event
-------
"What is the hardest thing about governing?" "Events!"

Is the event the confirmation or the undermining of structure?
Is structure made out of events, or events the result of structure?
Is the event unpredictable?

events as the confirmation of structure:

For Kant, the concept "cause" is intimately tied to that of "event", in such a way that, unless the former concept were applicable, there would be no concept of an event as an objective happening. At the heart of scientific theories are models or representations that describe a mechanism by which a cause, be it event or state or potent thing or substance, brings about the effect, event, or state. (Rom Harrй)

In a more "nonlinear" account, economist Paul Ormerod writes, that "in the living, constantly changing economic and social worlds, the connection between the size of an event and the magnitude of its effects is no longer routine and mechanical. Small changes often have small consequences, but occasionally these are large, and from time to time, dramatic." (Butterfly Economics, p X)

The anthropologist Clifford Geertz describes an event as a unique actualization of a general phenomenon, a contingent realization of the cultural pattern. The event is a relation between a happening and a structure. According to Claude Levi-Strauss, those relations can go in either direction. He claims that scientific thought and mythic thought are distinguished by the inverse functions they assign to events and structures. (The Savage Mind, p. 22)

For Levi-Strauss, science is based on the distinction between the contingent and the necessary, which is also what distinguishes event from structure. "Bricolage" is a model of mythic thought because it builds up structures with the remains of events, with "odds and ends." (See time for more oppositions of structure and event) For Levi-Strauss, the aesthetic emotion is the result of a union "in miniature" in the work of art, between the structural order and the order of events. " A work of art is not only the residue of an event but it is its own signal , directly moving other makers to repeat or improve its solution. George Kubler, The Shape of Time, p. 21.

According to Giorgio Agamben, if history figures becoming as a pure succession of events, as an absolute diachrony, then it is constrained, in order to salvage the coherence of the system, to assume a hidden synchrony operating in every precise instance (representing it as a causal law or teleology), whose sense is revealed only dialectically in the total social process. (see transcendence / immanence )

According to Agamben, the precise instance of intersection of synchrony and diachrony is the myth of abolute presence, which Western metaphysics makes use of to guarantee the continuation of its dual conception of time. Not only can synchrony not be identified with the static and diachrony not be identified with the dynamic, but the pure event cannot exist any more than the pure structure. (see Infancy and History, p.75)

events as the undermining of structure:

The event or occurrence has always been a problem to those historians who wished to submerge it in the grand sweep of history. John Rajchman distinguishes the event from a narrative sequence organized by plot. He maintains that the event is "a moment of erosion, collapse, questioning, or problematization of the very assumptions of the setting in which the drama may take place, occasioning the chance or possibility of another, different setting." (Philosophical Events, p. viii) The French Revolution is an event if there ever was one. According to Francois Furet, the revolutionary event "institutes a new modality of historic action, one that is not inscribed in the inventory of the situation. (Penser la Revolution ) quoted in Marc Augй Non-Places. Augй describes the condition of "supermodernity" as an overabundance of events.

Alain Badiou calls the unpredictable, incalculable newness of the event its supplement. For Badiou, events are implicative. They allow for a truth (a fidelity to the event) to appear, because the supplement of the event interrupts repetition. One trace of that truth is in the name of the event. 1968 was always referred to in France as les Evenements de Mai . For Antonio Negri, "Nineteen sixty-eight will never be repeated, but it is nonetheless an irreversible event; nothing will ever be again as it was." (Negri on Negri, p.29)

Pseudo-events: In Daniel Boorstin's account of The Image, he coins the term pseudo-event for an event planned primarily for the purpose of being reported. It is usually designed to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.


events as a particular form of structure:

'It is precise that "events take place " ' Michael Snow

In Science and the Modern World, Whitehead puts forward a doctrine of internal relations. He rejects the idea of simple location and says that reality is events (not things), which are prehensive unifications -- gathering diversities together in a unity; not simply here or there , but a gathering of here and there (subject and object) into a unity, prehension being his term for uncognitive apprehension -- feeling, valuing, etc. For Whitehead, the event is the ultimate unit of natural occurrence. Thus every event in nature is an organism which cannot be studied independent of the whole of which it is a part.

According to Whitehead, an object is characteristic of an event. Such an object is a pattern.

J.H. Woodger describes Whitehead's usage as combining a "place-date" and an intrinsic pattern. Thus "Process" presents two fundamentally different yet essential features: the irrevocable passage of process and the persistence of something in spite of it.

For Whitehead, nature is a structure of evolving processes, and the realities of nature are the prehensions in nature, that is to say, the events in nature. (p.72) Using Leibniz' vocabulary, Whitehead claims that an event mirrors within itself modes of its predecessors, contemporaries, and aspects that the future throws back on the present. "There is in the world for our cognisance, memory of the past, immediacy of realization, and indication of things to come." (p.73)

For Deleuze, ideas are events, lines of intensity which open up possibilities of life and action. They form a kind of screen, (like a formless elastic membrane, an electromagnetic field, or the receptacle of the Timaeus, which makes something issue from chaos, which is an abstraction inseparable from the screen. (The Fold, p. 76) For Deleuze and Guattari, an event requires extensions, intensities, and prehensions. (They explicitly refer to Whitehead's Concept of Nature and Process and Reality.)

(see haecceity / singularity)
Events are changes in things, not the replacement of one thing by a completely new thing. Some specific intrinsic material conditions are necessary for the occurence of a particular event, a material as well as an efficient cause, which is a potentiality

The "state of the universe now" is an event that excludes all other events, and each moment of time is correlated to such an event. It is as if time were simply a fourth dimension of space. Classical analysis (in physics, for example) is based on the separability of event and observation, of observing instrument from observed object. (see Alfred North Whitehead's criticism of simple location.)

a p-dimensional NOW event is joined to others by a (p+1) dimensional time interval. (which is an event at (p+1))A p-event could be the event "house", which we only recognize when the house is complete and ready to be lived in. We could think of its construction as consisting of foundation, walls, floors, roof, and exterior trim. These five vertices form a 4-simplex, and thus the recognition of the event "house" is a 4-event. (from Casti, Complexification)

event horizon: Events in a black hole can not escape it. They are beyond the event horizon. For phenomenology, the horizon is the limit beyond which the inquiry ceases to display its internal characteristics, but it always remains distant.


agency
---------
For Freud, agency (german Instanz , French instance ) refers to one or other of the various substructures of the psychical apparatus. Examples would be the agency of censorship in the first topography, the agency of ego or super-ego in the second topography.

"Agency may be coextensive with life. Life certainly burgeons nowhere without agency. We act on our own behalf. In the Kantian form: What must something be such that it can act on its own behalf?" (Stuart Kauffman, Investigations, p.49) For Kauffman, autonomous agents, defined as autocatalytic systems that can reproduce and carry out work cycles, define life. He emphasizes that "all free-living systems we know -- single-cell bacteria, single-cell eukaryotic cells, and multicelled organisms -- fulfill his definition of an autonomous agent.

For Marvin Minsky, human understanding functions by running multiple representations in parallel through agencies he calls the "society of mind." Thus, "If you understand something in only one way, you do not really understand it at all. If something goes wrong, you will be stuck with a thought that just sits in your mind with nowhere to go. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we have connected it to all the other things we know. If you have several different representations, when one approach fails you can try another. Well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many different perspectives, until you find one that works for you." (from Scientific American, October 1994) (cf metaphor)




BwO
------
The "body without organs" and the "organs-partial objects" are concepts that Deleuze and Guattari mobilize in opposition to the organism and its organization, in opposition to the functional specificity of organs, so as to release the decoded and deterritorialized flows of desire . The BwO is the "anorganism of the body" a bundle of virtual affects in a non-organic and non-organized multiplicity, "molecular" rather than " molar."

Rather than an undifferentiated "Pre-Oedipal" body, (a retrospecive illusion projected back onto the infantile body by psychoanalysis) the BwO is a hyperdifferentiation, Individuation at its most intense. (cf subject)

Deleuze and Guattari use the expression "body without organs" to describe what they call the " plane of consistency of desire ". (with desire defined as a process of production without reference to any exterior agency, whether it be a lack that hollows it out or a pleasure that fills it) It is the field of immanence of desire, as opposed to its surfaces of stratification, where the judgement of God makes it an organism, a signification, a subject. The body without organs is a site of non-coded flows, like the full body of the earth.

The BwO is an extreme rejection of a Helmolzian mechanical psychology that would, for example. treat the eye as a measuring device which the brain uses in constructing a practically efficient map of the external world. In the BwO "No organ is constant as regards either function or position,...sex organs sprout everywhere,...rectums open, defecate and close,...the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments" (William Burroughs, Naked Lunch, p. 9) It is an anti-armor, the polar opposite of the armored body studied by Wilhelm Reich and Klaus Theweleit (Male Fantasies). As an external sign of their internalized character armor, the men of the Freikorps fortified themselves with hard leather body armor to assert their solidarity against the threat of fluid women. (although even Fascism is desire)

The BwO is a fusion of internal and external which must be constructed. It can take place in very different social formations, through very different assemblages. Deleuze and Guattari refer to the BwO "not as a notion or concept but a practice or set of practices" (A Thousand Plateaus, pp 149 - 150) and advocate the careful dismantling of the organism through practices that include the hypochondriac body, the paranoid body, the schizo body, the drugged body, and the masochist body. (Since the degree of freedom is also a degree of danger, all the more reason to make the escape with the utmost sobriety. --Massumi, p.85) "Think of the body without organs as the body outside any determinate state, poised for any action it its repertory; this is the body from the point of view of its potential, or virtuality. (Brian Massumi, p.70)

"Where psychoanalysis says 'Stop, find your self again,' we should say instead, "Let's go further still, we havn't found our BwO yet, we havn't sufficiently dismantled our self." (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 151) (see also identity)This ideal status is ultimately unattainable. "You never reach the Body without Organs, you can't reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit." (p. 150) The BwO is the opposite of the body image

For Deleuze and Guattari, the bachelor machine "forms a new alliance between desiring machines and the body without organs to give birth to a new humanity. The subject, which is produced as a mere residuum alongside the desiring machines confuses himself with the bachelor machine, and thus the autoeroticism of the bachelor machine gives birth to the subject. The bachelor machine produces pure intensive qualities.

The Body without organs is a a chastised body. In his radio play of 1947, To Be Done with the Judgement of God, Antonin Artaud proposed a kind of "Dionysian castration":

-By placing him again, for the last time, on the autopsy table to remake his anatomy.
I say, to remake his anatomy.
Man is sick because he is badly constructed.
We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape off that animalcule that itches him mortally,
god,
and with god
his organs.
For you can tie me up if you wish,
but there is nothing more useless than an organ.
When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic
reactions and restored him to his true freedom.
Then you will teach him again to dance wrong side out
as in the frenzy of dance halls
and this wrong side out will be his real place.

(in Artaud, Selected Writings, pp 570 -571)

The wrong side out also relates the BwO to Blanchot's concepts of thought from the outside. (see Foucault / Blanchot ) Like Foucault, and Bataille before them, Deleuze and Guattari find in Artaud's discourse of madness the inspiration for a anthropological / psychoanalytic discourse of excess and transgression. Artaud saw the organs as functional articulations forced on the body, as restrictions entailing separation, determination, and representation. Subject to epilepsy and eventually madness, Artaud's thinking is an expression of his torment and suffering. (see James Miller's biography of Foucault, The Passion of Michel Foucault, pp 275-276.)

An organon, an obsolescent word in English for organ, is defined as "an instrumentality for the aquisition of knowledge, a "body of methodological doctrine." (Webster's) Is the "body without organs" a resistance to method?

"The organ is a restriction, not the cause, of the activity of the formative impulse." (G.R. Treviranus, Biology, 1802 - 1822 vol. 4)

The body without organs has been an object of feminist criticism. For Luce Iragaray (Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un, p.140) the notion is reminiscent of a condition of dispossession of the bodily self. She points out that the emphasis on the machinic, the inorganic, as well as the notions of loss of self, dispersion, and fluidity are all too familiar to women: Is not the body without organs women's own historical condition?
See also Alice Jardine, Gynesis.

"The body without organs is an egg: it is crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines, traversed by gradients marking the transitions and the becomings, the destinations of the subject developing along these particular vectors." Anti-Oedipus, p. 19 CH NOTE Use this quote in relationship to Fuller Domes, Kieler Endless House, Kaufmann's diagrams of morphogenetic areas.

In Terminal Identity, Scott Bukatman considers Deleuze and Guattari as "Cyberpunks, too, constructing fictions of terminal identity in the nearly familiar language of a techno-surrealism." (p. 326) For him, the BwO "is the state in which we aspire to dissolve the body and regain the world." Bukatman compares Vaughn's quest in Ballard's Crash to attain the body without organs. In "The Technology of Death and Its Limits: the Problem of the Simulation Model" (in Rethinking Technologies, p. 156-170) Scott Durham traces the relationships between death and technological planning in Crash as well as in Siegfried Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command. For Giedion, the not altogether successful attempts at the mechanization of death in the slaughterhouse is the point where industrial techniques find their limit in the organic world. In Crash, according to Durham, "the 'accident' of death itself emerges as a product of triumphant industrial planning and technology". He describes the universe of Crash as very much like the Baudrillardian model of a world in which the "real" has become dependent on reproduction, and in which the subject withers away as a consequence of the death of the auratic object, persisting only as a condemned and useless vestige alongside the simulacra that precede and envelope it.


Sensitivity to Intial
-----------------------
Sensitivity to Initial Conditions: An extremely small change in the initial conditions of a chaotic or non-linear system leads to extremely differing results. Any arbitrarily small interval of initial values will be enlarged significantly by iteration. This is the so-called "butterfly effect" in which the flapping wings of a single butterfly could theoretically make the difference whether or not a hurricane occurred in another place and time. (The title of a paper by Edward N. Lorentz was "Can the flap of a butterfly's wing stir up a tornado in Texas?"

Lorentz discovered sensitivity to initial conditions by trying to repeat a computer modelling of the weather with a very slightly rounded off number. The results rapidly diverged from the previous calculation. Sensitivity to intitial conditions is an indication of error propagation. It can also be understood as the generation of information: there were two distinct starting points even if we couldn't distinguish between them, and running the system has generated that information.

The " clinamen" or swerve is the classical account of chance fluctuations leading to the structures of the world.

K-flows, named after the Russian mathematician Andrei Kolmogorov are a measure of chaos. K- entropy is a measure of the average rate at which trajectories starting from points extremely close together are moving apart. In a chaotic system an initial deviation will soon become as large as the true "signal" itself. Calculators or computers that round off numbers, to no matter how many digits, rapidly lead to errors in equations that both expand the number of digits and are sensitive to infinitesimally small differences in the numbers. However, in these cases K is positive but not infinite. It is infinite in totally random paths.

While sensitivity is central to chaos, it does not automatically lead to chaos. For example the simple function x » cx (c>1) is a linear transformation and does not lead to chaos, but any deviation is magnified during the course of iteration. given an initial error e, the error after n iterations will be c to nth power times e.

)


habit
-----
...Reality in a world, like realism in a picture, is largely a matter of habit. Ironically, then, our passion for one world is satisfied, at different times and for different purposes, in many different ways." Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, p. 20)

The term habit conveys the sense of operativeness, of a continuously practiced activity. It is an incorporating practice more than an inscribing practice. Habit is not just a sign. (Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember) "Habits are more than technical abilities such as walking, swimming, knitting and typewriting.

According to Bergson, memory is a representation. Habit enables us to adapt ourselves to a present situation. It acts our past experience but does not call up its image. It is stored in a mechanism which is set in motion by an initial impulse. "Of these two memories, of which the one imagines and the other repeats, the second may supply the place of the first and even sometimes be mistaken for it." (p.82) The former is "as capricious in reproducing as it is faithful in preserving," while the latter is conquered by effort and dependent on our will. (p.88)

Dewey suggests that we recognise the role of desire in habitual behaviour by considering bad habits. For what we can observe clearly in bad habits is the hold they exert over us. They remind us that all habits are affective dispositions: through frequent repetition they become parts of ourselves. (cf discussions of tools)

The social dimension of habit is custom. "From his first movements, the individual sees himself determined and limited by something over which he has no power. It is the power of custom that binds him. It watches over his every step allows scarcely a moment of free space in his activity. Not only his actions, but also his feelings and ideas, his beliefs and delusions are governed by it. Custom is the perpetually constant atmosphere in which he lives and exists; he cannot escape from it any more than from the air he breathes." (Ernst Casserer, "The Object of the Science of Culture" in The Logic of the Social Sciences, p.2)


organism
------------
"Organism" is derived from the same word as organ: in Latin, organum ; in Greek, organon, which means tool, and was the title given to Aristotle's logical writings to emphasize the idea of logic as a tool helping the other sciences. The instrumental view lies to some degree within the word organism itself: a system of organs, a whole composed of parts, where each part is a functional tool related to the other parts and the whole.

In an organism, according to the explanation given to it by Aristotle, the whole precedes the parts. The parts are only parts of a whole. Every part is thought as owing its presence to the agency of all the remaining parts, and also as existing for the sake of the others and of the whole.

"In organic being, first the form as a whole strikes us, then its parts and their shape and combination." (Goethe). The whole will change its properties when deprived of a part. A part will have different properties when removed from the whole (Woodger)

According to Kant, thes descriptions might still define an instrument of art. But for an instrument of nature, the part must be an organ producing the other parts. Only under these conditions can such a product be an organized and self-organizing being, and, as such, be called a natural end. For Kant, an organized creature is more than a mere machine, because it has the power to form its parts and to transfer this formative power to the "materials," so that the parts can mutually bring one another forth. (see mechanism / vitalism )(see autopoesis for a contemporary definition of this process of self-production)

Does the organism as a continuing entity in time have some power, by virtue of its specific nature, to maintain itself, and thus to determine a range of possible developmental changes? (This is the question of teleology) In Chapt. 27 of his second edition of the Essay on Human Understanding, John Locke differentiated the mechanical aggregate or "mass" from the organic body, which continues to be the same entity while its constituent particles are replaced.

In modern biology, the "organismic" point of view, as described by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, (Modern Theories of Development, 1933) replaced the teleological conception in drawing attention to the fact that practically all vital processes are so organized that they are directed to the maintenance, production, or restoration of the wholeness of the organism. (P.8) For Bertalanffy, the biological point of view requires organismic ideas in addition to physico-chemical descriptions. Thus, for example, the concept of "function" has an organismic sense: it only has significance within an organism, to the maintenance of which the function is exerted.

The properties of individual organisms that are of primary interest to biologists seem to be of a special sort in that they must be characterised in terms of a form or pattern of organization, a whole with its parts and an "arrangement." D'Arcy Thompson: "We might call the form of an organism an event in space-time, and not merely a configuration in space. (see autopoesis)

Brian Goodwin argues for the fundamental nature of organisms as the primary source of the emergent properties of life revealed in evolution. He argues that although Darwin took organisms to be primary, modern biology thinks of them as complex molecular and information-processing machines controlled by the genes carried within them. Mechanistic biology describes articulated parts and how they fit together to carry out particular functions. Instead, Goodwin argues, organisms should be thought of as a distinct level of emergent biological order achieved through morphogenesis. (See complexity ) Stuart Kaufman suggests that much of the order in organisms may not be the result of selection at all, but the spontaneous order of self-organized systems.

Gestalt psychology maintained that there are experienced objects and relationships that are fundamentally different from collections of parts. These latter they called "and-sums" that form the basis for " machine theories." Gestalt theorists asserted that dynamic structures in experience determine what will be wholes and parts, figure and background, in particular situations.

Organisms have a history, both individually and collectively, and a complete understanding of an organism cannot be separated from its history. "In order to fully understand organisms it is just as necessary to regard them as members in a process of historical development as it is to treat them as physico-chemical systems and organic unities." (von Bertalanffy, p. 15) The fundamental problem of a mechanical synthesis of evolution and development is the contingency of that history. (see open / closed systems) As Driesch (1908) observed, a living organism does not possess its "typical" form throughout its life, rather the form comes into being by a process of development. "So the living form may be called a 'genetic form'...and therefore morphogenesis is the proper and adequate term for the science which deals with the laws of organic form in general." (p.20)

J.H. Woodger, in his article on "the concept of organism" of 1930, published in the Quarterly Review of Biology 5, 1-22, points out the persistent tendency within biology to accept Descartes' view of the organism as some kind of machine, that is, an entity in which the relations between the parts are external or noncommunicative. Woodger describes Descartes as "a pious man who was in the habit of appealing to God to get him out of difficulties," as when the principle of doubt made it impossible for Descartes to distinguish between dream and waking reality. As Woodger notes, the idea of a machine without a transcendent mechanic or "organizing principle" is absurd, and for Descartes, the mechanic is God. "Has anyone observed a machine that was capable of evolution without a mechanic?" Woodger criticized the persistence of the machine model and claims that "Chromatin takes the place of Descarte's God and " controlling mechanic" in biological theories of heredity that follow Weismann's emphasis on the cell nucleus, and in which a "genetic programme" directs individual development.

Georges Canguilhem argues that organisms have a greater range of activity than machines. An organism is "less bound by purposiveness and more open to potentialities. ("Machine and Organism" , Zone 6)

For Ernst Mayr, every organism is unique; each also changes from moment to moment. He believes that is why biology has resisted mathematicization. This echoes Alfred North Whitehead's contention that "the concrete fact which is the organism, must be a complete expression of a real occurrence."
(Critics of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis have pointed out that the uniqueness of the individual is incompatible with the generalizing and comparative methods of biology. )

For the Gestalt psychologist, Kurt Goldstein, any change in one locality of the organism is accompanied by change in other localities (cf local / global) (in medical treatment the effect that the disturbance of one particular organic process has on the organism as a whole is called a syndrome .) For Goldstein, the organism is always affected in its entirety. It displays holistic relations. It is constantly forming new patterns, actualizing itself through the concrete actions of "performance," what Goethe refers to as "Dasein in Tдtigkeit" ("Being in actuality.") Goldstein points out that the organism never lives in a completely adequate milieu. There is never a perfect equilibrium between the organism and the world. The equalization process consists of slight catastrophic reactions in a phaselike course. (p. 227) (cf. Prigogine's descriptions of dissipative systems as far-from-equilibrium?) For Goldstein, serious catastrophic reactions are subjectively experienced as shock or anxiety. (see also heimlich / unheimlich)

Theories of the organism require a distinction between inside and outside. (cf. fold)

For Goldstein, when the organism is normal and healthy, its tendency towards self-actualization is acting from within, not out of anxiety, but out of the joy of conquest. (p.239) (cf "internality" in organicism) For Goldstein, the specific complexity of human organization is the potential to behave partitively as well as holistically.

L'organisme est une rйalitй informйe. Metaphors of the organism: history, culture, society, the state...see Gaia for the earth as organism. See adaptation for relations between organisms and environments.




organicism
-------------
Organicism may be defined as the philosophy whose major categories are derived metaphorically from the attributes of living and growing things.

Organicism is based on the conviction that art should imitate nature...in the hope of effectuating the metamorphosis of dead matter into a living being. The metaphorical application to architecture of concepts originally reserved for living nature, is one of the most widespread and constant themes in the history of Western architecture and its theory, but also one of the most variable and elusive." (Caroline van Eck, Organicism in 19th cent arch., p.18) For Van Eck, organicism did not arise at the end of the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, but was, in fact, an integral part of the Vitruvian tradition. In discussing the range of intercolumniation, or how high temples should be raised from the ground, Alberti simply reinvigorated the Vitruvian tradition when he used proportional measurements, based on the analogy with the body. .."just as the head, foot, and indeed any member must correspond to each other an to all the rest of the body in an animal, so in a building, and especially a temple, the parts of the whole body must be so composed that they all correspond one to another, and anyone, taken individually, may provide the dimensions of all the rest." (book VII, section 5) From Aristotle and Alberti on, "Purposive Unity" was the aspect of living nature that art should imitate above all others. see Critique of Judgement. According to Van Eck's account, "both the use of modular proportions in architecture and the advocacy of organic unity in designs are only the expressions of an underlying and more fundamental notion, that of purposive unity. The works of God and nature are unified wholes, based on the regulative use of a concept of the whole." (p.21) (cf. the "argument from design")

The term 'organic' was first used by Aristotle, but not in the modern sense. While the term organic was used of the living body as a whole, it more frequently applied to the members of the body, which are, as it were, its tool. (G.N. Orsini. "The ancient roots of a modern idea" in Rousseau, Organic Form.) Organs are specialized structures in the body tailored to carry out a particular function. Corresponding to the word organon , or instrument, organic meant instrumental. Aristotle compared the organs of animal movement with the "organa," or parts of war machines, like the arms of a catapult about to launch a projectile. (Deleuze and Guattari reprise a metaphysical usage of the term in their concept of a Body without Organs)

It was Plato in the Phaedrus who first enunciated the principle of organic unity in art. In it Socrates says that a composition "should be like a living being, with a body of its own as it were, and neither headless nor footless, but with a middle and members adapted to each other and the whole." Thus part of the classic formulation of organicism is that the parts of a work of art are not arbitrary or factitious, but as close and intimate as that between the organs of a living body. In his Poetics, Aristotle used the organic analogy to call for coherence in time: "The construction of (epic) stories should be like that in a drama; they should be based on a single action, one that is a complete whole in itself, with a beginning, middle, and end, so as to enable the work to produce its own proper pleasure like a living creature which is one and a whole."

The idea of organic unity implies basic concepts of the One and the Many, for organic unity consists of a multiplicity of parts which is reduced to a unity, and of a unity which is made up of a multiplicity. The question of "How the one can be many, and the many be one" is one of the questions that was argued in Socrates' circle.In the Thaetetus, Plato's idea of the whole plays an increasingly important role. He advances the notion that "the whole made up of the parts is a single notion (eidos ) different from the parts." This passage seems to be the origin of the maxim that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. (see emergence) (on eidos also see transcendence / immanence)

Plato's organicism was the foundation of his critique of systems of rhetoric--the rules for writing, which Butcher, the Aristotelian commentator, called "the uselessness of mere mechanical rules." This was the beginning of the historical function of organicism as a way to loosen the rigid rules of rhetoric and the pedantry of genres.

In the nineteenth century, under the influence of romanticism, organic qualities were explicitly valued in art and upheld as a criticism of the mechanical. For Coleridge, "The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate, it shapes as it develops from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form." --Coleridge, "On the Definitions of LIfe" (1830)in Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism. Coleridge developed his notion of organic form out of an analysis of Shakespeare's plays, which he held to have been designed from a unified view of human nature. One of his favorite concepts was that the peculiar power of artistic genius lies in the ability to combine tension and reconciliation of manifold opposites.

Coleridge develops the theory of the romantic imagination as distinct from memory and fancy. Its metaphor, for M. H. Abrams, is the lamp, as opposed to the mirror. Coleridge defined organic form in terms of five attributes:

1. The whole is primary. The parts are derived. (principle of the seed)

"The difference between an inorganic and organic body lies in this: In the first, the whole is nothing more than a collection of the individual parts or phenomena, while in the second, the whole is everything and the parts are nothing."

2. Growth: An organic form conveys the process of its own development to the observer.

(genetic interest: process (or becoming ) as much as being)

3. Assimilation: As it grows, the organism assimilates diverse elements into its own substance.

Similarly, the mind feeds on images of sense.

4. Internality: The achieved form is directed from within. The plant "effectuates" its own secret growth.

An artefact needs to be made, but a plant makes itself. For Coleridge, the organic form is an educt rather than a product--to educe something is merely to "bring out" (latin educere) something that has a (predetermined) form. (Does this concept side with preformism as opposed to epigenesis?)

5. Interdepedence: The parts are interdependent.

(see M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, pp 170-176)

The nineteenth century preoccupation with style is the context for studying organicism in architecture during that century. Caroline Van Eck distinguishes three versions of organicism in the nineteenth century: tectonic organicism, which considers nature as a model for constructional procedures and for the way these must be represented in ornament (eg. Schinkel), religious organicism, which considers nature as the art of God, and Gothic architecture to be the most suited for the conveyence of religious experience (eg. Ruskin, Oxford Museum), and scientific organicism , based on developments in comparative anatomy, which uses biological concepts such as " type" and "conditions of existence" to understand and impose order on the history of architecture, to introduce new materials, and even to reject style.

In 19th cent. architects such as Viollet-le-Duc, Ruskin, Semper, Bцtticher, Root and Sullivan sought to represent a natural history in stone, to imitate the methods rather than forms of nature: . Viollet-le-Duc singled out unity as the aspect of nature which architecture should imitate. Unity in architecture is based on structure, that is on the means and ways of construction. "In one word, creation is unity; chaos, the absence of unity." For Viollet-le-Duc, architecture is not an imitative art, but rather a logical system equivalent to the workings, rather than the appearances, of nature, one in which forms were the inevitable emanation of universal and natural laws, discernable through observation and subjective investigation. (But, at least in France, these laws were not those of Darwin, they remained a structural principle increasingly associated with function)

Georges Cuvier's principle of correlation of 1812 linked the part to the whole in a "pure logic of a law of tendency" For Cuvier, "Every organized being forms a whole, a unique and closed system, in which all parts correspond mutually and contribute to the same action by reciprocal reaction. None of its parts can change without the others changing too; and consequently each of them taken separately, indicates and gives all others." "La forme de la dent entraine la forme....tout comme l'equation d'une courbe entraine toutes ses proprietйs. "(for relationship between Viollet and Cuvier, see Bernard Thaon, in Actes du Colloque International Viollet-le-Duc, Paris, 1982. pp 131-142) The great innovation which Cuvier had introduced was to shift the emphasis from description by the identifiable members of an organism, and classification by description, to classification by the function performed: so that ressemblance was no longer the principal criterion of classification, but the working of the member within the organism. Michel Foucault situates Cuvier in the shift away from representation, as a structure of visibility, towards "organic structure." With this shift of episteme, which Foucault dates to the 1790's, character in biology is now linked to function. (see homology for a specific instance of this shift.)

The celebrated debate between Cuvier and Geoffroy Ste. Hilaire, which Goethe followed avidly, was seen as a debate between comparative anatomy -- a modern, positivistic, approach to the requirements of functional coherence -- and a idealizing concept of morphology, despite the fact that Cuvier was a staunch opponent of evolution, while Ste. Hilaire espoused the concept. Cuvier's conviction that each animal has a logical coherence that ties its parts to each other and to the environment, allowed him to dismiss evolution while affirming the scientific certaintly of biology. Ste. Hilaire based his extensive system of comparative anatomy on the doctrine of an ideal fundamental type. (see analogy / homology)Deleuze and Guattari characterize the "never-ending" debate between Cuvier and Ste. Hilaire in unexpected ways. They describe Cuvier's scientific definitions of the relations between organs and functions as making a unity of analogy that is transcendent, while Geoffroy's abstract descriptions assume a plane of consistency or composition. (A distinct echo of this concept is the contemporary interpretation of species as individuals which are the units of evolution)

Gottfried Semper was struck by the success of Cuvier's arrangement of the great collection of natural specimens at the Jardin des Plantes, especially compared to the confusion of the material in the Great Exhibition. Influenced by his visit to the Jardin des Plantes, Semper attempted to formulate a typology of architectural forms. For Semper, architecture takes a unique position among the arts because it imitates not the visible and tangible forms of nature but her laws. what is the history of this claim? Although nature creates an infinte variety of forms, she is very parsimonious and simple in the use of basic laws. The analogy between Cuvier and Semper is often described in terms of the (positivistic?) stress on the "conditions of existence." However, at least in Semper's case, this materialistic and reductive interpretation, first promulgated by Riegl, seems unfair. (On Cuvier, see Dorinda Outram, Georges Cuvier. Semper's relationship to Cuvier has been outlined by Rosemarie Bletter, "Semper" in Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architects)

Semper's reaction to his visit to the Jardin des Plantes was set out in the paper Wissenschaft, Industrie, Kunst, in which he proposed a quadruple organization of human artefacts, and in which the primitive hut provided a model of articulation. This hut is made up of four radical, irreducible elements: the hearth, which is the "moral foundation of settlement", the walls, the terrace, and the roof. These four radicals correspond to four ways of making: moulding for the hearth, weaving and plaiting for the walls, carpentry and joinery to the terrace and the roof, to which was added stereotomy, or masonry. (see Joseph Rykwert, "Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Style" in Architectural Design 51, 6/7-1981.) Semper examined craft, material, and technique as sources of meaning, as "self-illuminating symbols." (see Podro, Critical Historians of Art, Chapt. IV) Meaning is generated through both both making and metaphor, and the transference of motifs from one material (or culture) to another is a central element of Semper's thought. Thus the literal character of material and techniqe are not themselves objects of our stylistic appreciation unless their potential has been brought out by their handling. Ornament can bring out latent potential, as for example, when clothing and bodily ornament "clothe the naked form with an elucidating symbolism." Semper acknowledges the role of masking, of denial of reality, as well. In his prologemena to Der Stil, he says explicitly that in order to become an idea brought to realization in appearance,"...it is not absolutely necessary that the material as such be a factor in the artistic appearance." (quoted in Podro, p.49) "Architecture, like its great teacher, nature, should choose and apply its material according to the laws conditioned by nature, yet should it not also make the form and character of its creations dependent on the ideas embodied in them, and not on the material?" (Four Elements of Architecture, p.102)

Caroline Van Eck describes the nineteenth-century transformation of organicism from a philosophical and religious complex of thought, based on Aristotelian notions of purposive unity, into a scientific and secular view of the connection between architecture and living nature, in which functionality is singled out as the most important similarity. The "conditions of existence and the demands of material" which determine the functional integrity of a building are the same as those of natural organisms. According to Eck, in the 1880's and 90's organicism "loses its spell". It is no longer associated with the classical tradition, infused with rhetorical and Aristotelian concepts, but becomes an esoteric pseudo-philosophy. "Purposive unity" is replaced by function, which at times comes close to the 18th century defintion of "character" when Louis Sullivan, in his discussion of "Function and Form", states that "outward appearances ressemble inner purposes."

In the twentieth century, Frank Lloyd Wright raised the banner of organicism. "By organic architecture I mean an architecture that develops from within outward in harmony with the conditions of its being, as distinguished from one that is applied from without." Frank Lloyd Wright, "In the Cause of Architecture, 1914, or again "An organic form grows its structure out of conditions the way a plant grows out of the soil...both unfold similarly from within." (Modern Architecture, flyleaf) For Sullivan and Wright, great architecture must evolve organically out of the specific architectural problem to be solved, a thesis which clearly suggests the necessity for direct and "natural" expression. (see natural form)

Louis Sullivan describes "real thinking," thinking in the present tense, as organic thought. "It is in the present, only, that you really live, therefore it is in the present, only that you can really think. And in this sense you think organically. Pseudo-thinking is inorganic. The one is living, the other dead. The present is the organic moment, the living moment." (Kindergarten Chats, "Thought.")

In his Princeton lectures on Modern Architecture, published in 1931, Frank Lloyd Wright states that "the word (organic) applies to 'living' structure--a structure or concept wherein features or parts are so organized in form and substance as to be, applied to purpose, integral. Everything that 'lives' is therefore organic." (quoted in Donald Drew Egbert, "The Idea of Organic Expression and American Architecture" in Stow Persons, ed. Evolutionary Thought in America.) Thus, to Wright, a building that is "integral" (by which he means a building whose every part is a direct result of the process of construction for use) is a "living" organism.

For Frank Lloyd Wright, organic architecture meant primarily a living architecture in which useless forms were sloughed off as part of a nation's growth, and in which every composition, every element, and every detail was deliberately shaped for the job it had to perform. Wright stressed the unity of building, furnishings, and environment in an "organic-entity, as contrasted with that former insensate aggregation of parts...One great thing instead of a quarrelling collection of so many little things." (quoted in Ulrich Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes, p.25)

At different moments Wright also meant:
crystalline plan forms,
the possibility of growth by asymmetrical addition,
the relationship of composition to site and client,
the use of local materials,
the individuality of every created thing,
the need for every artist to endow his work with the integrity of his inmost being, etc.
(Peter Collins, "The Biological Analogy", in Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture.)

In Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Robert Venturi criticizes what he call Wright's self-limiting biological analogy, and links it to Wright's hatred of cities. Venturi quotes Edmund W. Sinnott, The Problems of Organic Form, who describes the specific form of a plant or animal as an interaction between a genetic constitution and an environment, not as a pure action of the gene. (cf. continued criticism of the " discourse of gene action" in genotype / phenotype) Venturi describes architecture as registering conflicts between exterior and interior, as a complex order that registers often opposing forces. He descibes Wright as working primarily in a suburban environment, which posed few limitations to the continuities of interior and exterior and points to Wright's refusal to recognise the setting of the Guggenheim Museum that was not sympathetic to the direct expression of the interior.

Is organicism the same as naturalism? Donald Drew Egbert describes naturalism as "a philosophy which, in both its romantic and functionalitic aspects, encourages man to be "natural" by living in accord with what he judges the phenomenal world of nature to be." Buildings can be thought of as in harmony with the the natural world from different points of view. Donald Drew Egbert contrasts the "romantic" from the functionalistic" attitudes when discussing organic expression and architecture, both of which he considers forms of naturalism.

Against van Eck's account, is organic form in architecture to be opposed to the Renaissance Humanist tradition? Is it a contrast between a design method based on universal and abstract princples versus one that stresses the uniqueness of the local, the intuitive, and the specific facts on nature? Is Organicism a strategy of invention, or of interpretation ? (Is it fruitful for one and dangerous for the other?) When organicism is a strategy of interpretation, the work of analysis raises a number of questions: Is it possible to divide an organic work into parts? What purpose is served by the division? What procedures should be followed in order to divide the work into parts that are vital and not artificial? As Plato said in the Phaedrus, one must not hack away at the parts of a beautiful whole like a clumsy butcher.


Rhizome
-------------
The Rhizome is one of a panoply of concepts that Deleuze and Guattari deploy in A Thousand Plateaus to describe the dynamics of their nomadology. While they reject binarism, which they consider to be founded on the transcendence of the one, many of Deleuze and Guattari's concepts are detailed "in contrast to".

"We employ a dualism of models only in order to arrive at a process that challenges all models. Each time, mental correctives are necessary to undo the dualisms we had no wish to construct but through which we pass" (Thousand Plateaus, p. 20) Here the opposition is between the rhizome and the tree. Their modernity "pays willing allegiance" (p.5) to a series of figures meant, as it were, to shake the tree, to subvert all the ossifying tendencies of the state apparatus, of repressively understood psychoanalysis, of the dominant history and philosophy of western thought.

RHIZOMATICS = SCHIZOANALYSIS = STRATOANALYSIS = PRAGMATICS = MICROPOLITICS.

The Rhizome is a system of plant radicles that allows for proliferation (like weeds), which connects everywhere, and which disrupts the idea of the unit. Unlike the tree, which for Deleuze and Guattari, is geneaological and historical, the rhizome consists of "machinic assemblages of desire and collective assemblages of enunciation" The notion of unity (unitй) "only appears when there is a power takover in the multiplicity". The work of D & G is a ceaseless effort to disrupt that unity.

The term of multiplicity can be thought of as disruption, partiality, juxtaposition, etc. or as proliferation, growth, actualization. D+G seem to equate both senses. This is a link between their thought and the scientific study of complex systems.

The writing of a Thousand Plateaus becomes the motor of a reflection on the import of the multiple , which must be made, or assembled. It is a literary machine similar to a war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, all swept along by an abstract machine.

Problems are assumed to become intractable when they become tangled, yet models of rhizomes and networks that value links are a kind of countermodel. Stuart Kauffman identifies this countermodel with the origin of life. He believes that the origin of life was not an enormously improbable event, but law-like and governed by new principles of of self-organization in complex webs of catalysts -- that we can think of the origin of life as an expected emergent collective property of a modestly complex mixture of catalytic polymers.
genetic algorithms
John Holland, the pioneer of genetic algorithms, sees them as "a theoretical tool for investigating the phenomena generated by complex adaptive systems -- a collective designation for non-linear systems defined by the interaction of large numbers of adaptive agents (economies, political systems, ecologies, immune systems, developing embryos, brains, and the like)." (from preface to 1992 edition)

(cf adaptation)

In an important sense, genetic algorithms are bred, not designed. For Holland, this "eliminates one of the greatest hurdles in software design: specifying in advance all the features of a problem." While Holland refers to a market mechanism, the primary underlying analogy operating in genetic algorithms, which their name alludes to, is evolution through natural selection.

Genetic algorithms engage in a kind of sexual exchange, recombining parts of their program sequences in order to evolve more successful variants. They work with populations acting in parallel. Interestingly enough, Holland uses a "market" mechanism to reward success. For him the terms of dynamics such as basins of attraction etc, are only of limited relevance because he sees these systems as "far away" from optimum and sees competition as determining aggregate behaviour.

The language of complexity, however, seems more relevant: "swarms" of slightly different strategies test the entire problem landscape, looking to climb its peaks. By mating the best-performing algorithms, the system concentrates on the most promising areas and thus seeks the its important peaks. Large numbers of local optima, instead of diverting the plan from further improvement, are exploited to improve performance on an interim basis while the search for more global optima goes on.



parallel/serial
-----------------
Parallel processing in computer usage: distinction between serially carrying out operations one-at-a-time (with mainframe or supercomputer) and carrying out pieces of operations in parallel by many smaller units simultaneously. (see network and rhizome)

A serial computer algorithm is very suseptible to disturbance. A small change will probably stop it. On the other hand, a distributed parallel algorithm (see genetic algorithms) may be more robust.

Biological: Genome as as kind of computer underlying the ontogeny of each individual--central directing agency. Can be reprogrammed and fragile to variations. Versus "parallel-processing genetic regulatory network which can exhibit self-organized buffered behavior." (Kauffman, Origins of Order, p.13)

" Bottom up" research believes that the "general architecture" of the brain does matter. For neurophysiologists and computer connectionists the characteristic features of the brain that are important for AI are: large numbers of simple processors, operating in massive parallelism, that are unprogrammed and adaptable. In the "swarm" model, a multitude of simultaneous actions form collective patterns which are far more important than a series of critical individual actions.

For Marvin Minsky, human understanding functions by running multiple representations in parallel through agencies he calls the "society of mind." Thus, "If you understand something in only one way, you do not really understand it at all. If something goes wrong, you will be stuck with a thought that just sits in your mind with nowhere to go. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we have connected it to all the other things we know. If you have several different representations, when one approach fails you can try another. Well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many different perspectives, until you find one that works for you." (from Scientific American, October 1994) (cf metaphor)

For Gilles Deleuze, science displays a peculiarly serial, ramified time...resulting in a completely different pace of scientific progress (What is Philosophy?, p. 124) marked by bifurcations and ruptures. The goal of a scientist's work is to spare us going down the same path again. "We do not work through a named equation, we use it" Manuel De Landa argues that the most important model for serial industrial production in the nineteenth century was ammunition and military spare parts, and that the need for absolute similarity and exchangibility came out of the requirements of warfare, not out of developments in the economic sector.



network
---------
a child's definition of a net: "a lot of holes tied together with string"

Stuart Kaufman has described the formation of networks as a phase transition that occurs as the number of connections is increased between a random graph of points. As a general feature, when the number of connections reaches half of the number of points, the majority of the points become linked in a giant cluster. Kauffman believes that we should think of the genetic program not as a serial algorithm but as a parallel distributed regulatory network .

As a general model, the network applies not only to the "intertwingled" pieces of text in a hypertext but also to the linked computers in a connected system such as Internet, to pattern-recognition systems such as the immune system, or to organisms such as the slime mold, that are made up of individual cells responding to gradients and forming larger and more differentiated entities. The ability of the brain to synchronize and coordinate activities in different parts, called reentry, is another networked process. Theorists of complexity describe the behaviour of such systems as emergent.

Problems are assumed to become intractable when they become tangled, yet models of rhizomes and networks that value links are a kind of countermodel.

At the end of the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin describes life as a "tangled bank,"
an image of grasses and flower and bees and butterflies growing in tangled profusion without any discernable pattern, acheiving homeostasis by means of a web of interdependence too complicated for us to unravel.

The network is the rhizomatic figure par excellence. It is "postpersonal", allowing for a web of connections to be drawn, not only in terms of the author's "intentions" and the reader's "reception," but rather in a much wider, more complicated set of possible interconnections that blur established, that is to say hegemonic, distinctions of class, race, sexual practice, and so on. Kevin Kelly describes the "hive mind"as a distributed system of awareness. For him, "a distributed, decentralized network is more a process than a thing."

Geodetic structures (derived from the term geodesis, the imaginary geographical lines following the curvature of the earth along straight paths) have a high degree of structural redundancy, so that if some portion of the structure is lost, the stresses are simply rerouted to the remaining members. In this they resemble networks. (see Reiser + Umemoto, Assemblage 26)

culture
-----------
According to Franz Boas, culture is "the totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought."

For Levi-Strauss, "Any culture may be looked upon as an ensemble of symbolic systems, in the front rank of which are to be found language, marriage laws, economic relations, art, science, and religion." (Introduction to Marcel Mauss). For anthropologists, culture is "the order of life in which human beings construct meaning through practices of symbolic representation."

Thus, representation is a distinctive manner of imagining the real, and is a fundamental phenomenon upon which all culture rests. (Clifford Geertz)

In anthropology, the historical tendency has been to connect this realm of culture, very closely to the particularities of place. The inclination in anthropology has been to assume an isomorphism between place and culture. The "idea of culture" has historically carried with it an "expectation of roots, of a stable, territorialized existence." (James Clifford, the Predicament of Culture, p. 338)

A civilization is the broadest cultural entity, with the longest story as well.

In "The Location of Cultural Experience," Winnicott describes culture as an extension of the area of play. "No human being is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality." "This intermediate area of experience, unchallenged in respect of its belonging to inner or external (shared) reality, constitutes the greater part of the infant's experience and throughout life is retained in the intense experiencing that belongs to the arts and to religion and to imaginative living, and to creative scientific work."




economic systems
------------------------
Is capitalism motivated by a fantasy of total control? Or has the biological metaphor of capitalism as an evolving system, previously used to excuse abuse in the virulence of social Darwinism, found a new vitality, as it were, in the idea of economies as dynamical systems?

Some economic concepts informed by these dynamic or biological concepts include " virtual corporations" producing "just in time" goods and services by net-driven "flex factories" on demand. In a networked economy, companies are distributed, decentralized, collaborative, and adaptive.

There are a number of "ecologies" operating in these conceptual convergences. For example, the collapse of the Soviet Union serves as an example of the superiority of the " bottom up" approach over the " top down" workings of the "command economy". Even the "invisible hand" of the market resurfaces as an " emergent phenomenon."

Because the boundaries between the living and the artificial have become porous, adaptibility in both living and non-living systems can be directly compared, and market economies are now thought of as able to learn, as responsive, and as perhaps having attractors, albeit chaotic ones. Doyne Farmer, for example, one of the original pioneers of the chaos cabal, is involved in stockmarket prediction. He believes that there is a "flip side" to the long-term unpredictibility of chaos (see sensitivity to initial conditions) which are moments of short-term predictibility, which he is trying to identify.

"Industrial Ecology" (a concept put forward by Hardin Tibbs)


Evolution
-----------
"Evolution is a mechanism by means of which a fortuitous variability is converted by a dynamical process into a pattern of development which reads in one direction." (Norbert Wiener p.37) Wiener's awkward prose captures the key issues of modern evolutionary theory: It depends on a random process for the push for change (genetic mutations) Natural selection, along perhaps with more intrinsic properties of the process of evolution itself, act to convert random changes into an ordered pattern. And these changes are historical and irreversable. Thus, James Crick describes the results of evolution as"Frozen accidents." And, more poetically Jacques Monod describes evolution as "Chance caught on the wing." Francois Jacob describes evolution as "a tinkerer," and S.J. Gould claims that "There is no progress in evolution."

While evolution is now fundamentally associated with Darwin, with the development of new species, and with an element of chance, the term formerly had a very different meaning. In premodern biology, especially in prefomationist theories, the term evolution was understood as an unfolding of predermined events.
See epigenesis/preformation

The modern view is that evolution is not an unfolding but a historically contingent wandering pathway through the space of possibilities. Whether this pathway is a "random walk" or a more structured, "robust" path is still open to question. But the distinguishing feature of a Darwinian theory of evolution is explaining evolutionary change by a theory of natural selection.

"...and then Darwinism... explained how by throwing stones one could build houses of a typical style." (Hans Driesch, p.137) -- a new "argument for design!

The "argument for design" i.e. for God and against Darwin, described in Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker, was an argument based on the unlikelihood that life would just have assembled from parts like a watch spontaneously assembling itself without a prescient watchmaker. Darwinian theory sees evolution as a "blind watchmaker", that is to say, there is no preordained design but a constant process of trial and error.

For Darwin, random hereditary variations among members of a species and natural selection over long periods of evolutionary time became the basis for explaining the adaptation of organisms to their habitats. Darwin showed how "organs of extreme perfection and complication, which justly excite our admiration" arise not from God's foresight by from the evolution of replicators over immense spans of time. In the "Neo-Darwinian Synthesis." random mutation at the genetic level is subject to natural selection and leads to branching phylogenies converting varieties within populations to variation between populations It is an important question for biology as to whether evolution occurs in continuous or discontinuous steps. Darwin shared the view that individuals varied continuously in all their common characteristics and formulated his theory of the accumulation of small intergenerational differences as the explanation of the origin of species (which define discontinuity) within that framework.

The modern approach to taxonomy is called cladistics. (The name is from the Greek term for "twig," klados.) Cladistics attempts to group taxa hierarchically, based on shared derived characters. (this is the hypothesis of homology.) Cladograms show us a logic of life that actually emerges out of the history of life. In The Problem of Knowledge, Cassirer criticized Darwinism for imposing upon historical thought "tasks that were quite foreign to its nature and which it was not competent to fulfill." (p.172) "Historical description was supposed to perform at once the whole duty of 'explanation':

(see population / typological)

"The modern theory of evolution, like all historical theories, is explanatory rather than predictive.... Evolution, like history, is not like coin tossing or a game of cards. It has another essential characteristic: irreversibility. All that will be is the descendent of what is, not from what might have been. Men are the children of reality, not of hypothetical situations.." (S.E. Luria Life: the Unfinished Experiment, quoted in Yates , p.6) Eg. symmetry breaking, once it has occurred, remains in place.

An example of symmetry breaking: a pole stands on a horizontal plane. Prior to falling, its range of possible directions to fall is the full circle. After it falls, it points in some specific direction. By falling, the pole has broken the circular symmetry of the system and come to a specific orientation.

Darwin's theory of evolution requires that the notion of natural kind, the kind of event found in nature and hooked up to other events by laws of nature, be replaced by that of historical lineage and that the concept of essential nature be replaced by that of the accidental collocation of properties. In traditional terms, the forma essentialis is replaced by that of forma accidentalis.

What are the real entities that are the objects of scientific evolution theory? Darwinism is generally understood to be a theory about species, not about individuals. What, then, are species? According to David Hull, species taxa are not classes at all, not natural kinds, but are rather individuals -- species individuals conceptualized through the theory of descent. In this view, the relation between an individual organism and a species taxon is not that of a member and class, but that of a part and a whole. According to this theory, the act of naming a species is like a baptism. It does not give us morphological information, for example, and is not even based on it. A name is not the same as a description. According to Hull, "Evolutionnary theory...is false. It is unfalsifiable. One of its basic principles, the claim that fitter organisms tend to survive to reproduce themselves more frequently that those organisms that are less fit, is tautological..It does not provide the necssary basis for predictions about the future development of particular lineages but can be used to explain these events once they have occurred." (quoted in Elizabeth Lloyd, The Structure and Confirmation of Evolutionnary Theory. p. 1)

Brian Goodwin argues for the fundamental nature of organisms as the primary source of the emergent properties of life revealed in evolution. He argues that although Darwin took organisms to be primary, modern biology thinks of them as complex molecular and information-processing machines controlled by the genes carried within them. Mechanistic biology describes articulated parts and how they fit together to carry out particular functions. Instead, Goodwin argues, organisms should be thought of as a distinct level of emergent biological order achieved through morphogenesis. Goodwin proposes that the term natural selection could simply be replaced with the word dynamic stabilization, the emergence of stable states in a dynamic system.

Critics of neo-Darwinism point out that scientist still rely on their ability to identify specimens as types, and that Darwinism has looked only on the conditions of evolution while overlooking its actions. For Michael Polanyi, for example, "Evolution can be understood only as a feat of emergence." (P.390)

For Gerald Edelman, there appear to be only two deeply fundamental ways of patterning thought: selectionism and logic.

The American psychologist James Mark Baldwin outlined a subtle variation on Darwinism, often called "Baldwinian evolution." Baldwin suggested that learning and behavioral flexibility play a role in amplifying and and biasing natural selection because these abilities enable individuals to modify the context of natural selection that affects their future kin. This provides a means by which behavioral changes can be subject to what Conrad Waddington called "genetic assimilation." An well-known example of Baldwinian evolution is the rise of human lactose tolerance. Most adult animals lose the ability to digest lactose, but once humans began to herd animals and to use animal milk as a food source, selective pressures strongly favored the reproduction of those most tolerant to it. For Terrence Deacon, behavioral adaptations tend to precede and condition the major biological changes evident in human evolution because they are far more facile and responsive than genetic and morphological changes. "More than any other group of species, hominids' behavioral adaptations have determined the course of their physical evolution, rather than vice-versa. Stone and symbolic tools, which were initially aquired with the aid of flexible ape-learning abilities, ultimately tied the tables on their users and forced them to adapt to a new niche opened up by these technologies. Rather than being just useful tricks, these behavioral prostheses for obtaining food and organizing social behaviors became indispensible elements in a new adaptive complex. The origin of "humanness" can be defined as that point in our evolution where these tools became the principal source of selection of our bodies and brains. It is the diagnostic trait of Homo symbolicus. " (The Symbolic Species, p.345)

Should the history of technology be compared to evolution? This is the basis for Deleuze and Guattari's term " machinic phylum." (see also machine )

Some recent issues about evolution include the question as to whether evolution evolves, (Langton, Dawkins) and especially whether evolution is constrained by its own internal growth. (Kaufmann, Packard) These questions address the questions of the dynamics of the process of evolution, how spontaneous order may mingle with Darwin's mechanism of evolution by natural selection. If Darwinian evolution is crudely reduced to a question of fitness to an environment, these questions reflect an awareness that the environment is at least partly a result of the evolution itself. The " fitness landscape" changes right along with the species. It consists of other products of the same process.

Stuart Kauffman's project is to "incorporate self-organization into the weave of evolutionary theory." (The Origins of Order, Preface)For Kauffman, natural selection is not the sole source of order in organisms. Some systems adapt readily, whereas others are so badly disrupted by minor modifications that adaptive improvements by random mutation and natural selesction can hardly occur. Are there characteristic features so deeply requisite for the capacity to adapt in a coevolutionary process that their presence in organisms is itself a lawlike consequence of selection operating on complex coevolving systems? For Kauffman, "Selection achieves and maintains complex systems poised on the boundary, or edge, between order and chaos. These (poised) systems are best able to coordinate complex tasks and evolve in a complex environmnent." (P.XV) (see phase boundary) For ensembles of these systems, selection may be unable to avoid their spontaneous order.

Dawkins: "perhaps there is a sense in which a form of natural selection favors, not just adaptively successful phenotypes, but a tendency to evolve in certain directions, or even just a tendency to evolve at all." (Artificial Life 2, p.219) Selection among embryologies for the properties of evolvability would be an example of this higher order selection process. Terrence Deacon suggests that learning biases are genetically assimilated.

John Holland's genetic algorithms are based on analogies to evolution and to market mechanisms. They are a "theoretical tool" of artificial life -- as much a product of metaphorical transference as an enabling technology.


ressentiment
----------------
ressenti(e) is the past participle of the French verb, ressentir, and ressentiment is the noun form. NIetzche makes use of ressentiment constantly, in his own singular fashion, to describe the phenomenon whereby an active force is deprived of its normal conditions of existence, where it directs itself inward and turns against itself. "Pushed back and repressed, incarcerated within and finally able to discharge and vent only on itself." is the perfect definition of what is meant for something to be ressenti according to Nietzche's concept of ressentiment. In his Nietzche and Philosophy, Deleuze defines ressentiment as the becoming reactive of force in general. "separated from what it is capable of, the active force does not how ever cease to exist. Turning against itself, it produces suffering." Hence, Deleuze concludes, with ressentiment a new meaning and depth is created for suffering, an intimate, internal meaning. (Anti-Oedipus, translator's note p. 214)


praxis
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The tradition of Platonic and idealistic philosophy separates theory from practice in much the same way as it does mind from body, priveleging in both cases the "conceptual" (or moral) over the "material".

Praxis philosophies give primacy to a theory of action. The original expression is Aristotle's and refers to a symbolically meaningful activity, whose very doing, not its result, is the fulfillment of a cultural commitment. It can be defined as meaning rather than function.

Philosophers of Praxis include Hegel, Marx, and pragmatists such as William James.

Phenomenologically oriented theories of Praxis stress perception and embodiment.

For Lenin, the materialist dialectic requires constant verification through praxis to increase its cognitive content.

For the Frankfurt school in its earlier period, prior to 1937, truth was defined as "a moment of correct praxis." Subsequently, in the face of Fascism and Stalinism, the relation between theoretical truth and the political praxis of specific social groups began to appear increasingly remote. The "changing function of theory" signalled the growing gap between the critical truth of Marxism and the empirical consciousness of the proletariat, which theory continued to designate as the objective agent of the future transformation of society. (see Seyla Benhabib, "The Critique of Instrumental Reason", in Zizek, Mapping Ideology.)

Meaning can also be distinguished from value, when "The transformation of meaning into value deprives values of a referential anchoring in such a way that our only option is to view them as arbitrary products of our will." (Simpson, p.80)

see distinction that Hannah Arendt draws between action and work in The Human Condition.





work
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"Why should we plant, when there are so many mongo-mongo nuts in the world?"
--the Bushman's retort to the question of agriculture. in Richard Lee, Man the Hunter

In his reassesment of the "hardships" and "poverty" of hunter-gatherer societies, Marshall Sahlins describes the effect of the market-industrial system as instituting scarcity and sentencing us to "life at hard labor." (Stone Age Economics, p.4)

"Work pure and simple is the chief social manifestation of the reality principle." Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization. "As a path to happiness, work is not highly prized by men. They do not strive after it as they do after other possibilities of satisfaction. The great majority of people only work under the duress of necessity, and this natural human aversion to work raises most difficult social problems." (Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, p. 27) For Freud, only the "small number" of "thinkers" and "artists" are able to transform work into pleasure through sublimation.

See Le Corbusier's hymn to work in his contrast between the straight path and the pack donkey's way.

Marcuse criticizes Freud for not distinguishing between alienated and non-alienated labor (between labor and work). He proposes that work could be assimilated to play --the free play of human faculties -- through instinctual transformation. "If work were accompanied by a reactivation of pregenital polymorphous eroticism, it would tend to become gratifying in itself without losing its work content." (Eros and Civilization, p. 215)

Marcuse goes on to criticize Fourier for "coming closer than any other utopian socialist to elucidating the dependence of freedom on non- repressive sublimation." but then "handing over the blueprint for the realization of this idea" to a "giant organization and administration." For Marcuse, "Work as free play cannot be subject to administration." (p. 218)

Following Marx's analysis of the factory system in Capital, Deleuze and Guattari speak of the "work-model of the construction site and factory." ("Smooth and Striated" In Thousand Plateaus, p.490) For them the work-model, in both its phyiscoscientific (weight-height, force-displacement) and socioeconomic (abstract labor) aspects, is a fundamental part of the state apparatus. (see machine) They consider the wage regime the correlate of a mechanics of force and describe work as striated space-time. Lewis Mumford goes a step further and calls the invisible structure which includes all the political and economic, military, bureaucratic and royal components that make the immense work-output and grand designs of collective social organization the megamachine --its technical equipment, "megatechnics." The term that Deleuze and Guattari counterpose to work is "free action." (borrowing from Leibniz) "Work is a motor cause that meets resistances, operates on the exterior, is consumed and spent in its effect, and must be renewed from one moment to the next. Free action is also a motor cause, but one that has no resistance to overcome, operates only on the mobile body itself, is not consumed in its effect, and continues from one moment to the next." (thousand plateaus, p.397)

The history of work discipline -- the discipline of labor and social relations through time -- can be traced to the church. Monasticism asserted the originally Jewish thesis that work is an essential kind of worship, that God's command to labor six days of the week was as binding as that to rest on the seventh. The regulation of the day, which started in the ringing of the bells in the monastery, was extended to society at large through the tyranny of the clock . see also fordism. Lewis Mumford describes the mine as the archetypal place of work , as "the concrete model of the conceptual world which was built up by the physicists of the seventeenth century" (Technics and Civilization, p. 70) and draws attention to its devastation of the environment.

"Housework" has been made part of a conceptual scheme wherein all human activity is either work or leisure, a dichotomy that more accurately describes men's lives than women's. Child-raising, cooking, house care, and the like are certainly both work in the sense of socially useful labor and leisure in the sense of a oft-chosen and pleasurable activity, but for women they are both more and less than these categories can capture." (Harding, p. 88) (in this sense, housework is closer to a praxis, although Aristotle would hardly have called it that.)

Elaine Scarry describes the opposition between work and play in terms of embodiment. For Scarry, "although play is often sensuous (for in play the senses become self-experiencing), work entails a far deeper embodiment: the human creature is immersed in his interaction with the world, far too immersed to extricate himself from if (he may die if he stops) ...In contrast, the very nature of play requires that the person be only half submerged in the world of his activity...The The person at play, protected by the separability of himself from his own activity, does not put himself at risk: he acts on the world with less intensity than the person at work..It is in the very nature of work--as dramatically visible in forms of physical labor and craft such as coal mining, farming, building, or inventing--that the worker "works" to bring about severe alterations in the world..and only brings about these alterations by consenting to be himself deeply altered." (The Body in Pain, p.82) For Scarry, war is the most radical and rigorous form of work, a work of world unmaking rather than worldmaking.

see relations between order and work. see also body.

The Newtonian definition of work is the integral of force acting though distance. By defining force purely as the product of an acceleration (a purely kinematic magnitude--from Greek kineo, referring to constrained or controlled motion) and a mass (a coefficient to be determined empirically), modern science eliminated both the metaphysical terminology and psychological origins of the concept of force. E.J. Dijksterhuis calls this part of the "mechanization of the world picture." (see machine) Atkins, in his book on the second law of thermodynamics (?) defines work as "the constrained release of energy." see entropy.
The maintenance of order in "negentropic" systems requires work.




theory
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"It is the theory that decides what we can observe." (Einstein)

As opposed to the weird science section, the theory section is devoted to terms that come from criticism, from literary studies, and the humanities. The basis for this bipartite structure came from my interest in the borrowings and polyvalent meanings of terms, the ways that the same term might take on opposite valences. A prime example of this reversibility is chaos. (a key reading was Chaos Bound, by Katherine Hayles) For cultural theory, chaos is opposite of order. But for the "new sciences" chaos can be understood as a new extension of order. Order itself moves back and forth between reassuring stability and coercive power. Hayles desribes "The politics of chaos" as " local knowledge versus global theory." My interest is thus to see how the meanings of terms need to be understood in variable contexts. This document seeks to map out some of the convergences, overlaps, shifting perspectives, and outright conflicts between contemporary criticism and sciences.

In Greek, theoria originally meant a looking at or viewing and theoreo, a spectator. In this sense, theory and Visuality are metaphors of each other. The Is the theoretical attitude is that of the disengaged observer? Does theory require a distinction between the illusionless observer and the gullible participant, or to put it more mildly, between theory and observation? Does theory always entail what John Dewey derided as the "spectator theory of knowledge"? Perhaps to theorize is to create the impression of something that existed already (or, even better, always already) (see metaphor) In the Pragmatic tradition, theory is the critical reflection on "belief." William James calls it "an appetite of the mind," what Frank Lentricchia calls "the need to generalize" and "to obliterate differences." (quoted in Cary Wolfe, Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the "Outside" )

But according to the Greek conception, theory is not a knowledge but touching (thigein ). Darwin often remarked that no man could be a good observer unless he was an active theorizer as well.

"...We could say that creating a new theory is not like destroying an old barn and erecting a skyscraper in its place. It is rather like climbing a mountain, gaining new and wider views, discovering unexpected connections...But the point from which we started out still exists and can be seen, although it appears smaller and forms a tiny part of our broad view gained by the mastery of the obstacles on our adventurous way up." (Einstein) (cf fitness landscape) One difference between science and critical theory is probably that this metaphor of climbing to greater heights is not so persuasive to cultural critics.

In his partly autobiographical Thought in Medecine, Helmholtz contrasts the slow and painful climb of the adventurous thinker with the "royal road" that appears to him once he reaches the top. Helmholz described his publications as taking his readers along the royal road, which bears no ressemblence to the crooked and tortuous path he created for himself. (cf. "royal science" vs " nomad science" for D+G in eg. form / matter ) The concept of the "royal road" refers to Euclid. According to Proclus' Commentary on the first book of Euclid's elements, Ptolemy I, king of Egypt once asked Euclid for a shorter way to mastering geometry than working through the Elements. Euclid answered, "There is no royal road to geometry."
What are the spaces of possiblity for theories?

scientific theory:

Under a general hypothetico-deductive view of theories, as formalized by the heirs of logical positivism, a theory is understood as offering hypotheses from which, in combination with empirical assumptions, deductions can be made regarding empirical results. For a theory to be considered a complete or adequate theory about the natural world, some or all of these hypotheses must purport to be "laws of nature." Laws are usually explicated as strictly universal statements incorporating some sort of physical necessity. Thus, at the heart of scientific theories are models or representations that describe a mechanism by which a cause, be it event or state or potent thing or substance, brings about the effect, event, or state. (Elizabeth Lloyd, Rom Harrй)

What is the relation between theory and experiment? Most philosophers of science stress that experiment takes place within a framework of questions established by theory. Karl Popper, for example, claims that "The theoretician must long before have done his work, or at least the most important part of his work: he must have formulated his questions as sharply as possible. thus it is he who shows the experimenter the way." (The Logic of Scientific Discovery, p. 107) In Representing and Intervening, Ian Hacking points to a number of counterexamples to this relationship, in optics, for example, where significant observations as well as experiments preceded any theory. While he does not claim that experimental work could exist independent of theory, (what Bacon referred to as the blind work of "mere empirics") Hacking points to examples where truly fundamental research can precede any relevant theory whatsoever.

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