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)

teaser

The exact meaning of life made possible by life
The exact meaning of standardization made possible by standardization
The exact meaning of protocol made possible by protocols.

a life as resistance to life
a standardization as resistance to standardization
a protocol as resistance to protocol

the desire for the subject to transcendent the given while still be constituted in the given

Being-in-the-world never saw the world before*

Being-in-the-world never saw the world before*. For being-in-the-world, world was an unseen background that was resolved through mental activities. It was only through photographs from astronauts, the decoding of DNA and the expansion of informatics networks that we start to understand what Serres calls world-objects. It is through them that we realized the power to move uninterrupted from the local to global and back again.

Being-in-the-world never heard the world before*

Being-in-the-world never acted on the world before*

*Micael Serres in the Natural Contract

Dangerous Knowledge

Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, a thin thread of thinking that gradually reveals the power of uncertainty. Four mathematicians that profoundly changed the course of the history by laboriously working on the paths of the uncertain.

So Gödel after Turing's death set the profound question "how the mind could reach truth outside logic and what it could mean if it couldn't?"

Greg Chaitin adds in his concluding touch to this brilliant documentary:"You do not want to solve the problem, it is more fun to live with the problem and create... it is much more creative".

It is not therefore about solving the problem, it is about living and creating within the problem.

So indeed, "logic has revealed the limitations of logic and the search for certainty revealed uncertainty"

It is about time though to question, as the documentary invite us to do, how different is our world from Cantor's. Why we haven't learned to live with uncertainty, and to transport our thinking to social science, political theory and economics, it is time to question how all these established realities have affect the way we understand and reject uncertainty. Why have we stopped being creative?

unknown unknowns

>after this the unknown unknown has been forever aligned with the inability of one to imagine utopia but only dystopia. The image of the future becomes the image of death, fear and terrorism. This whole idea of this double negation can also be explored through the banned "kinder chocolate eggs" in 1960's. It was from the unknown unknowns that the youth should be protected... A whole society wasn't able to confront surprise... and unfortunately this surprise in the contemporary world has been aligned with FEAR!

a life | the self

John Rajchman will write, in his introduction to Deleuze's book Pure immanence: essays on A life,

"we may think of a life as an empiricist concept in contrast to what John Locke called "the self". A life has quite different features thatn those Locke associated with the self - conciousness, memory and personal identiy. it unfolds according to another logic: a logic

of impersonal individuation rather than personal individualization,

of singularities rather than particularities.

it can never be completely specified. it is always indefinite - a life.

In short, in contrast to the self, a life is impersonal and yet singular, and so requires a "wilder"sort of empiricism - a transcendental empiricism.

A conception of empirisism that departs from the classical definition that says that all our ideas can be derived from atomistic sensations through logic of abstraction and generalization. the real problem of empiricism is rather to be found in a new conception of subjectivity."

David Hume: "thinking with AND instead of thinking IS, instead of thinking for IS: empiricism has never had another secret."

Deleuze, G.(2001)Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life. Zone Books, New York

experimentalism... to inhabit forbidden spaces

"De Landa: The call to be "more experimental" stems not from a utopian desire, and it certainly has absolutely nothing to do with "changing language in the hopes of changing perception". This type of talk belongs to the linguistic relativism that I attack above and which I think is a major block to any progress in this regard. Rather, the "call to action" stems from the realization that we never understood the world properly. We have extremely naive views about the economy, for example. We feel happy to simply speak about the "capitalist system" or "commodification", when the reality of economic history (as uncovered by Fernand Braudel, for example) is much more complex and full of opportunities. There are alternatives to the corporate model, such as a region of contemporary Italy called Emilia-Romagna, dominated by small businesses competing against each other not in terms of costs and reaping economies of scale, but in terms of product design and a concentration of creative people in a region (a model known as "economies of agglomeration"). Now, this region of Italy was put together over the last thirty or so years on the basis of experimentation: it was not planned from above (though local governments did play catalytic roles) and it was not guided by theory. Yet, our obsolete economic ideas prevent us from seeing how innovative this region is, and bias us to see in Emilia-Romagna just another form of "capitalism", or to dismiss it as a short-lived utopia. But a deeper understanding of economics has the opposite effect: it shows that past history is full of "Emilia-Romagnas", that our economic choices were never between "capitalism" and "socialism", but were more open than that.

A similar change has ocurred in our conception of matter, which is now viewed as capable of much richer behavior than before, and this needs to change the very form that a materialist philosophy takes. And being more experimental here is simply a way of responding to the extra capabilities we have discovered in matter itself. How this may impinge on the practice of art is related to what I said above in relation to theories of the genesis of form. To develop a new, non-essentialist, relation to materials (including linguistic materials) seems to me more important today than challenging social assumptions about what art is or how it should be displayed. (We have been "challenging conventions", or "deconstructing them" for over thirty years now, it's time to move on.)"

extract from an Interview by Art210