Abstraction as Dissection of a Flat “Ontology”: The Illusiveness of Levels (Paper)

DeLanda:

…while an ontology based on relations between general types and particular instances is hierarchical, each level representing a different ontological category (organism, species, genera) [or strings, quarks, baryons], an approach in terms of interacting parts and emergent wholes leads to a flat ontology, one made exclusively of unique, singular individuals, differing in spatio-temporal scale but not in ontological status.

The following discussion, however, seeks to go further than DeLanda’s account of hierarchy, extending it to all entities of spatio-temporal entities, thus the interjection of “strings, quarks, baryons” into the quote. That this extension is natural should be clear once van Fraassen’s role in this level-denying consilience. Furthermore, van Fraassen’s account will be employed to illustrate why any level-like organization attributed to the components of an explanation has no bearing on the explanation, and arises due to two things:

1) erroneously clumping together all types of belief statements into a single branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge, and

2) attempting to stratify the causal thicket that is the world, so as conform the produce of scientific enterprise with monism and fundamentalist predilections.

Finally, there is one other way in which the account differs from DeLanda’s flat ontology, when touching upon Kant’s antinomy of teleology: the idea that levels of mechanisms telescopes to a flat ontology, as every part and whole enjoys the same status in a scientific explanation, and only differ in size.

Figure: The larger arrows point toward the conclusion of consilience. The smaller arrows suggest relationships that create cooperation toward the thesis. The blue bubbles represent the positive web of notions that cohere, and the red bubbles are those notions that are excluded from web. The red arrows indicate where the ideas not included in the web arise, and the totality of this paper works toward a final explication as to why these are to be excluded. There are a few thin blue lines that are not included, because they would make a mess of the image, such as a line connecting abstraction and James’ pragmatism. However, the paper (Abstraction as Dissection of a Flat Ontology. through) endeavors to make these connections clear, for example, quoting James to show that James presents an idea that seems a precursor to Cartwright’s notion of abstraction. (Note: Yellow lines are really blue lines, but are yellow to avoid confusion that might ensue from blue lines passing through blue bubbles. Green lines are to indicate additivity. The red lines denote notions not connected to the web, yet bear some relation to ideas in the web.) 

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Topological Drifts in Deleuze. Note Quote.

Brion Gysin: How do you get in… get into these paintings?

William Burroughs: Usually I get in by a port of entry, as I call it. It is often a face through whose eyes the picture opens into a landscape and I go literally right through that eye into that landscape. Sometimes it is rather like an archway… a number of little details or a special spot of colours makes the port of entry and then the entire picture will suddenly become a three-dimensional frieze in plaster or jade or some other precious material.

The word fornix means “an archway” or “vault” (in Rome, prostitutes could be solicited there). More directly, fornicatio means “done in the archway”; thus a euphemism for prostitution.

Diagrammatic praxis proposes a contractual (push, pull) approach in which the movement between abstract machine, biogram (embodied, inflected diagram), formal diagram (drawing of, drawing off) and artaffect (realized thing) is topologically immanent. It imagines the practice of writing, of this writing, interleaved with the mapping processes with which it folds and unfolds – forming, deforming and reforming both processes. The relations of non-relations that power the diagram, the thought intensities that resonate between fragments, between content ad expression, the seeable and the sayable, the discursive and the non-discursive, mark entry points; portals of entry through which all points of the diagram pass – push, pull, fold, unfold – without the designation of arrival and departure, without the input/output connotations of a black boxed confection. Ports, as focal points of passage, attract lines of resistance or lines of flight through which the diagram may become both an effectuating concrete assemblage (thing) and remain outside the stratified zone of the audiovisual. It’s as if the port itself is a bifurcating point, a figural inflected archway. The port, as a bifurcation point of resistance (contra black box), modulates and changes the unstable, turbulent interplay between pure Matter and pure Function of the abstract machine. These ports are marked out, localized, situated, by the continuous movement of power-relations:

These power-relations … simultaneously local, unstable and diffuse, do not emanate from a central point or unique locus of sovereignty, but at each moment move from one point to another in a field of forces, marking inflections, resistances, twists and turns when one changes direction or retraces one’s steps… (Gilles Deleuze, Sean Hand-Foucault)

An inflection point, marked out by the diagram, is not a symmetrical form but the difference between concavity and convexity, a pure temporality, a “true atom of form, the true object of geography.” (Bernard Cache)

Figure: Left: A bifurcating event presented figurally as an archway, a port of entry through order and chaos. Right: Event/entry with inflexion points, points of suspension, of pure temporality, that gives a form “of an absolute exteriority that is not even the exteriority of any given interiority, but which arise from that most interior place that can be perceived or even conceived […] that of which the perceiving itself is radically temporal or transitory”. The passing through of passage.

Cache’s absolute exteriority is equivalent to Deleuze’s description of the Outside “more distant than any exterior […] ‘twisted’, folded and doubled by an Inside that is deeper than any interior, and alone creates the possibility of the derived relation between the interior and the exterior”. This folded and doubled interior is diagrammed by Deleuze in the folds chapter of Foucault.

Thinking does not depend on a beautiful interiority that reunites the visible ad articulable elements, but is carried under the intrusion of an outside that eats into the interval and forces or dismembers the internal […] when there are only environments and whatever lies betwen them, when words and things are opened up by the environment without ever coinciding, there is a liberation of forces which come from the outside and exist only in a mixed up state of agitation, modification and mutation. In truth they are dice throws, for thinking involves throwing the dice. If the outside, farther away than any external world, is also closer than any internal world, is this not a sign that thought affects itself, by revealing the outside to be its own unthought element?

“It cannot discover the unthought […] without immediately bringing the unthought nearer to itself – or even, perhaps, without pushing it farther away, and in any case without causing man’s own being to undergo a change by the very fact, since it is deployed in the distance between them” (Gilles Deleuze, Sean Hand-Foucault)

Figure: Left: a simulation of Deleuze’s central marking in his diagram of the Foucaultian diagram. This is the line of the Outside as Fold. Right: To best express the relations of diagrammatic praxis between content and expression (theory and practice) the Fold figure needs to be drawn as a double Fold (“twice twice” as Massumi might say) – a folded möbius strip. Here the superinflections between inside/outside and content/expression provide transversal vectors.

A topology or topological becoming-shapeshift retains its connectivity, its interconnectedness to preserve its autonomy as a singularity. All the points of all its matter reshape as difference in itself. A topology does not resemble itself. The möbius strip and the infamous torus-to-coffe cup are examples of 2d and 3d topologies. technically a topological surface is totalized, it can not comprise fragments cut or glued to produce a whole. Its change is continuous. It is not cut-copy-pasted. But the cut and its interval are requisite to an emergent new.

For Deleuze, the essence of meaning, the essence of essence, is best expressed in two infinitives; ‘to cut ” and “to die” […] Definite tenses keeping company in time. In the slash between their future and their past: “to cut” as always timeless and alone (Massumi).

Add the individuating “to shift” to the infinitives that reside in the timeless zone of indetermination of future-past. Given the paradigm of the topological-becoming, how might we address writing in the age of copy-paste and hypertext? The seamless and the stitched? As potential is it diagram? A linguistic multiplicity whose virtual immanence is the metalanguage potentiality between the phonemes that gives rise to all language?

An overview diagram of diagrammatic praxis based on Deleuze’s diagram of the Foucaultian model shown below. The main modification is to the representation of the Fold. In the top figure, the Fold or zone of subjectification becomes a double-folded möbius strip.

Four folds of subjectification:

1. material part of ourselves which is to be surrounded and folded

2. the fold of the relation between forces always according to a particular rule that the relation between forces is bent back in order to become a relation to oneself (rule ; natural, divine, rational, aesthetic, etc)

3. fold of knowledge constitutes the relation of truth to our being and our being to truth which will serve as the formal condition for any kind of knowledge

4. the fold of the outside itself is the ultimate fold: an ‘interiority of expectation’ from which the subject, in different ways, hopes for immortality, eternity, salvation, freedom or death or detachment.