigaray and Deleuze. I would like to relate the term desire somehow close to the notion of intensive difference, which will be discussed later.
38 Barad 2003, 804 39 Barad 2003, 801-803 40 Barad 2003, 806
is not some sort of a priory or eternally present truth, but has a face and a date and place of birth of which cartographies and genealogies can be recorded. The logics of representation is according to Barad “often theorized in terms of a tripartite arrangement”. The triangle is made up from ‘the known’; that is that what is to be represented, then there is ‘knowledge’; made up of representations of what is known, or the known made understandable by means of ‘political, linguistic and epistemological’ forms of representationalism.41 And fnally, there is the acknowledgement of the knower; that is ourselves. Representations in this triad function to mediate between the knower and the known, that take the role of some kind of universal key that can be used to decipher or reproduce all that is ’known’ into some type of ‘universally accessible’ knowledge.4243
One of the main problems with this the system of representation, according to Barad is that it is completely closed. The three nodes of the triangle are
considered independent from each other and have been appointed a fxed function and identity; an ontological distinction is installed between “two
independent kinds of entities — representations and entities to be represented”. Furthermore, it is taken for granted “that which is represented is […] independent of all practices of representing.”44 Questions regarding the practice of
representation or the mechanism of this tripartite system, such as for example What makes entities that represent different from those who ‘need’
41 Barad 2007, 46 42 Barad 2007, 46-47 43
The triangle was published in The Meaning of Meaning (1923) by Ogden and Richards 44 Barad 2003, 804
representation? are not catered for. Barad refers to this mechanism of
representation as being stuck in a ‘geometrical optics of reflection’.45 At work is the reflection of ‘questions of correspondence’; Granted that knowledge
represents that what is known, and that as a result, that what we know must be knowledge; nothing new is able to enter the picture and similarity keeps on being reproduced.46
In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Barad mentions two authors in particular who have made an effort to draw cartographies regarding representationalism in the realm of science studies. Ian Hacking traces the idea of representationalism back to the Ancient Greece of Democritus, “a man only a little older than Socrates” and his (binary) “dream of atoms and the void.”4748 Here, in his atomism, according to Hacking, for the frst time the possibility is raised of there being a difference between representation and represented and a difference is proposed
45 Off course language is not the only institute that needs reconsideration. Barad also questions space made materially discursive in geometrical terms and time conceived as a linear line and aims at reconfgurations of concepts of space-time. Especially
approaching these concepts from a quantum perspective, these notions that since Kant, have come to be considered some sort of a-priori concepts, are rapidly being
reconfgured. For more on this see the chapter ‘Spacetime Re(con)fgurings
Naturalcultural Forces and Changing Topologies of Power’ (2007, 223-246) or her essay Ma(r)king Time: Material Entanglements and Re-memberings: Cutting Together-Apart. (2013)
46 “Social constructivist approaches get caught up in geometrical optics of refection where, much like the infnite play of images between two mirrors, the epistemological gets bounced back and forth, but nothing more is seen.” (Barad 2007, 803)
47 Hacking 1983, 140
48 I do want to mention that in a multiplicity of ancient non-western religions,
philosophies and schools of thought concepts that refer to the smallest unit of matter are also present. A few of the more known examples include those of the ancient school of Indian philosophy of Ājīvika. Interestingly, this theory that fnds its origins in the saga of Acharya Kanad (real name is Kashyap), the meaning of ‘the smallest particle’ is embodied by the protagonist of the saga himself. Another interesting example on this topic from the same region, is mentioned in 11th century Theravada Buddhism texts, in
which the smallest part ‘kapala’ is considered to be indefnitely divisible and capable of involution and constantly fickering in and out of existence.
However in the more linear and streamlined and unifed conception of western history it is mainly the term ‘atom’ from Greek atomon, meaning. ‘uncuttable’, ‘indivisible’ as coined by Democritus, that is referred to as the origin of thought around the smallest possible unit of indivisible matter. Here, as done by Hacking, it also serves to introduce the concept of the ‘void’ which differs from ‘non-existence’ in that it does exist, but contains (of) nothing.
between things ‘as they look to the eye’ and how they are in ‘reality’; a difference between how things ‘appear’ and what is their ‘inner constitution, a constitution that can be though about, perhaps even uncovered’.49 “Is the table a solid mass made of wood or an aggregate of discrete entities moving in the void?” 50
Atomism proposes a comprehensive and delineated manner to think of the world, and a possibility to adopt and share a point of view that is rooted not in individual (unsharable) embodied experiences but in a theoretical perspective.
Barad quotes Joseph Rouse in who she fnds an ally in questioning this habit of mind, that this way of perceiving reality has taken on. Rouse encourages ‘doubt about the presumption that representations are more accessible to us than the things they supposedly represent.’ He holds that representationalism is “a Cartesian legacy, a linguistic variation on Descartes’ insistence that we have a direct and privileged access to the content of our thoughts which we lack towards the “external” world.” Barad continues that this taken-for-granted belief in
representations “is a historically and culturally contingent belief that is part of Western philosophy’s legacy and not a logical necessity.”51
In order to move beyond representationalism, to break out of the confnes of geometrical optics and its endless reflecting of preexisting sameness, Barad proposes a different method of making the real materially-discursive.52 At the core of it must be metaphysics and a new ontology.
When shifting attention away from a world considered as full of independent, individual entities, Barad, trained as a physicist, employs her knowledge of Quantum mechanics; a feld which has long awoken from the atomic dream. Waves and particles are embedded and can’t be thought of outside of,
independent from or even as other from the felds of gravitational, magnetic and nuclear force that animate matter. Barad proposes to think in complex
49 Hacking 1983, 140 50 Barad 2007, 48
51 Rouse 1996, 206 quoted by Barad 2007, 49
52 ‘Material-discursive’ is a term coined by Barad. How to understand ‘discursivity’ outside of a mere linguistic conception? For Barad key is “A performative
understanding of discursive practices” (2003, 802) Where material bodies are not turned in words but perform themselves. Material-discursiveness would then consist out of (questioning) doings and actions and perceiving these in a way that is not independent from them (specifc material phenomena that are confgurations of the world) but as closely entangled with them.
reconfgurations of particle/waves and waves/particles. Working through Niels Bohr contemplations and his break with Newton, Descartes and Democritus she proposes a shifted from a world considered as full of independent, individual entities, linear time, cartesian dualisms and other representationalist dogmas to considering felds of gravitational, magnetic and nuclear forces constantly
affecting particle/waves and waves/particles.
Barad's proposal for an agential realist ontology sees the world as complex sets of entanglements of particle/waves and intra-active felds that are constantly constituting new phenomenas. The “performative approach” Barad proposes in her article, aims to “shift focus from linguistic representations to discursive practices.”53 It puts back the focus on matter and rather than looking for
“correspondence between descriptions and reality”. An approach like this, always focusses on experiences and “practices/doings/actions.”54 It starts not from
considering objeects, but always looks at the dynamic processes, that are producing new phenomena. A Performative approach also rejeects the metaphysics of a world that consist out of ‘words’ and ‘things’ but is always
concerned with the practices that compose the (re)confgurations of phenomena. Barad asks; why do we think that the existence of relations requires relata?55 The agential realist ontology Barad develops in her work, is a relational ontology that theorizes the production of material bodies and “advocates a causal
relationship between specifc exclusionary practices embodied as specifc material confgurations of the world.” This causal relationship is marked by agential intra-action between “the apparatuses of bodily production and the phenomena produced.”56
53 Barad 2003, 807 54 Barad 2003, 802 55 Barad 2003, 812
56 Understanding Barad's term intra-action, works well with the fgure ‘relations without relata’ as mentioned above, in mind. Where the usual word ‘interaction’ holds that two separate pre-existing entities interact with each other, but preserve their own identity, intra-action does not respect the boundaries of multiple separate entities but completely blurs them. (2003, 814)
In Barad'sown words: “The notion of intra-action is a key element of my agential realist framework. The neologism "intra-action" signifes the mutual constitution of entangled agencies. That is, in contrast to the usual "interaction," which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction, the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their
intra-Niels Bohrs’ famous ‘double slit’ experiment functions as a cornerstone for holding one of her most important claims; that what you measure is always influenced by whit what or how its measured. The same matter can behave both as particle and waves, depending on the tool of measurement. Actions of
measuring are deeply entangled with the agency in the confguring or
materialization of the phenomenon which is being measured. Measurement tools are never neutral, silent and without agency but instead actively play a part in the practice of measuring constituting the nature and materiality and their
discursivity.57
action. It is important to note that the "distinct" agencies are only distinct in a relational, not an absolute, sense, that is, agencies are only distinct in relation to their mutual entanglement; they don't exist as individual elements.”(2007, 33)
57 Barad often employs the double-slit experiment to demonstrate how practices of measuring are actively constituting what they intra-act with. This experiment, frst carried out by Thomas Young in 1801, can be employed to demonstrate whether an entity is a wave or a particle. Demonstrating the same experiment some decades later, Niels Bohr famously pointed out that the experiment and its specifc setup, actively infuence, or rather constitute what it measures. Without a specifc detector present in the experiment, the atom seems to behave like a wave. Once the detector is introduced, however, the atom exhibits particle behavior. The same entity thus, can be (or rather behave like) both particle and wave.
6. FROM EXHAUSTEDTRUTHTO MATERIALOPENENDEDNESS
“The hope is that this world will retain all its openness and divergence, so that the intense expressively and even madness so often attributed to Deleuze's world maybe seen as integral properties of the world itself.” 58
Similar problems as those posed by Braidotti and Barad are also relevant to Delanda. He has more of a technical approach and offers a careful elaboration that I will use here to function as fa solid backdrop for constructing the open ended worldview that seeks to liberate matter from existing around essences and transcendental axes that work to limit our sight and imagination.59 In his book
Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Delanda also gives insight on what
route he takes; he states to offer “not a direct interpretation of Deleuze texts but a reconstruction of Deleuze's philosophy.”60
An unpacking of Deleuze's world, must start off with “granting reality full autonomy from the human mind.” However, what differentiates the realist
ontology he proposes from what he calls ‘naive realism’ is that it does away with the idea that the world is “composed of fully formed objeects whose identity is guaranteed by their possession of an essence, a core set of properties that defnes what these objeects are.”61 Seeing the world from this point of view would not only entail stating that objeects have a singular, fxed identity that is claimed to be possessed regardless of time and space, it also introduces the belief in reifed generalities; transcendental, abstract models that do not really exist but that are constantly referenced. Instead of thinking of reality as full of “copies of these models, resembling them with a higher or lower degree of perfection”, Delanda opts for a theory that does away with essences and does not conceive of the
58 Delanda 2002, xvii
59 Harman (2016) makes a comparison between Barad's and Delanda’s approaches, read Agential and Speculative Realism: Remarks on Barad's Ontology. I would like to argue that he utilizes the classical (geometrical, masculine) approach to critique; he positions two theories and observes their oppositions. At the same time Harman also has his own agenda; and proposes his own Object Oriented Ontology as flling the missing parts in both theories, or in other words, he points out an unjustifable void between where they differ, and offers to fll it.
60 Delanda 2002, xii 61 Delanda 2002, xiii
world by measuring degrees of resemblance. At the core of what Delanda
elaborates lies the idea of difference, not regarded as something negative, “as a lack of resemblance” but positively or productively, as that what fuels dynamic processes.62
Delanda’s attempt of reconstructing Deleuze's ontology of difference is thus closely related to Braidotti, who relates ‘the capacity to act different’ to an
affrmative desire and sees it’s subjeect as a “piece of meat activated by electric waves of desire” and is affliated to Barad's in the way that it does not take in account timeless and static essences that defne the identity of objeects or fully formed beings, but rather looks at the dynamic, morphogenetic processes which defne the becoming(s) of the world progressively.63
Focussing on elaborating on a worldview that is not (en)closed or honeycombed by given categories that “exhaust all there is to know about the world” but instead one that allows for an unfolding of the open-endedness of the world and the agency of the becoming(s) of material processes. Delanda opts for a worldview that allows for spontaneity and anticipates the virtual and the not yet actualized potential.64
Allowing for the world to be open-ended and being capable of containing and doing the unexpected (incalculable, unmeasurable) leads to diverging importance and relevance away from Flatland notions like ‘truth’ and ‘fact’. As determining (timeless) truth and (static) facts consist according to Delanda, out of determining a relation of “correspondence between, on one hand, a series of facts and on the other, a series of sentences expressing these facts.”65 These words also echo those of Barad, reminding us that which is labeled or measured as ‘truth’ is deeply connected with the practices of determining that fact. Braidotti, criticizing Eurocentrism, points out the relevance of determining ones’ location and the importance of being aware of the political implications that lead to the constituting of singular truths and universal laws that allegedly promote universal equality, but, are equal only to themselves. (And imply that difference means less than.) Questioning the idea of ultimate truths and universal facts and fnding a way to
62 Delanda 2002, i-iii
63 Braidotti 2000, 159 qtd. in Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 19 64 Delanda 2002, xiv
shift attention away from them, Delanda proposes, after Deleuze, to instead try to formulate “correctly posed problems”.66 Problems regard notions like ‘relevance’ and ‘importance’ rather than truth and fact and most importantly, they are not founded on terms of correspondence but lie embedded in dynamic processes or relations of difference.67 The fgure of the eternal interplay of images between mirrors in which the same is multiplied endlessly and nothing new appears can be referenced once again here. Let’s do so for jeust another time:
“Man is a wolf for men, an eagle for sheep, a rat for rats. In truth, a rara avis. I’ve seen few men with the bravery of the rat, the courage of the wolf, the nobility of the eagle. I speak in fgures to those who speak in fgures; we know not what we say. We are in a labyrinth of images; we’ll never get rid of these illusions. Let us leave the theater of representations” (…) Quite simply, what is essential is neither the image nor the deep meaning, neither the
representation not its hall of mirrored refections, but the system of relations.”
68
66 Delanda 2002, 129
67 See Mackenzie (2005) for more on the ontology of problematization as developed by Delanda after Deleuze: “Situations overfow context by virtue of their unresolved or problematic aspects. Situations singularise contexts. In posing a problem, someone or something tries to come to grips with what is not yet worked out or settled, what is not reducible to pre-existing terms or limits.” (2005, 103)
I. Te door to the invisible must be visible
In the 1952 novel by Renee Dumal an “extraordinary voyage on the yacht Impossible”
is undertaken to an invisible mountain, that nevertheless has a real geographic location
on earth; Mount Analogue. Te main character in the book publishes an article on the
notion of the mountain as known in mythic traditions. It forms the bond between
Earth and Sky. He proposes that Mount Analogue can be considered as the ultimate
symbolic mountain: “Its solitary summit reaches the sphere of eternity, and its base spreads
out in manifold foothills into the world of mortals.”
iWhereas some symbolism is related only to ‘proportion’, (the relations between
dimensions of a structure, as seen a triangle for example) an other type of symbolism
also deals with ‘scale’ (relations between these dimensions and those of the human
body). What defines the scale of Mount Analogue, he continues, is that it’s
inaccessible to ordinary human approaches. Despite this inaccessibility, it is very
important to note that this mountain must exist. “If our analogical mount has no
geographical location, “it loses its persuasive signifcance as a way of uniting Earth and
Heaven.”
iiIn his article, the author concludes; “For a mountain to play the role of
Mount Analogue, (...) its summit must be inaccessible, but its base accessible to human
beings as nature made them. It must be unique and it must exist geographically. Te door
to the invisible must be visible.”
iiiTe idea to undertake an expedition is brought up by Professor Sogol, who has read
the article and sends a letter to our author in which he insists upon meeting.
Pierre Sogol is professor of Mountaineering, but also does odd jobs in a domestic
appliance factory, a camping goods store, a laboratory producing insecticide, and a
photoengraving company. He is determined to locate the mountain and insists on
working together. During their first meeting he declares to our author that he thought
he was alone in being convinced of the existence of this ultimate symbolic mountain.
“But the very fact that there are now two of us changes everything. Te task doesn’t
become twice as easy: after having been impossible, it has become possible. It’s as if
you gave me, in order to measure the distance from a star to our planet, one known
point on the surface of the globe: you can’t make the calculation. Give me a second
point and it becomes possible, for then I can construct the triangle.”
ivWhen professor Sogol has advanced his calculations regarding the exact
geographical location of mount analogue, they gather with group of knowledge
seekers of all kinds on the attic of Sogol’s place. Here they address three
questions; How has this territory thus far escaped the notice of explorers and
travelers, how does one gain access to it, and where is it?
v7. THEBREAKOUT
Now, how to continue? How to force a break out of being stuck in the sameness of reflective optics? How to move beyond geometrical models and diagrams in which points have fxed spots, singular identity and in which the human (a very specifc kind of human) constantly claims a central position? How do we
conceive of space not captured within reflective boundaries that eternally copy and reflect sameness? How to sketch out space that is not measured along transcendental all mighty axes, which in order to be universal, presume a very narrowed down conception of the real?
How to visualize a non-exhausted open-ended world? How to think of a world not only as full of preexisting categories that administer a false total amount of possibilities, but a dynamic terrestrial reality that is morphogenetic and
constantly reconfguring? How to speak of a world where matter is not passive and where phenomena are not eternally convicted to a singular category and identity. A world not held hostage by concept-bound language, non-contradictory logics and rigid geometrics, but a world of/as/in becomings, relations, processes and flows that are fueled by fleshy desire, intra-active entanglements and
intensive differences.
Being informed by Braidotti about the social and political implications of the notion difference having to come to mean ‘less than’ she also clearly states that the promise of universal equality does not do jeustice to difference as a
productive term. She urges both for a move beyond exclusive, binary logics, anthropocentrism and unitary and static identities. She encourages explorations of strategies and practices that cope with difference and change and seek to ‘increase our capacity to act differently”.
Braidotti’s posthuman ethics proposes a world of complex embedded multiplicities of the world, invoked by powerful forces of fleshy desire and affrmative passions. Barad foregrounds her knowledge of physics to set the outlines for an agential realism. One that allows to conceive of a world in flux; one in which every cutting apart is also a cutting together of the world as constantly reconfguring the new. Barad has clearly pointed out, that thinking that words give identity to things, or that marks on a set of axes give ultimate position or meaning to points, is an obsolete habit of mind. Barad reminds us
‘that nature does not lives in clock time’69 and neither within the confnes of geometry, as representationalism seems to imply. Measuring apparatuses, and practices are not neutral observers, reflecting the preexisting ‘real’ of the world but instead actively contribute in shaping the constant reconfguration of an entangled world. Instead of defning identity, truth, the real, giving defnite answers and posing absolute statements, the only thing they indicate is a relationship and connectivity between the two.
While keeping in mind Barad hinting towards the importance of practice, performativity; doings and actions and proposing the mechanism of refraction instead of representation, it is Delanda with whom we shall continue to explore and develop possibilities beyond the geometrical optics of reflection.
Following Delanda in his effort to ‘reconstruct Deleuze's world’, we shall carefully formulate some premises for a setting out of a space, that does not represent ‘the truth’ or the actual but nevertheless aims to be as real it can get. Braidotti reminds us that “all cartography, [they] acts a posteriori and therefore fails to account for the situation here and now.” 70 However, here we are interested in another type of cartography, one that is aware of failing in giving a proper
account of any situation in the here and now and one which must not be though about as trying to represent a reality after the fact but as a venture in a new world.
I like to think of non-representational cartography as a drawing of portraits of space, a practice that starts off with a given but hosts in its practice the potential of endless unfolding. The drawing becomes a model(ing) that allows that what is already there to open up, to morph into something entirely different and attains to its space a structure to host a manifold space of possibilities.71
Here and now, I propose to consider it as a model or a testing ground that allows for practicing change and as a method to conceive of a model that that provides with a way of perceiving space in terms of radical indeterminacy, and
69 Barad 2014
70 Braidotti 2006, 199
71 Hosting here must not be understood as in one providing space to the other, but in the sense as proposed by Serres in The Parasite.(1980) The relationship between host-guest is best expressed in French, hôte-à-hôte. Always simultaneously host and guest. In which words as the gift, the loss, the offering, the taking, hospitality and hostility come to mean things absolutely different.
immanence.
This mapping does not help us, in making sense of what the world already is, rather it tells us about the routes its potential becoming could take. This mapping practice is necessary, in an attempt constituting a new (way of perceiving)
reality. It allows us to imagine the mechanics of the space of intense encounters. It allows us to unfold the intensity of the moments where, because the
circumstances were jeust right, we get to see a glimpse of what inhabits this world that mostly remains invisible but affects us all the time.
The intention to be “worthy of the present” and the need to “resist the present,” go hand in hand in order to affrmatively conceive of a space of possibilities, where potential states, virtual states, becoming states are considered as real as actual states of things.72 A space not determined by things, phenomena, or objeects that already exist, but a space that endlessly ripples along with the actions and their waves, the groans, and stuttering of becomings.
Next, we shall continue to investigate this ‘space of possibilities’ with Delanda. This shall introduce us into thinking in terms of the actual and virtual, that help us structuring (thinking about) that territory. Delanda offers a very concise and step by step manner which we shall follow closely and keep as a point of reference. This, in order not to get completely lost in those wild and intense planes that must inhabit all those things that we know exist – far from
equilibrium– but are rarely contacted, as usually they are not granted the space to actually form in/as.
72 Braidotti 2013, 53 Stengers 2000, 72
II. Te group
A group “for which the impossible no longer existed” gathered at the ‘laboratory’ of
Father Sogol.
viTe prepare for the expedition to Mount Analogue, they would first go
over Sogols’ calculations. Tey are with twelve in total; the author and his wife, who
upon hearing the plan responded “Tis is the first serious plan I’ve come across in my
life”.
viiOthers that where invited for the meeting where Ivan Lapse, a Russian linguist,
small, “bald on top and fringed with black hair”, “fattened features”, and an
“excellent glacier climber with a particular liking for “bivouacs at high altitudes.”
viiiTen there was Alphonse aamard, a French poet who “consoled himself to writing
long poems on mountain themes.”
ixEmile Gorge, “twenty-five, a newspaperman”,
“Small, bizarrely built, with a thin body and a chubby face, having thick lips and no
visible cheek-bones” and a passion for music and choreography.”
xTere was uudith
Pancake, an American mountain painter “who understands that the view one has from
a high peak is not registered in the same perceptive range as a still life or an ordinary
landscape.” She works in a workman-like manner and “her pictures with their curved
perspective, vividly recall those frescos in which the old religious painters tried to
represent the concentric circles of the celestial universe.”
xiNext up is Arthur Beaver.
Forty-five to fifty, a physician, bony, tanned face, blond hair, only happy above an
altitude of 15,000 feet. A yachtsman, inventor and mountain climber. “Knows the
latin names, habits, and properties of all animals and plants on the principal mountain
ranges of the earth.” Present were also the brothers Hans and Karl. Twenty-five and
twenty-eight, fingers of steel, eagle eyes, specialists in acrobatic climbing. Hans studies
mathematical physics and astronomy and Karl is principally interested in oriental
metaphysics. Tere was uulie Bonasse, a successful Belgian actress. “Te confidant of a
swarm of odd young people whom she guided into paths of sublime
expedition was Benito aicoria, an Italian ladies’ tailor in Paris, belonging to the
German school of mountain climbing. His method: You attack the steepest slope
along the least promising approach, and climb toward the summit without allowing
8. NEW PORTRAITS OF SPACEAND FACES
Rather than allowing any transcendental factors to determine our understanding of the world, Delanda opts for a radically immanent material world, in which matter and energy are the intrinsic form generating resources.
In his attempt to replace ‘eternal archetypes’ and to get rid of essences and transcendental axes that assign position, form and identity to things, Delanda centers Deleuze's concept of the ‘multiplicity’ in his ontology.
Multiplicities will function to ‘specify the structure of spaces of possibilities’ which “explain the regularities exhibited by morphogenetic processes.”73 In order to elucidate on the resources this concept could offer to avoid essentialism,
Delanda turns to mathematics. Deleuze's term multiplicity is closely related to the mathematical ‘manifold’.74
The manifold provides with quite a different type of space, as those spaces, we are more familiar with from analytic geometry. When sketching out ‘a space’ on a piece of paper, we are likely to refer to those models developed by Descartes and Fermat; two dimensional spaces that allow the possibility to embed curves between fxed axes. Determining identities of points or locations points that can be drawn in spaces delineated by for example x and y axes, is done by ascribing to them sets of numbers or coordinates that relate them to the axes and
subsequently back to each other. The distances between all points in this space are defned. Rather than such metric space, as described above, manifolds provide with space that is nonmetric.75 Manifolds are never drawn by sketching outlines frst and must not be thought of as spaces that are ruled by a certain number of fxed axes.
Conceived frst by the differential geometry of Friedrich Gauss and Bernhard Riemann, manifolds do not need a global embedding space with fxed sets of axes. Rather than inscribing and relating what happens within a given space to external measure, ‘instantaneous’ values can be measured by relations
expressed in ‘rates of change’.76 Relational values in/of this space, are indicated by a relation of difference among several points in the same neighborhood.
73 Delanda 2002, 10 74 Delanda 2002, 3 75 Delanda 2002,15 76 Delanda 2005, 6
Rather than showing and representing a number of static points or states here, processes of differentiation and trajeectories of degrees of change become visible among a multitude of values. This allows for the study of a surface as a space in which a rate of change characterizes the space in itself and notions of identity and position are always relational and dynamic.
According to Delanda, the fact that manifolds do not need a transcendental dimension or a global embedding space and the fact that it can consist of a variable number of dimensions are what make up the main traits of Deleuze's ‘multiplicities’.77 It is important to note, however, that the replacement of
transcendental ‘essences’ as means of defning a unity or explaining “the identity of material objeects and natural kinds” with the term multiplicity, does not entail a simple replacement of terms but points “to a deeper ontological difference”.78 Rather than assigning singular identity and fxed positions through the discretion of the display of a singular state or bestowing instantaneous values, snapshots, single moments, with timeless legitimacy, the important ontological difference lies in the facts that now identifying matter is being done through the mapping out of future-present-historical possible states and through gaining an insight in the tendencies (or behavior if you will) that specifc morphogenetic processes display.
Because of the possibility to map trajeectories and tendencies, the manifold functions to map out a space of possible states which the physical system can display. As actual states are always in a process of continuously changing or updating, the manifold becomes a non-representational mapping, that does not reduce what it calls the real, by rendering it still and motionless, by capturing phenomena in snapshots depicting eternal essences.79 The multiplicity mapped as a manifold shows us a dynamic reality of natural kinds if allows a study of
77 Deleuze himself refers to these two terms as overlapping in several sources, quoted by Delanda.
78 Delanda 2002, 5
79 While Barad frequently uses the term phenomena, Delanda quotes Deleuze in pointing out it’s Kantian roots, as being part of the distinction between the terms ‘phenomena’ and ‘noumena’, whereby the ‘phenomena’ is a term that relates to things susceptible to human experience, while ‘noumena’ refers to (things of) the world ‘in itself’ (2005, 3) Having this said, I am using multiple terms here referring to ‘natural kinds’ quite interminably and it does not feel relevant for my purpose here and now. I feel it works nicely to address ‘natural kinds’ with multiple terms.
