Theory vs Practice

Do we still hold on this argument? Are we still divided between a mental and physical world? Hume dismisses Descartes' 'cogito' by arguing that 'theory becomes an inquiry'. "Theory is an inquiry, which is to say, a practice: a practice of the seemingly fictive world that empiricism describes: a study of the conditions of legitimacy of practices in this empirical world that is in fact our own. The result is the great conversion of theory to practice" Deleuze Hume p.36 Deleuze adds in the same text that the origin of this conception can be found in Francis Bacon with his famous  'ipsa scientia potestas est' ("knowledge itself is power"). However it was after Hume that William James will popularize Pierce's conception of pragmatism where knowledge is produced in a pragmatic way where "the relation between knower and known 'works' in the world." 

Empiricism | Humean inversion

Arguing against Empiricism's main epistemological claim that "everything finds its origin in the sensible and in the operations of the mind upon the sensible" Deleuze finds in Hume "a model of the genesis of subjectivity" (Delanda, 2006). Deleuze in his text on Hume (1972) writes about Hume's great inversion that places empiricism in a higher power: "if ideas contain nothing other and nothing more than what is contained in the sensory impressions, it is precisely because relations are external and heterogeneous to their terms. ...The real empiricist world is thereby laid out for the first time to the fullest: it is a world of exteriority, a world in which thought itself exists in a fundamental relationship with the Outside, a world in which terms are veritable atoms and relations veritable external passages; a world in which the conjunction 'and' dethrones the interiority  of the verb 'is'" (Deleuze, Hume p.38)

Transversal thinking

Alain Bombard's experiment. "The experiment involved two glass bowls, one filled with polluted water from the port of Marseilles or somewhere similar, in which a clearly very healthy octopus was swimming around –virtually dancing –and the other filled with pure, unpolluted water. Bombard caught the octopus and transferred it to the ‘normal’ water; within a few seconds, it curled up, sank to the bottom, and died. More than ever today, nature has become inseparable from culture; and if we are to understand the interactions between ecosystems, the mechanosphere, and the social and individual universes of reference, we to learn to think transversaly."
Felix Guattari "Three Ecologies"

The world has lost its pivot

"The world has lost its pivot: the subject can no longer dichotomize, but acceds to a higher unity, of ambivalence or overdetermination, in an always supplementary dimension to that of its object. The world has become chaos, but the book remains the image of the world : radicle-chaosmos rather than root-cosmos." Deleuze and Guattari ATP p.6

Affectio and Affectus

"By affect I understand the affections of the body, by which the power of acting of the body itself is increased, diminished, helped, or hindered, together with the ideas of these affections." B. Spinoza, Ethics p.98


"In Networks, Affect is not emotion... Affect is networked, becomes distributed, and is detached from its anthropomorphic locus in the individual. In a dynamic network the individual is constituted through the circulation of the affects" E. Thacker, Networks, Swarms, Multitudes

from symbiosis towards symb(i/o)sis

from symbiosis towards symb(i/o)sis... a need to become machinic in order to re-engineer the systemic regime of world's metabolic processes. 

Technology is therefore social before it is technical (or I am a programmer!)

“What is it that Foucault call a machine, be it abstract or concrete (he speaks of the machine-prison, but equally of the machine-school, the machine-hospital, and so on)? The concrete machines are the two-form assemblages or mechanism, whereas the abstract machine is the informal diagram. In other words, the machines are social before being technical. Or, rather, there a human technology which exists before a material technology. No doubt the latter develops its effects within the whole social field; but in order for it to be even possible, the tools or material machines have to be chosen first of all by a diagram and taken up by assemblages. Historian have often been confronted by this requirement: the so-called hoptile armies are part of the phalanx assemblage; the stirrup is selected by the diagram of feudalism; the burrowing stick, the hoe and the plough do not form a linear progression but refer respectively to collective machines which vary with the density of the population and the time of the fallow. In this respect, Foucault shows how the rifle exists as a tool only in the sense that is 'a machinery whose principle would no longer be the mobile or the immobile mass, but a geometry of divisible (and composable] segments.

Technology is therefore social before it is technical" Deleuze Foucault p.34

...

“The history of forms, the archive, is doubled by an evolution of forces, the diagram. The forces appear in 'every relation from one point to another': a diagram is a map, or rather several imposed maps. And from one diagram to the next, new maps are drawn. Thus there is no diagram that does not also include, besides the points which it connects up, certain relatively free or unbound points, points of creativity, change and resistance, and it is perhaps with these that we ought to begin in order to understand the whole picture. It is on the basis of the 'struggles' of each age, and the style of these struggles, that we can understand the succession of diagrams or the way in which they become linked up again above and beyond the discontinuities. For each diagram testifies to the twisting line of the outside spoken of by Melville, without beginning or end, an oceanic line of passes through all points of resistance, pitches diagrams against one another, and operates always as the most recent. And what a strange twist of the line was 1968, the line with a thousand aberrations! From this we can get the triple definition of writing: to write is to struggle and resist; to write is to become; to write is to draw a map: 'I am a cartographer'.” Deleuze Foucault p.37-38

From this we can get the triple definition of programming: to program is to struggle and resist; to program is to become; to program is to draw a map: 'I am a programmer!'.