Month: November 2018

Most people live in an analytic world of flatness and objectality. It is a horizontal world in which the subject suffers more or less, because a subject can never be reduced to objectal evidence. No decent person will ever strive in a world of parts, even if [because] these parts are articulated into a functional machine.

The level of analytics is very useful technologically in order to build the rationalised relative comfort we live in, but it is not a level in which consciousness can breathe for too long. The world of analytics is an eternal present of false duration. Its reduction to cause and effect and reactive mechanisms over-simplifies the creal nature of time. Such negation is precisely what an analytic mind wishes to do: control is the mode of power of analytics. All those who pretend that the world is made of parts, and that they are objectively making sense of it, are also trying to hide the fact that they want to be the controlling whole.

Fewer people enter the higher stage of dialectics. In it we discover process, change and interdependence. Objects are never identical to themselves and there is a dynamic of becoming that trans-affects parts into wholes and wholes into parts. Hegel, inspired by Heraclitus, was a master in dialectics, and yet the problems left in Hegel — pointed for example by Deleuze — are the limitations of dialectics: a latent dualism of spirit and matter even if they constantly interact and pass into each other, a dualism of the positive and the negative, and a fetichization of conflict, the antagonism through which processes evolve.

Crealectics is the highest stage of understanding, related to what Merleau-Ponty at the end of his life called “hyperdialectics” in the book Le Visible et l’Invisible, or to what Whitehead called a Philosophy of Organism, or to what Deleuze/Guattari called “schizonanalysis” in the book Anti-Oedipus. It does not negate analytics and dialectics, it integrates them into a richer understanding.

At the source of the cosmos there is an asymptotic chasm or interlacing between two entities that presuppose each other — pure creative Multiplicity or infinite probability (the Creal) and pure Unity (the One, sometimes called the Void in Lacan or in Buddhism) — which creates a cosmological dynamo we now find and experience in every microcosmic fractal part of the universe, including yourself. Lévinas spoke of a spiralling movement (“mouvement en vrille”) in the book Autrement qu’être.

A gridy (and greedy) world is created when the One or Unifying tendency take precedence over the Creal. Let’s speak in images for the moment: if the symbol of analytics is the grid,

And if the symbol of dialectics is the yin and yang:

The symbol of crealectics is the ascending spiral or rising spin:

In fact, a slightly better image — for the moment — to offer an intuition of the crealectical stage of understanding would be to superpose the three images. The grid and the yin and yang are moments of the crealectical spin. 

This superposition looks confusing intentionally. This is the world we are living in today, a world in which analytics, dialectics and crealectics are not integrated. It is almost like three human epistemic species finding it more or less hard to understand — and cohabit with — each other. Effectual Crealectics is meant to end the state of war, dereliction, regression and ill-belonging. We need a balance between grids, circles and spirals (regarding the metaphor of lines and the ascending crack-up, see my monograph on Deleuze and the lines of life).

For now, I leave you with Hannah Higgins, synthesising her Grid Book, about “Ten grids that changed the world: the emergence and evolution of the most prominent visual structure in Western culture”:

 

Consider reacting elusively and leniently,

Evidence could trigger illusions, crumbling simultaneously.

Come, reflect, elevate another light;

Existence carries tornadoes in carriages soberly cruel.

Relate endlessly at low energies —

Curious tentacular impressions can stand.

Complicity regarding elation appears lonely,

Effectively canny; take iron, cut stone.

Computers react evasively and lively, ecstatically curious,

Time is criminal sometimes,

Critique reasserts epic art limits,

Estimations can tweak invisible cores slowly.

Could roses eradicate all legions?

Electricity can trim impossibly comic strategies.

It is often said that having many connections is the secret to a successful life.

The present space is materialised by one hundred chairs and a quarter of tables. You are sitting at one of the tables. Some music is playing in the background, rather superfluous if not disturbing. This is a deserted part of a hotel. A closer inspection reveals that breakfast is probably served in this large mezzanine, but it is now the end of the afternoon and the space is a no man’s land.

You are sitting alone in front of a laptop. You are thinking, meditating about connections, connections between humans, among objects, humans, non-humans. Everything can more or less connect with everything else at a given moment of its biography, but connections are often superfluous like the music in the background or the cosmic radiations that pass through our body. It is not enough to be connected, to experience a vast number of epidermal inconstant connections. It is only effective socially to be hyperconnected if one is satisfied with a superficial state of constant inconstancy. If a human being relates meaningfulness with constant solicitation, then incessant connections, if they are not unpleasant, will colonize the subjective space of a calendar and confer an appearance of plenty. Such agitation will eventually produce platitude rather than plenitude.

I am interested in affixion rather than mere connection. A connection is more or less superficial, epidermal, volatile, while an affixion is more faithful. We are connected to everything more or less momentarily, but we are only affixed in duration to certain realities, beings or beliefs. We are connected to many, but only affixed to a few. A hyperconnected person can be poorly affixed even to herself.

A successful life cannot only be about commerce, coupling, mobilisation and reaction to stimuli. If we are too connected, we cannot create an Umwelt. An entity that would be too connected would not form a limit between its interior and its exterior. It would not individuate. We need strange attractors to affix our oscillations.

We need disconnections as much as connections. Systematic avoidance of affixion via metamorphic connectivity may lead to affliction in the long term.

“Amazon might use predictive data analysis to ship products to consumers before they even order them, according to new patent.”

Please read the news article below. Note that this is part of a series of informational links I give connected to the matter of anticipation. This of course does not mean I agree with the journalists or with the company’s claims. I do not have the time to give a critical reading of all the data. This Amazon announcement is clearly symptomatic. More soon on this matter.

https://www.smartdatacollective.com/amazon-wants-predictive-analytics-offer-anticipatory-shipping/