Twice we have been wrapped up in some kind of national drama and a catastrophe has come in from out of our collective blind spot, swept away the import of the previous discourse, and laid bare a "true" problem.  In the case of the 2012 election, Superstorm Sandy displaced the petty bickering between the two candidates, illustrating that the ongoing cataclysmic global warming is more important than any domestic squabbles.  Secondly, all the b.s. around the "fiscal cliff" (December 2012) was pushed into the background by the Newtown elementary school shooting, demonstrating the need for adequate gun control laws in the U.S.

No Man is

The Best Parody of the Events of May 1968?

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4616099768327171653

You Don’t Know Jack: Kerouac Biographer Joyce Johnson and ‘The Voice Is All’ - The Daily Beast:

Finally, after years of suppressing his French-Canadian lineage in his writing, Kerouac experimented with writing openly about his Franco-American heritage in the blunt, plainspoken joual of his youth. This experiment in his native language, which occurred shortly before he sat down to write On the Road,gave his writing a certain intimacy. “It was a very direct first-person voice,” said Johnson, “frank and open—not the self-conscious literary voice he was using before. It was a voice that would lure an ardent legion of Kerouac disciples for decades to come, with unremitting lines that build momentum like freight trains:

'55

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WiK74i0bms

"Of this image of time, Deleuze retains (in L'image-temps) the continuity of "sheets of past" with the "peaks [pointes] of present," implying the cone is a vortical continuum; each sheet is a disk but also a winding stair continuing up and around in the "next" one, according to the Bergsonian formula of the flux, "interpenetration without succession."

Peter Canning, from Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, p.80.

"What demons do is jump across intervals, and from one interval to another." (Dialogues, p. 40)

May '68

"What counts is what amounted to a visionary phenomenon, as if society suddenly saw what was intolerable in it and also saw the possibility for something else."

Two Regimes of Madness, p. 233-234.

"Intensity is itself differential, by itself a difference."

DR, p. 222.

"The Interval is Substance"

ATP, p.478.

"The collective assemblage is always like a murmur [rumeur] from which I take my proper name, the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which I draw my voice."

ATP, p.84.

"It is almost as if every expressing subject contained others, each of which speaks a diverse language, the one in the other."

Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, p.371.

"The only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted."

ATP, p.7.

http://books.google.com/books?id=H4XWdN4u4OgC&lpg=PA19&ots=h6zF2K2kXP&dq=kafka%20%22sober%20revolutionary%22&pg=PA19#v=onepage&q=kafka%20%22sober%20revolutionary%22&f=false

"Language stabilizes around a parish, a bishopric, a capital."

ATP, p.7.

"What is at the bottom of the psyche but a load of cat cough-ups?"

This is a table, this is an apple, this is a piece of wax...

From DR, 35.

Food Palate Map

I think the palate is perfect example of an intensive surface.  The palate is composed of five main assemblages (sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami).  All food is but a combination of these five attributes in the same way that a sound is a combination of frequencies.  The palate has sensitivities to certain tastes and sends this information up to the brain where it is translated emotionally (e.g. "Mmm, this pretzel is good and salty" or "This coffee is impotably bitter.").

One could write an essay on the stylistic consistency of the sounds that DJ Premier digs for samples and loops.  On one hand, it seems impossible that one might find a sample in a song such as the following, but once you hear the movement in the samples that he is going for (another example would be Above the Clouds), the sounds achieve consistency in the Deleuzian sense:
http://www.whosampled.com/sample/view/11515/Gang%20Starr%20feat.%20M.O.P.-1/2%20%26%201/2_Jimmy%20Webb-Gymnast%27s%20Ballet%20%28Fingerpainting%29/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jY3VwmiT3j4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIv4PHJqCnM

www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/04/06/books/20120406-BEATS-12.html

Humility

"The earth trembles and quakes with laughter at the arrogance of a ground that, in the span of an instant, can suffer obliteration."

Flaxman (2012), p.152.

Plane of Immanence

Percept and Affects

http://books.google.com/books?id=shBXkF8MIpsC&lpg=PA164&dq=percepts%20inauthor%3Adeleuze&pg=PA169#v=onepage&q&f=false

"Just as i learn to like ___, it seems that I can never reach ___.  There is the wall far above, the horizonless sky extends deeply and incongruently across my soul."

Eris

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eris_%28mythology%29

"We are reminded of the grand finale of the Sophist: difference is displaced, division turns back on itself and begins to function in reverse."

Difference and Repetition, p. 68.

Les Mots et Les Choses

"For, the panic subsiding more and more every day, it will daily be seen how it originated; confidence will be more than restored; there will be a reaction; from the stock's descent its rise will be higher than from no fall, the holders trusting themselves to fear no second fate."

Herman Melville, The Confidence Man, p.27.

"The eternal return transmutes the negative: it turns the heavy into something light, it makes the negative cross over into affirmation, it makes negation a power of affirming."

Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 81.

Good new book on Deleuze

http://www.amazon.com/Gilles-Deleuze-Fabulation-Philosophy-Powers/dp/0816665508/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325002129&sr=1-1

"If becoming is the power of the false, then the good, the generous, the noble is what raises the false to the nth power or the will to power to the level of artistic becoming."

"A cinematographic mutation occurs when abberations of movement take on their independence; that is, when the moving bodies and movements lose their invariants."

- Cinema 2, 137-138.

"Differential calculus...is consequently a basic and real means of exploration of the reality of existence."

- Deleuze, from seminar of 22 April 1980. 

"We must not see mathematical metaphors in all these expressions such as 'singular and distinctive points' or 'adjunct fields'...These are categories of of the dialectical Idea, extensions of the differential calculus (mathesis universalis)...corresponding to the Idea in all its domains."

- Difference and Repetition, 190.

Via Daniel W. Smith.

"Breaking your double helix, and now the shit is single"

via http://rapgenius.com/Company-flow-8-steps-to-perfection-lyrics#note-339711

"Fell in love with this fish who got caught in my mesh"

http://www.mp3lyrics.org/d/de-la-soul/itzsoweezee/

Compare to the Sierpinski triangle, sieve of Eratosthenes, Deleuze on the holes of the fisherman's net.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgleqnmBeeqKXIhdKLQ5iDRn6l67YRducB7P6_5QlFK5bQet4JZRgk_LUnTqMuSrZAVqR-QYK-0_o7tx8nLcM6nUCc1hqhW6ApDTvoQw5ZK33xxHr6Li6vKWgm3O7O8v0u_XwT78I7IYG4/s1600/768.jpg

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkokSJgLe6QntuwMKlWSzkZmfwpVylAJyt0mSyutwcOHkGALKRuzqsJsasxzn_hkzrH5FQcdO9nE3qG31RP6jGQP36sP9vuvc-ZOXJEC6LiK3S7bpFE9mWjWd8IwxGrsoY1sfuCgz-z5U/s1600/776.jpg

Time is Encoded

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/opinion/the-umbrella-man.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.

• Longfellow, Pt. III, The Theologian's Tale: Elizabeth, sec. IV

From Badiou to Deleuze

(This is drawn from Badiou's Being and Event (1988) (page numbers are from the 2007 paperback ed. of the English translation.))

Badiou opposes two concepts, the "count-as-one", and the "non-being of the one".  "Oneness" is a misspecification: "There is no one, just count-as-one." (24)  The count-as-one I will abbreviate as n.  It is the multiple.  The non-being of the one I will abbreviate as -1.

A structure, Badiou's ontological space, is "the multiple qua multiple, subtracted from the one in its being." (28)  What would be the shorthand for this structure?  n-1.  n-1, of course, already exists within Deleuze's writing.  It is the rhizome, the system of assemblages or machines that make up his ontological space, virtuality, etc.

Where Do We Go From Here?

How to describe the ontological space Deleuze has outlined in LOS?

"Ontology itself in the form of pure mathematics." (Alain Badiou's Being and Event, p.4)

"I’ll know it when I see it.”

From: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell?printable=true

Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Immanence

There are declarations, books, articles, and movies on the pursuit of happiness.

I would argue that the feeling of happiness, or even jouissance, can be achieved via the pursuit of immanence.

What is immanence?

Immanence is the moment when there is no outside to the moment, when you are so totally into a book that you forget you are performing the act of reading; instead, you are experiencing the book, mentally performing the action of the characters therein.  The same would be true for movies: it's the moment when you forget you are watching a movie and instead you are totally entranced (at one) with the progression of the action.

Immanence can happen in any and every situation.  In meditation, one might lose track of one's own corporeality, thereby becoming immanent to the sonic waves passing through the galaxy, etc.

Immanence is often opposed to transcendence.  In Judeo-Christian theology, transcendence is the pursuit most noble...The transcendence of this world for the world of Heaven, etc.  In our lives, we often focus on transcendence as goal: E.g. "I want to transcend my miserable service industry job and shoebox apartment.  I want to move on up.  I want something better (for my life)."

I feel that if we pursued moments of immanence as hard as we pursue moments of transcendence, we would be happier and more likely to achieve transcendence.  This is because transcendence is actually a result of immanence, not a means to it.  We only realize that we have transcended our situation retroactively.  We experience an immanent moment, gain a little taste of the sublime, and only afterwards realize what we have tasted.  Likewise, within Lacan's diagram of desire, meaning is retroactively pinned -- desire flows up one channel, then encounters a swerve, a line of flight, then flies back the way it came, transformed. That bend in the curve is akin to a difference, a differential, where the slope of the line is changing, and eventually changes sign (from negative to positive in the Lacan diagram).  The bend in the curve is the moment that we are in touch with the Aion -- asymptotic unlimited time wherein past and future stretch undifferentiated from one another.  The bend in the curve, the line of flight, ontologically, is difference-in-itself.  Immanence is the wormhole, the rabbit hole stretching infinitely, Borges' infinite straight-line labyrinth, the gateway that leads to foreign lands, transcending from the here and now, etc.

I would love to write up the Pursuit of Immanence into a self-help book that was as popular as the 4-Hour Workweek.  Anybody want to help?

Appendix II: Phantasm and Modern Literature: 5. Zola and the Crack-up

"Carrying the crack" == Cain. (321)

The crack is "continuous, imperceptible, and silent." (324)  It is Aion.  It has a heredity (cf. Foucault's genealogies). (324)  Like a gravity well or gyre, the crack "follow[s] the lines of least resistance" along an "oblique line" (read fibonacci numbers in Pascal's triangle). (325)  Compare to logistic map.

"The crack...--the appetite for oil". (330)

D speaks of the small heredity reflected in the grand heredity, the small maneuver in the large maneuver. (331)  Compare to the Sierpinski triangles within the Pascal triangle, also the two levels of the Baroque House.

Appendix II: Phantasm and Modern Literature: 4. Michael Tournier and the World Without Others

"Must we conclude that sexuality is the only fantastic principle able to bring about the deviation of the world from the rigorous economic order assigned by the origin?" (303)

"If it is true that neurosis is the negative of perversion, would not perversion, for its part, be the elemental aspect of neurosis."  (304)

"The pervert is not someone who desires, but someone who introduces desire into an eintirely different system and makes it play, within the system, the role of an internal limit, a virtual center or zero point." (304)  Essentially, introducing a new (pre-individual) singularity.

Page 305: Without the Other, I am groundless.  The Other is the button in the sofa holding the stuffing in place.

"[The Other] makes things incline toward one another and find their natural complements in one another." (306)

Page 306: On the origins of narcissism.  Without the Other, "Everywhere I am not total darkness reigns."

Page 306: On why things bang.

Page 307: There is a generalized relativity of others.

"The Other...is the expression of a possible world." (308)  D talks of Proust perceiving Albertine on the beach and what it meant to him and what would it mean to her if she had seen him. (308)  This is exactly the point made earlier between language and bodies: That the structure, the geophilosophy of the real, any arrangement of bodies (the scaled up version of one body perceiving (an)other) will benefit from decoding (as with a hieroglyph) because entire worlds are enclosed in these perceptions; to have viewed this person on this day says something more than just our subjective reaction -- there is a structurality to the real which is both beyond us and demarcated in our very own DNA.  It is in this "reading" of the real that we find that we are co-extensive with everything around us (e.g. Robinson's goat Friday, "Everything is Everything", the foot fetishist finding real amorous love in a foot, etc.).

Page 308: The crucial split between monism and dualism, the basis for the split between Deleuze and Lacan-Hegel, univocality vs. dialecticism, etc.

Page 310: Annihilation of subject by object and vice-versa means the inversion of the gyre within the Pascal diagram.  There is a moment of immanence in that annihilation, however.

Page 311: During immanence, "error", the remainder, has been reduced to zero.  The GCD is common to two numbers simultaneously.  Madness is where one is immanently connected to everything.

Page 311: Inability to find the cracked-ness in ourselves --> Groundhog Day.

"The desert isle initiates a straightening out and a generalized erection."  (312) The process of the eternal return.  The gyre, the black hole, at first breaks the world down chaotically, but is then productive, poetic.

Page 312: On doubling and the Event; the elemental generative act of the multiplicity.

On the GCD/BwO/"liberated double": "The new upright [rectified] image in which the elements are released and renewed, having become celestial and forming a thousand capricious elemental figures." (312) Compare this to the constellation, Bush I's "thousand points of light", "an arrow aimed at a heart", etc.  This double is like a gateway, a black hole to another dimension: "It is as if the entire earth were trying to escape by way of the island." (312)  Via the event, the constellation changes from a 2-dimensional picture into a 1-dimensional line (the straight-line labyrinth, "vertical without thickness", the Red Queen).  It becomes an "upright organization as opposed to a recumbent organization".  (313)  The "detachment of the pure element" is of course the Aion. (313)  This event, though productive and affirmative, can also be associated with catastrophe, an apocalypse of meaning, "everything has lost its sense". (313, 315)  Liberation comes with catastrophe, a release from the torrid depths and a "return to [and discovery of] the surface," a rediscovery of the jouissance of (pure) immanence. (315)

Page 314: On hylomorphism.

Page 315: On the tradeoffs of depth and breadth and of their seemingly incongruous transmogrification between each state.

Page 317: The Double as seen as an extension of the Self.

Pure immanence (the discovery of the surface) is "a world without Others," "a world without the possible," for everything is (magically, euphorically, painfully) Real.  (319, 321)

Appendix II: Phantasm and Modern Literature: 3. Klossowski or Bodies-language

Explain: "It is our era which has discovered perversion." (280)  What is perverse is the moment of deviation, declension, hesitation, stuttering, suspense, break, swerve, clinamen: "This differentiation never suppressing the undifferentiated [Aion] which is divided in it." (281)  Hence, Sade was a geophilosopher.

Page 281: On the formation of the BwO, the "glorious body" from a "pure mind" at the moment of the Event.

Page 281: On the replacement of G-d with structure, geophilosophy, the Pascal diagram, etc.  Our whole belief structure, our most holy ideals, including G-d, is now within the domain of the structure of the Event.

Compare Deleuze's writing here on seeing and speaking to his discussion in Foucault of Foucault's distinction between the visible and the statable, or the seeable and the sayable.  (282) The point of the Pascal diagram is the same -- the Fibonacci spirals that make up the Pascal diagram can have a seeable shape or they can be spread out and elongated over a line like a pulsing vein (or an infinite straight-line labyrinth (Borges)).  The event is this communication between the two forms, where we are converting the structure containing difference-in-itself from one form to the other.  Cf. this post.  "The function of sight consists in doubling, dividing, and multiplying, whereas the function of the ear consists in resonating, in bringing about resonance." (283)  Compare here going up or down in the same (golden) ratio among the fibonacci series (the Pascal diagram, i.e. sight) vs. using an elliptical curve (sound, resonance between a hammer, anvil, and stirrup) to factor a number.  Sight and sound are the two levels of the Baroque house which can actually switch or invert.

Page 283: On setting your perspective outside of yourself (cf. Buddhism).  This multiplicative act of self is in fact the raw elemental Event at a personal level -- a self-division.  The space between the multiplicative selves the potential energy whose release can be termed jouissance, but the content of which is the "idea of Evil". (284)

"Language imitates bodies...through flexion." (286)  The point here being that geophilosophy and structure is not just an abstract metaphysical exercise.  It is in the world; it is in the structures evidenced in literature, art, and film, which in turn have some basis in reality.  This is the "reality" of Deleuzian space.

Deleuze, quoting the introduction to the Klossowski's translation of the Aeneid, "Words are...woven." (286)

Page 287: See this post for more on the return of the not-same.  Repetition "authenticates the different."  "Repetition is found in the intensity of the Different." (289)  So when Deleuze says repetition "produces the only "same" of that which differs, within the Pascal diagram, we are talking about the GCD.

Page 288: On the gift and exchange as Event.

Page 289: Woman as pure intensity, difference-in-itself.

Page 289: Pure intensities are risings and falls.

Page 289: On the conversion from language reclaimed by the crystalline ("frozen") structure and made a "spiritual event" of it.

"There can be no transgression in the carnal act, if it is not lived as a spiritual event." (289)

"Repetition authenticates the multiple, and makes of it a spiritual event." (289)

Page 291: Quiet, silence, neutrality as a provocation to aggression.

Page 291: "Pure language" (e.g. fibonaccis) create thought (combinatorial conjunctions), while "impure language" (e.g. numbers that have not been fully reduced to their factors overwhelm the listener and generate "pure silence" (e.g. fibonaccis).  As Deleuze cites Le Baphomet, "either the words are recalled but their sense remains obscure; or the sense appears when the memory of the words disappears."  ""Pure silence surrounds words that are not "pure"". (300)

Page 292: On incommunicability, incompossibility, and the "privative function of a person".  This says to me that like language and bodies, we all have our own person number built from primes which is unique and which we and others try hard to decode and re-encode every day such that we are not "assumed by a nature either inferior or superior to our own".

Page 292: On the incarnation of G-d vis-a-vis Jesus.  The event as spiritual "treason".

"G-d is presented as the principle or master of the disjuctive syllogism."  (294)  G-d (later connected by Deleuze and Klossowski to Antichrist, Baphomet), like Aion, is itself difference-in-itself, pure intensity, an aleatory point.

Page 295: On reason (as a faculty, machine) vs. the categories/indices. (cf. Kant)  This division enacts a paradox similar to What the Tortoise Said to Achilles.

Page 295: Free will is an illusion.  There is no choice; G-d or the pure difference is the unmoved mover, the third man,  the "master" of the disjunctive syllogism, arriving from out of a blind spot.

G-d == "the sum total of all possibility" == Aion.  (295-296)  Later, connected by Deleuze and Klossowski to Antichrist, Baphomet, G-d become the "prince of all modifications", "modification of modifications" (2nd derivative == affirmation of affirmation). (296)  "Divergence and disjunction as such become the object of affirmation." (300) 

"Intensities comprehend in themselves the unequal or the different." (297)

"All simulacra rise to the surface, forming this mobile figure at the crest of the waves of intensity -- an intense phantasm." (298) Cf. "A little bit of time rises to the surface" (Cinema), "all that is solid melts into air" (Marx), the intensities moving through the sieve of singularities of the Pascal diagram, etc.

"As for the passage from intensity to intentionality, it is the passage from sign to sense." (298)  Later D connects this to the eternal return. (299)

"That I may be another...is the joyful message." (298)

"At the same time that bodies lose their unity and the self its identity, language loses its denoting function (its distinct sort of integrity) in order to discover a value that is purely expressive or, as Klossowski says, "emotional." (299)  This is "pure spirit".

The will to power == "open intensity".  (300)

Page 300: On the singularity as the "fortuitous" miraculating machine.  It passes through all its "disjoint terms that it simultaneously affirms." These are all the (diagonal) terms in the number's fibonacci sequence.  These terms are the sense which is "distributed" (into series) over the circumference of the circle.  (301)  "Difference here is at the center, and the circumference is the eternal passage through the divergent series."  Like the gyre.   Again, the link to Derrida.

Page 301: All that makes a "negative" use of a disjunction (singularity) does not come back with the eternal return.  How the meek will inherit the earth, the first will be last, etc.

Appendix I: The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy: 2. Lucretius and the Simulacrum

"Nature is...conjunctive: it expresses itself through "and"...an addition of indivisibles." (p.267)

Axiom: "Nature, to be precise, is power." (267) [My emphasis.]

D unintentionally describing the Pascal triangle diagram: "And what forms the whole if not a particular finite combination, filled with holes, which we arbitrarily believe to join all the elements of the sum?" (267)

"The elements which form this whole are contraries capable of being transformed into one another." (267)   See this post on opposition, twin valences, tragedy and farce, etc.  The two "sides" of the Mobius strip.

"There are beings and there is the void." (268)  To me, this exposition is Deleuze's greatest condemnation of Lacanian-Hegelianism, and (ironically) can be supported by Alain Badiou's work in Being and Event.

"The Nature of things is coordination and disjunction." (268)

Page 268: Analogy is akin to the eternal return (the composition and decomposition of sense).  Cf. Discussions of condensation and displacement, metaphor and metonymy, Lacan and Freud, etc.

Page 269: There is an up and down to the void/gyre.

Page 269: Clinamen == "line of flight" ("swerve").  The clinamen, being a "time smaller than the minimum of continuous time", is the pure difference ("difference-in-itself") running the whole equation ("a differential of thought"), and when unfurled (straightened (into infinite time past and future), is the Aion.

Page 270: On the relation of the swerve (clinamen) to chance (cf. dicethrow).

Our mission, our sole differentiating machine: "To determine what is infinite and what is not." (272) Read this literally, where "not" is in fact the break, the rupture, the cut, etc.  The infinite is the Aion.  In other writings, I have written how this elemental split when stratified results in different aesthetic and moral personality traits (cf. dominance in the amygdala, fight vs. flight, etc.).

Compounds "emanating from the depth...or...that detach themselves from the surface of things": http://modular.math.washington.edu/simuw06/notes/notes/elliptic_curves.png.  (273)  These elliptical curves can be used for factorization and represent a diagram of the methods (e.g. Pollard's p-1) written about in the last post.  A "perforated surface" like mouth is a perfect example of the Pascal diagram's striation. (274)

Confer here on the time "smaller than the minimum sensible time", the clinamen, etc. (274)

"Simulacra produce the mirage of a false infinite in the images which they form." (277)  Though the world might seem like "the world", it is actually the sum of images, simulacra, forming a simulacrum.  See this post on the vortex and vertigo.  As with Gabriel's Horn, what appears as infinite actually has a finite volume, though when we are within the gyre, looking into its spinning center descending infinitely, the appearance of infinitude hypnotizes us into submission: "Our belief in g-ds rests upon simulacra which seem to dance, to change their gestures, and to shout at us promising eternal punishment -- in short, to represent the infinite." (277)

Page 278: The only true infinite is Nature (the univocal).

http://www.whosampled.com/sample/view/55941/The%20East%20Flatbush%20Project-Tried%20by%2012_Odetta-Sakura/#

Wikiquote quote of the day:

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that
word. It is every individual’s individual code of behavior by means of
which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to
be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol — cross or
crescent or whatever — that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside
the human race.
 --William Faulkner
<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Faulkner>

Wikiquote quote of the day:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

 Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement.

 And do not call it fixity,
 Where past and future are gathered.
Neither movement from nor towards,

 Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

 I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where
 And I
cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
 --T. S. Eliot
<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/T._S._Eliot>

Appendix I: The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy: 1. Plato and the Simulacrum

Page 253:  D contrasts division and difference.

Page 254: The "middle" term is always lacking in the case of the division (read, the Event).  In fact, the lack or gap (i.e. the difference, the displacement) is the motivating force of the event or division.  At the moment of division (selection), "division renounces its task, letting itself be carried along by a myth."  Hence, selection comes out of a blind spot.  Being carried along by a myth are the domino effect within the Pascal Triangle created by the diagonal fiboancci series (Aion), unfurling themselves like lines of dominoes.

Page 254: This section where D explains Plato's "dialectic of rivals" is very Being John Malkovitch.  D opts to define rivalry as a "selection of the lineage", anticipating (or perhaps motivating?) Foucault's turn from a archaeological method to a genealogical one.

Page 254: See this post for more on the structurality of circulation, in this case, the circulation of souls.

Page 256: On tracking down the false pretender, the "nonbeing".  This is akin in the Pascal model to reducing the remainder, i.e. slowly factoring a non-prime.  See this post and this post for reference.

Page 256: D asserts that Plato laid the groundwork for the reversal of Platonism via his conception of the simulacrum (there is no differentiating between model and copy, see: Pierre Menand).

Page 257: I believe we need to read this literally: "The essential...is...the difference in nature between simulacrum and copy.  The simulacrum is built upon a disparity or upon a difference.  It internalizes a dissimilarity." (258)  The eternal return, the event, is in fact "creative involution" (enfolding). (cf. ATP)  This is a return with difference, a return of the not-same; the "identity of the different as primary power". (262)  D goes on to speak of "two halves of a single division."  This lines up well with our articulation of the two series (two Pascal triangles, two numbers to be factored), the two assemblages precipitating the eternal return, the event, through resonance and generating a GCD, a BwO, etc.

Page 258: On how we use the theoretical principle of parallax to simplify difficult problems.  (cf. Zizek's The Parallax View)  Parallax also occurs within the Pascal diagram due to its inherent symmetry to gauge distance and precipitate events -- this would be the methodology of division or negation.

Page 260: On incompossibility.

Page 260: On Hegel's circular (concentric) diagrams.

Page 261: That which is repressed eventually rises to the surface.

"The sign is...between two communicating series," their differences being "inclusive". (261)

Resemblance, "the product of internal difference," is "produced on a curve". (262)  That curve is the fibonacci spiral within our Pascal model.  The product that is produced, the GCD, the simulacrum, is affirmative, it is an idol-killer (cf. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols).  It is the internalization of two divergent series. (262)  Identity, by contrast, is the domino effect of moving up and down by degrees of the golden ratio through the fibonacci series.  In order to produce the GCD in both the Pascal diagram and the brain, we can use something similar the Euclidean algorithm.  In order to test for primality or break up large co-primes, we can use something like Fermat's little theorem or Pollard's p-1 algorithm combined with modular exponentiation.  See the chapter "The Twins" in Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat  for more on the human ability to calculate large primes.  One could also use a geometrical analogy of parallax here to get around large computations.  When D says "produced on a curve", the elliptical curve method of factorization (an extension of Pollard's p-1) also immediately comes to mind.  If you have the mathematical ability to test some of these assertions, please holler at me.

On the GCD: "There is no longer any privileged point of view except that of the object common to all point of view." (262) (cf. Borges' The Aleph, Lacan's objet petit a)  D uses the word "vertigo" here to describe the pull of the Event.  Indeed it is a vortex, what D will call later a "black hole", an attractor, a gyre spinning like a centrifuge, sending the GCD through the sieve, the holes in the fisherman's net (What is Philosophy), a Sierpinski triangle. 

Page 263: The quote from Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil on this page is used frequently to document D's concepts of rhizomatics and deterritorialization (cf. Greg Flaxman's The Brain is the Screen).  Also see D's mention of masks later in the page and his explicit connection of the simulacrum to Nietzsche's eternal return.

"Between the eternal return and the simulacrum, there is such a profound link that the one cannot be understood except through the other." (264)

Page 265: Explicit reference connecting the functioning of the simulacrum to the will to power.

Page 265: The "Same of that which differs" is (within the Pascal model) the Greatest Common Divisor.

Wikiquote quote of the day:

The impossible cannot have happened, therefore the impossible must be
possible in spite of appearances.
 --Agatha Christie
<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Agatha_Christie>

Babylon Makes the Rules

Wiktionary's word of the day:

variadic (adj):
(Computing, mathematics, linguistics) Taking a variable number of
arguments; especially, taking arbitrarily many arguments
<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/variadic>

___________________________
Wikiquote quote of the day:

The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed
exclusively of signs.
 --Charles Sanders Peirce
<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce>

Visualization

A mobius strip laid out in a ring in three-dimensional space where gravity applies.  The strip is rotating around a z-axis.  Attached to the strip are dominoes.  Once you flick the first domino (and assuming the strip is rotating at a commensurate rate), the dominoes will flick off indefinitely.  As the dominoes come to the twist in the mobius strip, the dominoes that had been reset by gravity will resurface to the top of the strip.  Variations: Multiple twists in the mobius strip; multiple starting points at which dominoes fall.

Thirty-Fourth Series of Primary Order and Secondary Organization

"Primary order" and "secondary organization" get more play in The Fold.  (cf. this post, the two levels of the Baroque house, etc.)

Page 239: More on the phantasm as echo chamber, involuting and projecting domino-like effects.

Page 240: On the yin and the yang: two series between which a "struggle" is "waged".

"Nonsense functions as the zero point of thought." (241) (cf. Greg Flaxman's essay on "Cinema Year Zero")  Confer with other posts on nonsense, especially this one.

The two moments: the "surface zone" and the "stages of depth". (245) Imagine Bergson's memory cone.   The point of the cone inscribes events which are singularities ("points of fixation", "beacons", attractors).  These singularities exist in a gyre of stratified depth, locked in a 3-dimensional gyre, waiting to be released to the surface.  Within the Pascal diagram, imagine the triangle wrapped around into a cone, performing in the exact same way.

Axiom: The revelation of the univocal is the Event.  (248)

"The perpetual entwining...constitutes the logic of sense." (248)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVI914vMHcQ&feature=player_embedded

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ouroboric

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lqp1i0cUUy1qzh19go1_500.jpg

Thirty-Third Series of Alice's Adventures

This chapter is largely an application of theories previously explicated in LOS.

Page 237: On the author as symptomatologist and the "art" of symptomatology.

On the method of the New Pioneer: "To extract the non-actualizable part of the pure event from symptoms, (or as Blanchot says, to raise the visible to the invisible), to raise everyday actions and passions (like eating, shitting, loving, speaking, or dying) to their noematic attribute...-- this is the object of the novel as a work of art." (238)

Explain in what sense the artist is patient, doctor, and pervert. (238)

Saddle

via decapitate animals

Thirty-Second Series on the Different Kinds of Series

Page 224: D is trying to make his theory commensurate with the psychoanalytic theory of Freud (and also Lacan), hence his inclusion of the analogy of sequence and block to displacement and condensation, respectively.

"A physics of intensive qualities." (225)

Page 226: It is the differential between two series, like resonance in a echo chamber, that causes the incarnation of the phantasm. In this sense, we can think of the event or the eternal return arising from a void. The phantasm (also GCD) is the bounded void, that like a chamber of the heart, pulses so as to both produce and contain resonance and to ensure the communication between the organs.

Page 227: Compare Deleuze's idol to Lacan's objet petit a. The idol (GCD) is the "source of disjunctions" and ramifications between the organs. The disjunctions "resonate by their difference." (228)

Page 227: A conversion from depth to surface. E.g. How we get from sound (sequential batches of frequencies) to sight (all the data points at once). The number to be factored is converted in the same way. From the binary string to the Pascal diagram, etc. Later in the chapter, D uses the word "extraction" in place of conversion. This extraction always "awaits the result" (233); meaning is retroactively pinned to the emissions of the voice -- hence, the double/doubling. Because of the gap inherent in the event, the result is never 100% completed, just as the dragon or dog never successfully catches its tail. This is why one might say the return is "eternal".

Page 227: The line which the event traces marks both an excess and a lack (i.e. a displacement); a lack as perceived by one series is an excess for the other.

Page 228: The phallus (idol, GCD, etc.) which is always "displaced in relation to itself" reminds me again of Derrida. (The phallus as the ultimate organ of "displacement", "center without a center", BwO, filled with pure intensity, etc.)

"Is it not the case that the serial organization presupposes a certain state of language?" (229) (cf. Lacan)

The child learns "formative [language] elements [e.g. phonemes] before any understanding of formed linguistic units." (230)

Page 230-232: Psychoanalysis/schizoanalysis as localization (of "clusters" of intensity/singularities) (e.g. needle-therapy, acupuncture, etc.): "The surface of the entire body as an aggregate or sequence of letters....The child was learning to speak on his own body."

Thirty-First Series of Thought

The phantasm is "inseparable from a displacement, an unfolding, and a development within which it carries along its own origin." (217) The phantasm "reintegrates and retrieves everything in the retrieval of its own movement." (221)

Page 218: D speaks of the result of the phantasm developing on a "second screen". The idea of the screen is important to D's thought. (cf. D's two books on film, also The Brain is the Screen) The stuff of the depths rises to the surface as through a sieve which is the gyre or Pascal triangle or cone of virtuality, etc. (cf. Difference and Repetition). The second screen is the "cerebral or metaphysical surface on which the phantasm is going to develop". [My emphasis] ("The phantasm is the process of the constitution of the incorporeal," the "machine for the extraction of a...thought" (220) [My emphasis]; "The brain is...the inductor of another invisible, incorporeal, and metaphysical surface on which all events are inscribed and symbolized." (223))

"There is thus a leap." (218) Between the depths and the surface/screen, there is a gap, a crack, a synapse to cross, "which marks the powerlessness to think". (218) If you read D's writing on Kant (Kant's Critical Philosophy), you can see that he consciously or unconsciously is evoking Kant's sublime. The sublime is the moment where starstruck (like a trauma), we cease to think, only to be saved by reason (e.g. to become momentarily immanent with the feeling and sight beneath Niagara Falls at the "Maiden of the Mist"). Later, Deleuze writes more on immanence, and I believe the moment of immanence (and the incarnation of the plane of immanence) is just this result from the sublime moment, the "leap", as is were. Thus, the "not", the "with-out", is in fact the link or lineage between assemblages. Two become one through this crack. (cf. Alenka Zupancic's book on Nietzsche) Also, "sublimation" as Deleuze uses it here follows from this reading of the sublime. (219)

The "phantasm has the property of bringing into contact with each other the inner and outer and uniting them on a single side." (220) I.e. a Mobius Strip, the "site of the eternal return". (220) "The entire biopsychic life is a question of dimensions, axes, rotations, and foldings." (222)

The two poles: 1) the orientation of psychosis 2) the orientation of successful sublimation. (222) And between the two poles?

Thirtieth Series of the Phantasm

Where you see phantasm here, you can substitute in GCD:

"What appears in the phantasm is the movement by which the ego opens itself to the surface and liberates the a-cosmic, impersonal, and pre-individual singularities which it had imprisoned." (213) The phantasm is the result of a pure event, it is "inseparable...from a toss of the dice." (210, 214) It is a "surface phenomenon". (216) "Its topological property is to bring "its" internal and external sides into contact, in order for them to unfold onto a single side." (211) Where you read phantasm, you can substitute in the hieroglyph, the code, the ghost, the uncanny. (cf. The Fold)

Twenty-Ninth Series -- Good Intentions are Inevitably Punished

Page 207: On the "double screen" or doubled surface.

In this chapter, D expands his psychoanalytic/schizoanalytic take on Oedipus. Though we may have good intentions, to intend anything is to use the negative arts. Conversely, the "sage" makes no decisions -- actions flow through him like Tai Chi. To act in the way Oedipus does, to repair the world, is to build the world by division, by a (false, inessential) taxonomy of good and evil. Hence, the player, Oedipus, upsets the structure of the game in attempting to fix it. The loose pieces are seemingly annulled, but then come back in a form more terrible and perverse than he could have ever imagined (cf. Freud's return of the repressed). Thus, our most beneficent acts actually harbor a (perverse) drive that we don't understand, the results of which are shown to us in plain light from a cracked mirror, a mirror turned inside-out, a fun house mirror, a monster, etc. (Follow the connection here to the doubling of events, twin faces of tragedy and farce, etc.)

Twenty-Eighth Series of Sexuality

Page 196-197: On the organs' projection to a surface (i.e. body without organs).

There is a nestedness to the organization of organs and surfaces. "Each zone [surface] is the dynamic formation of a surface space around a singularity constituted by an orifice." (197) See this post on the buttonhole. The orifice is the archetypal example of the buttonhole. If you can understand the structure of the singularity, then you can understand how singularities are nested and communicate. This is integral to Deleuzian geophilosophy.

Page 198: If one can imagine the Pascal triangle as a 3-dimensional gyre, the gyre can invert where what was depth (i.e. the mixtures of depth, the interior of the cone) are pushed into 2-dimensions, while what was surface rises to the height to observe this new surface, not realizing it is at the pinnacle of the now-inverted gyre. As D says, "from a bird's eye view, it is but a fold more or less easily undone." [my emphasis] In this way, each event, each inversion and projection, is in fact, doubly, a subversion and a perversion. I am not entirely sure of what D means when he says, "Each zone is pierced by a thousand orifices which annul it," but I believe this refers to the thousand singularities, red dots, that give shape to the Pascal triangle, both giving it a form and also disciplining it. This is how the Body without Organs (surface) is tied up and bound, so that it does not go off schizophrenically propagating into n dimensions.

Twenty-Seventh Series of Orality

Page 188: Good description of Body without Organs.

Page 190: On the two parts of the organism/object: 1) The organs, or partial objects, internal mixtures of depth. 2) The body without organs, or form or surface. The organs supply the force to generate the form or surface. Within the Pascal diagram, the organs are the individual triangles filled with red dot singularities. When those series combine/intersect with one another (i.e. "the violent confrontation of two dimensions") , they generate a GCD which rises up from their factors into a new dimension. This GCD is sheer surface, like the body without organs.

Page 194: "The voice...presents the dimensions of an organized language, without yet being able to grasp the organizing principle [of]...language." The voice, the sound of language, the product of orality, has so many as yet uninterpreted signs waiting to be decoded. It "awaits the event", the interaction of organs (series) that will decode the crystals (constellations) into interpretable language. The series, or Pascal triangles, act as "sifters" of these crystals (constellations) (e.g. the pachinko machine, spinning gyre, etc.).

Twenty-Sixth Series of Language

On the eternal return / event: "The line-frontier brings about the convergence of divergent series; but it neither abolishes nor corrects their divergence." The series converge "around a paradoxical element, a point...circulating throughout the series." (183)

Page 184: Please see my notes in the eleventh and seventeenth series on the "ring".

Twenty-Fifth Series of Univocity

Page 178: "The eternal return has a sense of selection..."

Axiom: Being is univocal. (179) ("...the ultimate form for all the forms that remain disjointed in it...")

Univocality is simultaneously both sense and event. It is the "pure form" of the Aion, the thread between things and propositions, "the decentered center which traces between series." (176, 180)

More stuff reiterated in this chapter re: the eternal return, the pure event, selection, neutrality, affirmation.

Twenty-Fourth Series of the Communication of Events

D writes specifically here on the relation of events, compossibility and incompossibility. Within our Pascal diagram, we can read this directly as diagrams having common factors vs. those that do not. The relation of these events generates what D will later term a rhizome, a networked structure. Here, he denotes it as "a system of echoes...a system of signs." (170)

On Aion (difference-in-itself): "Difference is itself affirmed and is itself affirmative." (172)

Page 173: D writes of how Nietzsche used sickness as a perspective on health. As such, the relative displacement caused by the event is exactly a "switch" or reversal of perspectives. The mind operates as a parallax machine, switching perspectives in order to decode the shape of reality. In parallax, one switches perspective in order to ascertain distance (e.g. the distance to a faraway star). In a structure such as the Pascal diagram, symmetrical structures point toward a similar procedure in order to decode and factor a triangle, or an assemblage of triangles. One wants to ascertain the distance and position of the red dots in the diagram, and one means to accomplish this would be parallax, or perspective-switching.

"Inside-Out" (cf. p. 174):


When D says things like, "Thus, the ideational center of convergence is by nature perpetually decentered, it serves only to affirm divergence," he is ramifying and expanding upon Derrida's critical "Decentering Event in Social Thought" (1966), the Year Zero of postmodern studies, "the center is not the center", etc., etc. (p.174) Though LOS was not published till 1969, I believe that Deleuze's writing on decentering and affirmation (e.g. Nietzsche and Philosophy) pre-dates Derrida's writing on decentering. This needs fact-checking.

The key to logic is written on this page as well (174). He breaks down the 3 syntheses: connective, conjunctive, and disjunctive. These correspond, respectively to if...then, and, and or. In the simplest example, this logic undergirds the Photo Hunt example from this post. But more broadly, these actions are the only operators necessary for the logic system to work. That is the ultimate beauty, simplicity, and elegance of Logic of Sense: we can distill the brain/mind down to 3 operations.

Page 176: On the meaning of the crooked line, the break. (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Deflection_of_light_by_the_Sun)

Twenty-Third Series of the Aion

D spends some time here talking about relativity. Within the Pascal diagram we established earlier, we can read this as the relativity of numbers with common primes. E.G. We understand 35 by the diagrams for 7 and 5. Every non-prime is relative in nature.

D speaks of the "pure event" or "pure becoming". (166) What he means is Aion. Within our Pascal diagram, an example of the pure becoming is akin to the prime number, unfactorable, impenetrable by relative displacement (i.e. there are no common factors). The pure event is a pre-transcendental singularity, a "deep structure", a building block of language, like a phoneme. The phoneme is the "frontier" between things and propositions, onomatopoeia being the most basic application of the type. Aion is the zipper that zips the jacket of language open or closed. As such, Aion itself is "without a place" as it incarnates or destroys a place. It resides between two "unequal" "faces" (e.g. a line between two mountain faces), two numbers to be factored. (167)

Much of this chapter is reiteration of topics previously discussed regarding the Aion.

Twenty-Second Series -- Porcelain and Volcano

The crack is akin to the wound -- the mark of the event, but also its boundary, the frontier. (155)

Fitzgerald writes of the analogy between the crack-up and the Grand Canyon. And that is exactly the point, that the structure of the event, the doubling, is such that the incorporeal (Fitzgerald's cracked-ness) is double-bound to this material crack within the earth. Every event is double in just this way, the material and the incorporeal. We see ourselves within the world of signs, and the world realizes itself in us.

The structure of the assemblage/gyre: "The present has become a circle of crystal or granite, formed about a soft core, a core of lava, of liquid or viscous gas." (158)

Thought occurs at the locus of the crack. (160)

Twenty-First Series of the Event

Quoting Bousquet: "Become the man of your misfortunes; learn to embody their perfection and brilliance." (149) The key here being that every event is a break of some kind. Every event is the expression of some form (no matter how contorted) of representation. So in the really terrible misfortunes and breakages, we get the clearest indication of the disease at hand. The only tools we have are the signs which are our symptoms. We want these symptoms to declare themselves (if we can stand the pain and embarrassment they inflict). Hence, the "perfection" of the break. Connect this to rap breaks/samples.

Again, time "rises" to the surface, rises through that buttonhole, into the shape of the gyre, akin to the aufhebuhn, "with no more thickness than the mirror." (150) [my emphasis] (e.g. the heart monitor, result of a valve opening and closing) At the moment of the present, the pre-individual, transcendental fields of past and future condense and become asymptotic to each other, like two butterfly wings coming together at the body.

On the univocal which is also an inversion of the self: It is the moment of the event "where all events gather together in one ... transmutation." (153)

via yayo

Twentieth Series on the Moral Problem in Stoic Philosophy

Axiom: "Divination grounds ethics." (143)

"Divination is, in the most general sense, the art of surfaces, lines, and singular points appearing on the surface." (143) The most basic form of language comprehension is divination, the orientation of data point resulting from the event back into sense. E.g. The big bang emitted stars, and then, "Can you see the Big Dipper?" etc. This sense of sense is the basis for the I-Ching, Jung's schema of psychoanalysis, etc. It posits the idea that there are elements, elemental structures to the formation of reality, and leaves it to us to be the "cryptographer", to "read the folds of the soul", to decipher the hieroglyphs. (cf. The Fold)

The fulcrum of thought and difference: object = x = das ding == identification = paradox. (145)

Expression is "enveloped" in representation. (145) Expression is the means by which we unfurl the thread tangled on the spool (i.e. by spinning the gyre). Representation is a boundary or limit ("lining or hem") to the will to power (Aion) that left undisciplined, behaves schizophrenically.

"The sage waits for the event, that is to say, understands the pure event in its eternal truth, independently of its spatio-temoral actualizations, as something eternally yet-to-come and always already passed according to the line of the Aion. But, at the same time, the sage also wills the embodiement and the actualization of the pure incorporeal event in a state of affairs and in his or her own body and flesh." (146)

When D says the sage "selects" the event, he means that insofar as the sage is a series, other series come up through him the way play-dough gets pressed through a "spaghetti"-maker. It is like one series is flying through a buttonhole, or quilting point, and the common factors are selected by the series which is that sage (in the most immediate sense, think of the changed structure of the lips as raw sound is transformed into articulate speech). So in a sense, when reggae DJs refer to the DJ as the selector, perhaps this is what they mean.

Windmills of Your Mind

Nineteenth Series of Humor

P. 135, Substitution, analogy, and example, generally speaking, are forms of humor. Humor requires a flow through a singularity and a subsequent displacement, such that in retrospect, we can understand the difference between the model and the simulacrum. Remember the quilting point we spoke of earlier? Humor is the flow through that point, and then an abrupt turn, such that we can measure the difference in trajectory, as we might comment on someone's sharp wit. Another example would be the films of Werner Herzog, how he will have a character (say Kinski) step out from behind the camera and then turn to face the camera. The move is very off-putting and jarring, as if Kinski's body is flowing through this sharp U-turn which is meant to disorient us but at the same time provide a new perspective of his character. I think of Herzog because I just watched his new film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and in it, he provides the same camera trick, except he does it with a camera attached to a small helicopter. It as if he has become Kinski, seeing the move as if the camera was the character.

You might feel that this is a too-broad generalization of humor, but I think Deleuze is getting at (perhaps unintentionally) that lived life really only has two valences, two moments, tragedy and farce (humor). There is the shooting off, the aufhebuhn, line of flight (tragic), and the moment of the turn, the stitch, the change in the sign of the first derivative of a line (humor, farce). I think this conversation extends back to Marx and Hegel, though Deleuze might deny it.

Humor "hurls us into the ground of bodies and the groundlessness of their mixtures." (135) Humor is fundamentally a mortifying moment. It humbles us, and reminds us of the smallness of our aspirations and acheivements, makes fun of the gods and masters that we hold dear. Socratic irony "tears the individual away from his or her immediate existence." (137) If the moment is truly magnificent (e.g. Monty Python), we enter the realm of humor as nonsense -- signification has been cut up and unthreaded to the point that all navigation markers have been lost. The sensation of pure sense is to be so caught up in the number of bowling pins thet juggler juggles that we reach a state of immanence with the marvel and time, future and past, contracts and extends without measure (Aion). This infinite moment, at the surface, is where the line rises up and then turns, finally stitching itself to another line or surface. Hence, as Deleuze says, where the space where the line turns -- this "void is the site of sense", "harmonizing" with its own nonsense, the two sides of the coin, etc. (137) The void is the "paradoxical element", the space between, the aleatory point, the space underneath the curve. (137)

Deleuze take a sideline here to speak of Zen and the "absurdity of significations". (136) He seems to return several times in his work to Eastern philosophy to show what I would call the "flattening" of thought, as if one was to take thought and push it into 2-dimensions, as one might take an event and stretch or spread it along an "ordinary line". E.G. A picture using perspective becomes Hokusai, etc.

"[Irony] is the demon who holds up to G-d and to his creatures the mirror wherein universal individuality dissolves." (140) (E.G. The mousetrap (play within a play) set for Claudius in Hamlet.)

Eighteenth Series of the Three Images of Philosophers

"Idealism is an illness congenital to the Platonic philosophy." (128)

We must "reach a secret point where the anecdote of life of the aphorism of thought amount to one and the same thing." (128) Throughout this study, we have opposed two sides of the event, states of affairs (materiality) and propositions (the incorporeal). Here, Deleuze distills this formula down to a working example. Every anecdote we tell (like Poe's story of the "Purloined Letter") must indicate an aphorism, a lesson, a structure that transcends the present. In this context, the m.o. of New Pioneerism becomes decoding every story, every bit of taken-for-granted reality, into its aphoristic moment. Every number, every shape, every sequence has a meaning in and apart from the present. What Deleuze is trying to do in this book is relay the tools necessary for this kind of deconstruction and reconstruction of the real. When Deleuze bemoans the transition from Pre-Socratic to Platonic philosophy, he is disparaging this transition from a meditation on the meaning of material reality (e.g. what is the meaning of fire?) and towards philosophical Idealism which creates distance between the philosopher and the Object.

The philosophical revolutions that Deleuze discusses in this chapter mirror the structurality of sense. There is the focus on the depths, the mixtures (pre-Socratic); the focus on the Ideal, the proposition (Platonism); and finally, the focus on the surface, the perverse locus of the event, where life is both bifurcated and "zipped up" (the Stoics). In this situation, the structurality of the philosophical revolution(s) is the "anecdote", explained above.

"There is nothing behind the curtain except unnameable mixtures, nothing above the carpet except the empty sky." (133) Deleuze says that sense is like tracing one's finger in a fogged-up windowpane. The key here is that sense emerges out of something else; it is a effect defined by a gap in the fabric of reality. Sense is uncanny and "perverse"; it twists the real into something altogether new and unexpected.

Seventeenth Series of Static Logical Genesis

Page 118: The loss of the subject: the person has been reduced to a "material instance" which realizes the possibilities of an ontological proposition. No longer do we have a Cartesian subjecthood.

Page 119: On the relation of form to content.

Page 120: If you remove one factor from the Pascal triangle, this number may have been a pillar of the proposition, and it can "collapse" as a result.

A "ring may be snapped, and reveal the otherwise organized sense". (120) In the last post, I wrote on circles. Same idea here. A convergence or event undone spreads the singularity along the ordinary line, revealing its "sense", i.e. its pulsations and frequencies. Undisciplined by the circle (i.e. other singularities), sense can "run the risk of losing all measure" and "sink into the undifferentiated abyss of groundlessness" which produces a "monstrous body" of a "terrible primary order". (120) I.e. from sense to nonsense, from language to schizophrenia. Hence, a circle is not an "object" as such, but hidden within its code is a "differential system to which an emission of singularities corresponds." (123)

Aleatory and singular points are two sides of the same coin. (120)

The space between, the difference between a logical proposition and its ontological correlates can be termed "error", or a remainder. (120) In this way, cutting down an ever-slimming remainder, one can posit the relation between sense on one side and true or false on the other.

Page 122: The "problem", the "genetic element", the fibonacci spirals that occur at the time of the event -- those cannot be "reduced", as one might reduce a factorable number. Instead, the fibonacci numbers can only be contracted or condensed according to their "golden" proportion.

When Deleuze says that the problem does not exist outside of the propositions which express it, but rather subsists or inheres in them and as such the problem "is not", I think we should take him literally. (123) The problem is literally a negative space, "(non)-being or ?-being", an aleatory point which is immanent with the proposition and the underlying force structuring it.

The depths organize the surface. (124) In the Pascal diagram, the crystalline structure organizes the GCD.

Axiom: Sense is a double. (125) (e.g. the singularities on one side are the aleatory points on the other)

Sixteenth Series of Static Ontological Genesis

Deleuze's geophilosophy is a "surface topology". (109) Hence, we can use topology to construct and deconstruct the structure of the event. If we take one singularity, one knot, one red dot in the Pascal diagram, and spread it out over a "line of ordinary points," we get the labyrinth, the pulsed string, vibrating like a wave at a frequency in tune with its number. The singularity takes this shape of extension over an "ordinary" line in the actualization of the event. (110)

"A world already envelops an infinite system of singularities selected through convergence." (109) This idea of convergence is important to Deleuze. Elsewhere, he writes on hylomorphism. The preindividual transcendental field of singularities is self-organizing. This is how a shape or structure takes its shape, its form, "to be incarnated in a body; to become the state of the body." (110) Deleuze says, "An individual is always in a world as a circle of convergence." (110) To be a circle implies that the circle is the result of an event, a convergence that results not in a knot, or some other kind of shape, but in a circle. I visualize two series coming together, two Pascal triangles, the tips of which are interlocking in some kind of dragon-chasing-its-tail kind of shape, a yin-yang whose sum total is something like a circle, which also represents the GCD of the two series. The two Pascal triangles intersect and produce a new gyre, and because it has been lifted up into another dimension, we see the cross-section -- the circle. The circle is the stable shape of this event, and as such associated with the individual. Hegel also diagrammed the world as a series of interlocking concentric circles. Different theory, similar diagram.

If you can imagine the Pascal triangle as a 3-D gyre, when the event occurs, the potential energy in the system "falls to its lowest level" -- gets pulled to the tip of the triangle (like a tornado). (110) This idea of energy falling to its lowest level is similar to how we referenced the pachinko game earlier.

Deleuze wrote extensively on Leibniz, quoting him here that "each individual monad expresses the world." (110) Each monad would be like a singularity, and in discovering all the frequencies of that singularity (e.g. all the factors of a huge number), we gain a perspective on every other singularity. This is very similar to Borges' aleph, a point in space that reflects all the other points by which one can see everything in the universe.

Page 112: Deleuze distinguished between zones of clarity and obscurity in the singularity. In other works, this implies "consistency" and "inconsistency". Here, we can think in terms of sense and nonsense. Sense is the ability for the snowflake, crystalline form to incarnate an event. The nonsense is all the other unformed points (non-red dots).

Page 114: "Incompossible" worlds (e.g. a world in which Adam is a sinner and a world in which Adam is not a sinner; not a contradiction but a mutual exclusivity) imply that there must be an "ambiguous sign" or aleatory point constructing the difference between the two worlds. This aleatory point, or shifter, is the key, or machine by which the different actualizations are realized. In the case of Adam, the shifter would be something like, "to sin." Worlds are "overthrown from within by paradox", by this aleatory point or ambiguous sign, this moment of becoming and revolution. (117)

Fifteenth Series of Singularities

Deleuze's geophilosophy of the event (i.e. a geometric ontology/univocity/monism) has a fundamental neutrality. The event is a productive force, and does not have valences of right and wrong, good or bad, etc ("it is entirely independent of both affirmation and negation" (101)). For the event, there is only the distinction between sense and nonsense. Hence, when Deleuze speaks of an event like a battle, it is "terrible" in its neutrality, impassivity, and indifference to human death. (100) Like a puppeteer, the event incarnates itself in the flesh of the soldier, in all of his actions, and even his death. (101) In the midst of human carnage, one may ask why G-d allows evil and terror to exist, and to this Deleuze might respond with his theory of the event. On an individual level, it always makes me halt to think that in the midst of a bout of sadness or misanthropy that I might be feeling, these emotions are neutralized to someone else that might be listening objectively to my story. They might see my situation/problematic, but they do not feel it, because like the event, they see only the structure of it, and not the emotive production of sense that it incarnates in me. The individual only attains this "intuition" about the smallness of his own pain through a "long struggle" reaching towards a "beyond", a transcendent perspective where he/she can see himself/herself in the 3rd person. (101)

When Deleuze speaks of the event, he often speaks of it as being "full", as in impenetrable. This conforms to our example with the Pascal triangle. The crystalline triangles are not full; they are pockmarked with holes (they are the "impersonal and transcendental field" (102)). But in the production of sense, the fibonaccis produce a GCD which is full -- a gyre conforming to the golden ratio without any holes on its surface, what will become later for Deleuze the Body without Organs (a term originally used by Antonin Artaud).

Deleuze details the Pascal triangles:

"What is neither individual or personal are, on the contrary, emissions of singularities insofar as they occur on an unconscious surface and possess a mobile, immanent principle of auto-unification through a nomadic distribution."(102)

See this post and this post for a refresher on the production and distribution of singularities. Every event (the intersection of two series) produces singularities which then become new series which then intersect/resonate ad infinitum to produce new singularities. Within our Pascal triangle, the singularities are the red dots. The distribution of red dots in the triangle represent a store of "potential" energy just as a boulder has potential energy by resting atop a hill. (103)

The way that I would like to visualize the distribution of singularities is this: Each singularity (red dot) is the product of intersection of two series (numbers). The dot corresponds to the GCD of those two numbers. In the GCD, the mechanism of "auto-unification", the "differences between series are distributed." (103) So imagine one of the numbers flowing into the GCD, the gyre, and the GCD spins it down and spits out the other number. Like a machine. Or something like that. Because the GCD, the "locus of sense", is bound to the two series that generate it, "energy is not localized at the surface [read GCD] but is rather bound to its formation and reformation." (104) An example: you and I drink a beer at a bar and play Photo Hunt. In order to compare two pictures, two series, we first look at both, and in so doing, create a GCD which is a sum total of both pictures (a generalized approximation of both). We then look from one picture to the other, taking one series, comparing it to the GCD. As one series flows into the GCD, the negative, the inverse is left on the other side, showing the negatives, the inverse, the things which are different. In this way, one series is always an excess and the other a deficit. The "extra" icon in Picture 1 is the "thing without a place". The "missing" icon in Picture 2 is the "place without a thing".

Page 104: Deleuze states specifically that the event causes the surfaces to rise into "another dimension". This is the production of the GCD. In other writings, this would be the +1 of the n+1. In Hegel, this would be the aufhebung. Within Kant's writing, this is the sublime.

Page 106: Deleuze contrasts the "undifferentiated abyss" with the "supremely individuated Being". Here we should read the the pock-marked crystalline Pascal triangles against the "full" GCD, respectively.

Page 107: Being, which is becoming, "leaps from one singularity to another." I read the synapses in the brain directly here. Also, one can visualize pachinko, where a ball dropped at the top hits a number of nails, or singularities, redirecting its path to the bottom. The subject is but one of many possible points or perspectives from which becoming can speak. In his philosophy, Nietzsche madness allowed him to discover the "depth" of the individual, "discerning in it a thousand voices." (108).

Fourteenth Series of Double Causality

Why double causality? Because we have two series, bridged by sense. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze writes on the assemblage, which in his most cited example could be an orchid and a wasp coming together in the act of pollination. In this book, Deleuze has indicated the signifier and signified as an example of these two series. In order for there to be a double causality, there also must be a double nonsense "which must preside over the this bestowal of sense". (98) These are the series which have been partially emptied by the production of the GCD; they are missing factors. They are the crystalline snowflake Pascal triangles, only missing several of the red dots. The Pascal triangle itself is an "impersonal transcendental field" filled with singularities-- that is, a transcendental field without a subject, a structuring structure. (98)

Page 95: Sense is neutral as it is a "mere double"; it is the reflection of the two series through the generation, in our example, of the GCD.

Page 95: Sense is a productive force. It is not to be confused with negation or dialectics.

Page 97: Key question (that Deleuze answers in another chapter): How do we go from "sterility to genesis". The production of sense implies a creation ex nihilo. How does that work?