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?

Thirteenth Series of the Schizophrenic and the Little Girl

Page 82: Deleuze writes here on the experience of madness. Within our Pascal example, two numbers are generating (via the fibonacci sequence) a GCD. The GCD is tethered to the two numbers so that the two numbers can potentialy be factored in an orderly fashion. Should the GCD break away on its own, it is effectively groundless and has no crystalline structure connected to it by which it could become organized. This is no problem for small numbers, but you could see how if a person has a psychotic episode (e.g. schizophrenia), it would be akin to having a madman (i.e. the GCD) walk around in your brain, saying anything, doing anything, no discipline, no structure, perverse morals, inability to weigh costs and benefits, etc. One visualization that I use to see this is let's say you have a hideout inside a mountain. The interior of this structure is filled with tunnels and diagonal elevators (your crystalline structure). Should an event of madness occur, the mountain gets inverted inside out, such that all these structures are pushed to the outside, to the surface. Now, the only means to get to the top of the mountain (or anywhere else) is to follow the fibonacci spirals that were inherent inside the structure that have now become manifest on the outside -- effectively following a path around around and around the mountain, slowly gaining elevation, until at last you are back at the top. When the mountain is turned inside-out, it appears as if there are lots of gaping holes in the body. Rather than structuring the structure, the crystalline meshwork is on the outside -- the gaps, the breaks, are clearly evident. (cf. p.87) In this situation, everything is mixed up, such that in the psyche, schizophrenia dominates. When Deleuze says, on Artaud, that "For him [Artaud], there is not, there is no longer, any surface," (86) he means that the psyche has lost any semblance of consistency -- the forces of the depths of the soul rise to the surface indiscriminately; hence the loss of sense: "In this collapse of the surface, the entire world loses its meaning." (87) The corruption of sense results in indecipherable language, streams of language more like animal "howls" than spoken words. (89) The sound of phonetic language has become entirely dissociated from its meaning(s). Within our diagram, this would be all the non-red dots of the Pascal diagram, the non-factors of the GCD; there is a pattern, but it is almost impossible to decipher because it would mean decoding the inverse of a crystalline image (i.e. if there are very few red dots and many non-red dots, it is like decoding language through the gaps in speech, through the breaks). Deleuze speaks of this madness-event as nonsense "engulfing" sense. (91) We can get a clear visualization of that if we think of the mountain structure turning inside out such that the non-red dots are on the outside.

In this chapter, Deleuze opposes surfaces to poles of depth, or mixtures of depth. Again, we should read here, "the crystalline" and "the organic", respectively, from his other works.

"Psychoanalysis must have geometric dimensions....Psychoanalysis is the psychoanalysis of sense." (92) I think this is the takeaway for New Pioneerism...that to perform cultural analysis, as one might perform psychoanalysis, one must analyze geometrically, structurally.

Deleuze states his preference for Artaud over Carroll (93). The point being that from an understanding of the depths, one could always have the building blocks of the surface. Carroll's examination of the surface is epiphenomenal. In the two levels of the house, Artaud sits on the ground floor (cf. The Fold). Deleuze states that Artaud made his discoveries through suffering. He was creating a gap (an aleatory point, a differentiator) in himself through pain. The same thing could be said about the discoveries of Nietzsche. This reminds me of how George Soros says that his greatest discoveries and wins in investing happen to coincide with severe back pain.

Twelveth Series of Paradox

Axiom: "A mental Void" = "Aion" (74)

Page 75: Deleuze equates "good sense" with bifurcation, dialectics, the powers of division and negation, the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff, etc. We said earlier that this "formula" would be akin to cutting the Pascal distribution in half. Deleuze states that good sense takes us from the "most to the least differentiated"; i.e. by cutting a large distribution several times, you eventually come up with a large host of small factors of a number. What Deleuze then points out is that there is always an undifferentiated remainder which results as a product of these bifurcations (e.g. you must always take one path at the fork in the road); this remainder can be likened to the repressed, perhaps, or Deleuze uses the example of a hill that adjoins a open space used for an enclosure; either way, it has some kind of undifferentiated potential energy.

Page 77: Deleuze speaks of the "opposite" of good sense, which would be a "recreation". This is the key to sense -- that it arises organically, like a witty joke, an epiphany showing a sense of perversion -- of taking a structure and twisting it, giving it an extra arm, etc. This is in opposition to "good sense" or logic by division or negation.

Page 77: Deleuze states that Chronos goes from past to future "only to the degree that presents follow one another inside partial worlds or partial systems." In our example, this is akin to the decomposition from one large number to a smaller "world" or number by means of factorization (i.e. bifurcation). These groups of partial, decomposed groups are arranged in nested form.

Page 77: "To the oriented line of the present, which 'regularizes' in an individual system each singular point which it takes in, the line of the Aion is opposed." The Pascal triangles are "organ"-ized, oriented, nested, as opposed to the moment of Aion, which is the moment of difference, the differentiator. Chronos is "regularized" insofar as it has been disciplined. In this way, Chronos are the organs, and Aion is the surface, the skin that is being constantly stetched. In the process of stretching and folding skin, you get new organs; hence the outside becomes the inside. These organs, or Pascal triangles, or "functions", are what Deleuze denotes as "common sense".

Page 80: Humpty Dumpty's pure intensity comes up again: "he is uniquely made of shifting and 'disconcerting' singularities.

Page 80: "One does not grow without the other shrinking." Explaining this statement within the Pascal triangle visualization is difficult. I believe it means that if you have two triangles that have come into intersection, they generate a GCD which is larger than either; hence, they both shrink. Or could it mean that the GCD moves over to one side or the other, thereby shrinking the other (i.e. taking its common factors with it)?

"Nonsense has a internal and original relation to sense." (81)

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.