Eleventh Series of Nonsense

Axiom: Deleuze states that at the intersection of two series, "word=x and thing=x". (66).

See this post for background on nonsense.

Page 67: Good stuff on the "sense" of the onomatopoeia. These words as well as nonsensical words are "absurd" "paradoxes" as they are a class that contain themselves as a member; that is, they declare their own sense. The visual analogy here would be a circle, a ring, or a donut. The nonsensical word (e.g. "Phlizz") is caught in a loop of self-procreation, an elemental form of non-identity ("What is it? It's nothing."). Even terms that are "devoid of signification" have "a sense." (70) The remainder of difference between the two series in the nonsensical word has dwindled to such a small number, it cannot be pinned down such that it can be excised and the structure can invert or dissipate. This would be akin, on a different level, to the "nonsensical" phenomenon of not being able to get a "terrible" song out of one's head. There seems to be no "cure" for this type of event save to let the structure exhaust itself (i.e. time passes). The visual representation of this would be a Mobius strip or Mobius donut where the twist has shrunk down to minute size, so small that the structure looks like a plain donut or circle. If we have to use a method like parallax or triangulation to detect that tiny twist in the in the Mobius donut, one could see how this could take a long time.

Axiom: Sense is always a surface effect. (70). Imagine a machine that can determine the shape of a balloon from the inside. Sense is the production of a surface that then wraps the balloon almost perfectly.

Nonsense is the divided element, the blind spot, that both produces sense and is perceived in the interpretation and evaluation of sense or surface effects.

Page 71: Reference to the "blind spot".

"Structure is in fact a machine for the production of incorporeal sense." (71)

Page 72: The ideal game is not one that is perfect, but one that produces the incorporeal or as Deleuze puts it, "surface effects". But one could say, in the tradition of Leibniz, that every moment, every event, is in itself perfect: "God has chosen the most perfect world." (Discourse on Metaphysics) This would be true in our examples if every event conforms to to the structure of the fibonacci sequence, whose proportions are generally held as the model of perfection.

"What is bureaucratic in these fantastic machines...?" -- determining the logic, the order, the "bureaucracy" of the singularities in the series (e.g. the distribution of the red dots in the Pascal triangle). (72)

Page 73: It's interesting that Deleuze says that "today's task" is to "produce sense" -- nothing less than a philosophical call to arms -- yet the production of sense cannot be forced, there is no formula by which to produce it. Instead, it arises organically, out of a blind spot, under favorable conditions.