2004-07-20 18:26:20尚未設定
Deleuze and the Open-ended Becoming of the World (3)
Deleuze and the Open-ended Becoming of the World (3)
Consistency necessarily occurrs between heterogeneities, not because it is the birth of a differentiation, but because heterogeneities that were formerly content to coexist or succeed one another become bound up with one another through the ‘consolidation’ of their coexistence or succession…What we term machinic is precisely this synthesis of heterogeneities as such. (7)
Although this remark appears as part of a discussion of the self-assembly of animal territories, it would be a mistake to think that machinic assemblages (or "meshworks" as I call them) occurr only in animals whose behavior is highly "decoded", that is, not rigidly programmed by their genes. To be sure, a flexible behavioral repertoire does increase the ability of particular creatures to enter into complex combinations with heterogeneous elements in their environment (life does involve a gain in consistency, or a "surplus value of destratification" (8)) but meshworks can be formed at all levels of reality, including inorganic materials, as the following quote illustrates:
…what metal and metallurgy bring to light is a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such, a material vitalism that doubtless exists everywhere but is ordinarily hidden or covered, rendered unrecognizable, dissociated by the hylomorphic model. Metallurgy is the consciousness or thought of the matter-flow, and metal the correlate of this consciousness. As expressed in panmetallism, metal is coextensive to the whole of matter, and the whole of matter to metallurgy. Even the waters, the grasses and varieties of wood, the animals are populated by salts or mineral elements. Not everything is metal, but metal is everywhere… The machinic phylum is metallurgical, or at least has a metallic head, as its itinerant probe-head or guidance device.(9)
Deleuze and Guattari argue that the hylomorphic model is totally alien to the history of technology up to the 19th century, particularly to that ancient branch known as "metallurgy". For the blacksmith "it is not a question of imposing a form upon matter but of elaborating an increasingly rich and consistent material, the better to tap increasingly intense forces." (10) In other words, the blacksmith treats metals as active materials, pregnant with morphogenetic capabilities, and his role is that of teasing a form out of them, of guiding, through a series of processes (heating, annealing, quenching, hammering), the emergence of a form, a form in which the materials themselves have a say. His task is less that of realizing previously defined possibilities than actualizing virtualities along divergent lines. But, again, it would be a mistake to think that the relevance of metals for the question of innovation is solely due to human intervention. To see this we need to explain an obscure phrase in the quote above. What does it mean to say that "the machinic phylum has a metallic probe-head"? The key idea here is to think of metals as being the most powerful catalysts in the planet. (The only exception being organic enzymes, but these have been evolved to achieve that potency.) A catalyst is a substance capable of accelerating or decelerating a chemical reaction, without itself being changed in the process. That is, a catalyst intervenes in reality, recognizes specific targets, triggers effects, causes encounters that would not have taken place without it, and yet it is not consumed or permanently changed in these interactions, so that it can go on triggering effects elsewhere. We can imagine our planet, before living creatures appeared on its surface, as populated by metallic particles which catalyzed reactions as they flowed through the Earth, in a sense allowing the planet to "explore" a space of possible chemical combinations, that is, allowing the planet to blindly grope its way around this space, eventually stumbling upon proto-living creatures, which as many scientists now agree, were probably autocatalytic loops of materials, that is, proto-metabolisms.(11) A crucial question regarding open-ended evolution is the nature of these "spaces of chemical (or biological, or social) combinations". It is becoming increasingly clear that a crucial ingredient for the emergence of innovation at any level of reality is the "combinatorial productivity" of the elements at the respective sub-level, that is, at the level of the components of the structures in question. Not all components have the same "productivity". For example, elementary particles have a relatively low productivity, yielding only 92 possible atoms in this planet, although we can artificially stabilize a few more trans-uranic elements, beginning with Plutonium in World War II. However, when we move to the next higher level, the assembly of molecules out of atoms, the number of combinations becomes immense, essentially unsurveyable. Similarly, the number of cell types on Earth (nerve, muscle, bone etc.) is relatively small, a couple of hundred types, but the number of organisms that may be built combinatorially out of these elements is, again, immense. As physicist George Kampis has remarked,
the notion of immensity translates as irreducible variety of the component-types … This kind of immensity is an immediately complexity-related property, for it is about variety and heterogeneity, and not simply as numerousness.(12)
The point here is that a key ingredient for combinatorial richness, and hence, for an essentially open future, is heterogeneity of components. Another key element are processes which allow heterogeneous elements to come together, that is, processes which allow the articulation of the diverse as such. Here we can take a clue from another passage in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus:
It is no longer a question of imposing a form upon a matter but of elaborating an increasingly rich and consistent material, the better to tap increasingly intense forces. What makes a material increasingly rich is the same as what holds heterogeneities together without their ceasing to be heterogeneous. What holds them together in this way are intercallary oscillations, synthesizers with at least two heads.(13)
Consistency necessarily occurrs between heterogeneities, not because it is the birth of a differentiation, but because heterogeneities that were formerly content to coexist or succeed one another become bound up with one another through the ‘consolidation’ of their coexistence or succession…What we term machinic is precisely this synthesis of heterogeneities as such. (7)
Although this remark appears as part of a discussion of the self-assembly of animal territories, it would be a mistake to think that machinic assemblages (or "meshworks" as I call them) occurr only in animals whose behavior is highly "decoded", that is, not rigidly programmed by their genes. To be sure, a flexible behavioral repertoire does increase the ability of particular creatures to enter into complex combinations with heterogeneous elements in their environment (life does involve a gain in consistency, or a "surplus value of destratification" (8)) but meshworks can be formed at all levels of reality, including inorganic materials, as the following quote illustrates:
…what metal and metallurgy bring to light is a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such, a material vitalism that doubtless exists everywhere but is ordinarily hidden or covered, rendered unrecognizable, dissociated by the hylomorphic model. Metallurgy is the consciousness or thought of the matter-flow, and metal the correlate of this consciousness. As expressed in panmetallism, metal is coextensive to the whole of matter, and the whole of matter to metallurgy. Even the waters, the grasses and varieties of wood, the animals are populated by salts or mineral elements. Not everything is metal, but metal is everywhere… The machinic phylum is metallurgical, or at least has a metallic head, as its itinerant probe-head or guidance device.(9)
Deleuze and Guattari argue that the hylomorphic model is totally alien to the history of technology up to the 19th century, particularly to that ancient branch known as "metallurgy". For the blacksmith "it is not a question of imposing a form upon matter but of elaborating an increasingly rich and consistent material, the better to tap increasingly intense forces." (10) In other words, the blacksmith treats metals as active materials, pregnant with morphogenetic capabilities, and his role is that of teasing a form out of them, of guiding, through a series of processes (heating, annealing, quenching, hammering), the emergence of a form, a form in which the materials themselves have a say. His task is less that of realizing previously defined possibilities than actualizing virtualities along divergent lines. But, again, it would be a mistake to think that the relevance of metals for the question of innovation is solely due to human intervention. To see this we need to explain an obscure phrase in the quote above. What does it mean to say that "the machinic phylum has a metallic probe-head"? The key idea here is to think of metals as being the most powerful catalysts in the planet. (The only exception being organic enzymes, but these have been evolved to achieve that potency.) A catalyst is a substance capable of accelerating or decelerating a chemical reaction, without itself being changed in the process. That is, a catalyst intervenes in reality, recognizes specific targets, triggers effects, causes encounters that would not have taken place without it, and yet it is not consumed or permanently changed in these interactions, so that it can go on triggering effects elsewhere. We can imagine our planet, before living creatures appeared on its surface, as populated by metallic particles which catalyzed reactions as they flowed through the Earth, in a sense allowing the planet to "explore" a space of possible chemical combinations, that is, allowing the planet to blindly grope its way around this space, eventually stumbling upon proto-living creatures, which as many scientists now agree, were probably autocatalytic loops of materials, that is, proto-metabolisms.(11) A crucial question regarding open-ended evolution is the nature of these "spaces of chemical (or biological, or social) combinations". It is becoming increasingly clear that a crucial ingredient for the emergence of innovation at any level of reality is the "combinatorial productivity" of the elements at the respective sub-level, that is, at the level of the components of the structures in question. Not all components have the same "productivity". For example, elementary particles have a relatively low productivity, yielding only 92 possible atoms in this planet, although we can artificially stabilize a few more trans-uranic elements, beginning with Plutonium in World War II. However, when we move to the next higher level, the assembly of molecules out of atoms, the number of combinations becomes immense, essentially unsurveyable. Similarly, the number of cell types on Earth (nerve, muscle, bone etc.) is relatively small, a couple of hundred types, but the number of organisms that may be built combinatorially out of these elements is, again, immense. As physicist George Kampis has remarked,
the notion of immensity translates as irreducible variety of the component-types … This kind of immensity is an immediately complexity-related property, for it is about variety and heterogeneity, and not simply as numerousness.(12)
The point here is that a key ingredient for combinatorial richness, and hence, for an essentially open future, is heterogeneity of components. Another key element are processes which allow heterogeneous elements to come together, that is, processes which allow the articulation of the diverse as such. Here we can take a clue from another passage in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus:
It is no longer a question of imposing a form upon a matter but of elaborating an increasingly rich and consistent material, the better to tap increasingly intense forces. What makes a material increasingly rich is the same as what holds heterogeneities together without their ceasing to be heterogeneous. What holds them together in this way are intercallary oscillations, synthesizers with at least two heads.(13)