A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

York University From the SelectedWorks of A.T. Kingsmith

Summer 2017

A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation A.T. Kingsmith, York University

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC_BY-NC-SA International License.

Available at: https://works.bepress.com/at-kingsmith/2/

A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

1

Abstract The possibility of the revolutionary dream—the rendering of an effective menace to all established order—survives within the illusory gap that separates social from technical machines. This dream is virtual, an aspect of reality that is ideal but nonetheless real—a potentiality produced by actual causal interactions at the material level. It is the prospect engendered by a virtual becoming fulfilled in the actual (Deleuze, 1966). It is a ground that does not resemble that which it grounds. To eradicate the illusive space between technical progress and social totality is to embark on an immanent de-territorialising of the structures of power, violence, and law—a process of becoming-revolutionary. The syncretism of technocrat and dictator, of mechanisation and revolution, they make possible the dream of permanent revolution. This becoming-revolutionary—situated on the folding in of an imaginary rupture between human and machine; social totality and technical progress; past, and future—constitutes a vital point of departure for this symbiotic line of flight. Following from the nomadism of Deleuze (1968), this essay is untimely, abandoning the circle—a faulty principle—it returns to the straight and the narrow—the paradoxical presence of circulation—creating, destroying in order to create, never to preserve. Such a line of flight is but the induction of a larger terrain of the etymological, ontological, and politicological possibilities of deterritorialising the false binary of organic and technical through a concept-ontology of revolution-mechanisation. Keywords: circulation, politicological, revolution-mechanisation, becoming-revolutionary

I. Introduction: Surveying the Technical Terrain What we experience in dreams—assuming that we experience it often—belongs in the end just as much to the over-all economy of our soul as anything experienced ‘actually’: we are richer or poorer on account of it. – Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, (1886: 106). The technocrat is the natural friend of the dictator—computers and dictatorship; but the revolutionary lives in the gap which separates technical progress from social totality, and inscribed there his dream of permanent revolution. This dream is itself action, reality, and an effective menace to all established order; it renders possible what it dreams about. – Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, (1969: 49). In so far as digital technologies facilitate neoliberal capitalism’s vital desire to mutate, devaluate, program, weaponise, and entirely deterritorialise societal assemblages, they are predominately seen as an extension of dictatorship—computing as a manifestation of our servitude before a capitalist axiom that accentuates the closing off of an effective menace to all established order. Yet to focus strictly on how (hu)man’s use of computing machines influence society is to presume an instinctive break between the subjects of

A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

2

social change and the processes of digital infrastructures. We must be wary of the determinist presupposition that social and digital are distinct spaces of operations— such a position succumbs to the temptation of conceptualising the digital/technical as a realm that is different from ‘the world’. We can only move past such anthropomorphisms by recognising the distributed nature of subjectivity among human and non-human entities—certain technological, biological, and social processes both predispose and channel more traditional ‘human’ actions, which are usually positioned exclusively within the realm of the anthropogenic. We are living within a techno-centric terrain where the semiotic machines of economics, science, technology, aesthetics, and politics function in parallel, and non-consciously, as they produce or convey meaning in ways that circumvent our anthropocentric significations and representations. The existence of such processes means that we can no longer employ more traditional models of communicative and information theories, in which exchanges are realised between individualised subjects through emitter-receptor/ sender-receiver analogies. Instead, if we want to understand the conceptual terrain1 of revolution and mechanisation we must think in terms of ‘inputs and outputs,’ ‘machinic assemblages,’ and ‘technogenetic mutations,’ all of which have less to with ‘human’ and more to do with our subjectivations in/by/of cyberspace. After all, what of the potentialities for metamorphoses in forms of communities, planes of stratum, modes of consciousness, systems of economics, and styles of culture brought forth by computability? Environments integrate and co-evolve. In their form and operation, informational technologies have always constituted our social, political, and economic relations—they are not mere coefficients or co-extensions, but direct effectors of the territorialisations of capitalism. In other words, technological mediums constitute a digital society, not merely by the messages and signifiers they deliver, but by the characteristics of the mediums themselves—the integrated meanings of technical forms are inseparable from the forms’ social content.2 The present form of mechanisation and digitisation thus induces a certain type of globalised social relation—assimilative to that of the capitalist mode of production. What is new about the present moment is the unprecedented degree with which these relations actively shift and change. By enabling new forms of amplification between the frames of social totality (past) and technical progress (future), computing machines constitute the possibility for implementing new distributed and decentralised networks of subjectivities. The potential for a plane of non-consistency that dissipates the reductive hyper-industrial binaries of input-output forces us to confront the possibility we can conceptualise the digital in terms of what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) refer to as a nondistinct ‘stratum’—an everyday zone of codified materiality formed by the simultaneous double articulation of content and expression. By locating cyberspace as an emergent material plane that is repeatedly re-creating zones of de/re-territorialisation between social and technical stratum, we can move to investigate the possibility that cyberspace allows new spaces for resistance via the ‘crystallisation of new existences’ through the constant re-configuring of subjectivity at a

A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

3

socio-technical level. In other words, we think of cyberspace as a stratum where one 'edge' faces the social strata and the other faces the techno-strata. The digital strata— what we may call cyberspace—emerges as strata between these two, creating zones of deterritorialisation between the social and the technical. This explains why cyberspace seems, at times, so unfamiliar and uncontrollable—it is a digital strata that creates a discrete bridge between social and technical stratum that existentially morphs the social subjectivations and machinic enslavements of subjectivity under capitalism into something rupturous, autonomous, and transformatively unique. 3 Here we can see how a digital mediation of the interconnectivity between the social and technical makes possible a de-coupling of the archaic binary of (hu)man and machine— a binary this essay will refer to as revolution and mechanisation. The concern here is with the realisation of new and imperceptible affects and virtualities—a digital stratum of becoming-revolutionary that is contingent on the explicit rejection of this imaginary nature-culture dichotomy, (Haraway, 2007). For our organic brains are not being superseded by virtual machines, nor are they reduced to its prosthesis, rather, brains and/as machines are asymptotically co-constituting new virtual assemblages that extend infinitely outward, far beyond our current modalities of collective expression. In grounding this investigation in the problematising of the man-machine/ revolutionmechanisation binary, this essay is attempting to launch off where many have previously been satissfied concluding.4 Instead of casually probing the literature and theorising a few overly narrow and explicit deductions, this essay labours to stitch together a concept-ontology from far-reaching yet fundamental initial questions. Nietzsche: “Who are we really?” (1887: 15). Heidegger: “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” (1953: 1). Deleuze and Guattari: “What is a concept?” (1994: 15). In the vein of such concisions this essay asks: ‘How do ‘things’ work together?’ Then, pushing further, it draws from Nietzsche (1886)—what we experience in dreams [virtually] are as ‘real’ as what we experience in ‘actuality’—and Deleuze (1969)—the dream of permanent revolution rendered possible lives in the gap which separates out technical progress from social totality—to expand: How do things…the etymological and ontological inter-connectivities of revolution (social totality) and mechanisation (technical progress)…work together…to engender modes of becoming that do not inevitably reconstitute a violence of structured power?5 Is the sustained and non-structured dream of permanent revolution possible? Is it desirable? If so, what would such sustained and non-structured resistances look like at the digital register? At the political register? Can we even refer to such fluid and perpetual actions as political? Would they spiral off into something else entirely? Would they become a sort of ceaselessly nomadic becoming? “In every revolution there is a paradoxical presence of circulation,” (Virilio, 1977: 29). Such a paradoxical presence of circulation is immanent. Deleuze: “Transcendence is always a product of immanence,” (2001: 31). This essay seeks to avoid the trap of design to transcend the immanent paradox of revolution. Husserl: “All transcendence is constituted solely in the life of consciousness, as inseparably linked to that life,” (1939: 52). Instead, by way of a multiplicitous dis-logic that is neither transcendental nor

A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

4

dialectical, it is an attempt to map out a new creative terrain of sorts, a present-asimmanent folding of revolution (as synonymous with social totality, with past) and mechanisation (as synonymous with technical progress, with future)—a digital strata, a multiplicity that is mindful of the differences within itself—within its gaps—in a way that could offer the possibility of new ways of conceptualising social transformation. The political affirmation of such an ontological multiplicity is the metaphysics of flux, of process, an immanence of immanence, a life non-reducible, non-totalisable under any binaric violence—the introduction of movement into thought rather than an attempt to reveal universals of representation. Deleuze: “Life activates thought, and thought in turn affirms life,” (2001: 66). Such an ambivalence of becoming-multiplicitous may result in new post-circulation lines of subjective flight, or, a more familiar terrain of increasing influxibility—how to counter such ambivalence is a key focus as we survey the etymological, ontological, and politicological terrain in three proceeding parts. II. Etymology || imperialism and the conservative turn || our unknowing debt to Kant || language manifests temporally || discourse as intertextualised material practices || a double synthesis || an etymological survey of ‘revolution’ || an etymological survey of ‘mechanisation' || introduction to a new assemblage of revolution-mechanisation || III. Ontology || embracing the multiple in general || ontology of process || the eternal recurrence of revolution || a precedent revolution of subjectivity || how machine itself is conceptualised || the human-world gap || framing world-objects || co-constitutions of revolution and mechanisation || pivoting towards flat concept-oriented ontologies || IV. Politicology || mechanisation’s chronic anthropocentrism and revolution’s eternal return || a decisive position in the present || the paradoxical presence of circulation || a micro-physical commitment || making existence a process of revolt || to gaze into the horizon of the infinite || the double play of modernity || to put ‘everything’ at risk || In moving to trace the paradoxical presence of circulation through the etymology, ontology, and politicology of the folding in of revolution (as past) and mechanisation (as future), this work is intended to probe the excessive violences of being. It is a gaze into the horizon of the infinite, an untethered desiring for a ground that does not resemble that which it grounds to explore whether or not Deleuze’s sustained and non-structured dream of life as permanent revolution is possible, and if so, at what cost.

II. An Etymology of Revolution-Mechanisation Why is etymology important for understanding ‘how things work together’? After all, an emphasis on textual hermeneutics runs the risk of sliding into what Manuel DeLanda (2002) refers to as the conservative turn: an idealistic ontology—indebted, perhaps unknowingly, to Kant—which advances the rigidly anthropocentric notion that the world exists entirely as a discursive construction of our subjective experiences. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), these temptations of textual idealism are due to the fact that unlike the spatiality of material objects, language manifests temporally. Such a manifestation involves an intense deterritorialisation that makes language appear more independent

A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

5

of our formed materialities. This gives language the ability to represent all other strata: “To translate all of the flows, particles, codes, and territorialities of the other strata into a sufficiently deterritorialised system of signs,” (D&G, 1987: 62). The capacity to represent and translate all other strata gives language—or specifically, language-based theories—‘imperialist pretensions.’ 6 DeLanda: “The linguistisation of critical world-views that took place in the twentieth century after the so-called ‘linguistic turn’…can be explained as a result of the unique status of this specialised line of expression,” (2002: 165). Exegeses of these imperialist pretensions also permeate Foucault’s work, which frames discourse as set of intertextualised material practices that involve causal interventions on the human body—from torture and mutilation to subtler punishments like imposed physical exercise. As Foucault (1975) articulates: pairing a certain category of crime (first-degree murder) with a certain category of punishment (capital punishment) is a discursive practice, but the material act of execution is equally a non-discursive one. To label acts as either discursive or material is to ignore life’s intertextual nature—which situates itself between the scaling up to the strata of language or down to the material base. Through dual rejections of dialectical transcendentalism and textual fetishism, Foucault (1966), Deleuze, and Guattari (1987) put forward a new way to conceptualise the temporal fusion of objective entities we can refer to as the double synthesis; 7 a term DeLanda incisively summarises: “All the entities that populate the world come into being through specific temporal processes that affect both their materiality and their expressivity,” (2002: 164). In a sense, if we take history to mean human, but also biological, geological, futural, and cosmical, then all entities can be seen as both speculative and historical. This constitutively speculative historicity means entities, for example words or texts, are interchangeable—they may undergo destabilising processes affecting their materiality, expressivity, or both. In other words, entities may be subject to processes of multiplicity, of difference within, of deterritorialisation.8 Such a multiplicitous historicity is essential for a creative cartography of the revolutionary gap between the social totality and technical progress. The possibility (and actualisation) of permanent revolution is at stake. Thus regardless of the linguistic trap—a trap that has devoured many a vulgar imperialist posing as a vexing postmodernist with conservative turns and their imperialist pretensions—the constitutive nature of history renders immanent the value of etymologies in understanding how things work together. After all, the word as discursive/non-discursive signifier takes on a material and expressive form, and in the case of revolutionmechanisation, such forms are mutually constitutive. I. An Etymology of Revolution Presently, revolution has many complicated and predominantly political connotations, but the term is mechanical in origin. Recently, a large-scale etymological project traced the concept of revolution back to the 14th century outgrowth of to revolve—from the Old French revolver: ‘to change direction, bend around, turn back;’ from the Latin revolvere:

A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

6

‘roll back, unroll, unwind, return; go over, repeat,’ (Turner, 2014). Far from having social or political implications, revolve initially indicated explicit motion through space and time, (Williams, 1983). Thus the first familiar iterations of the term in Old French revolucion: ‘course, of celestial bodies’ and in Latin revolutionem: ‘a revolving of bodies’ are simply extensions of to revolve, (Turner, 2014). As science ‘progressed,’ revolution was utilised to describe more mechanical forces. In 1668, scientist Margret Cavendish recorded how intrinsic particles, having acquired a motion thereby, continue their current, recoil again, and return in a vortical motion, and so continue their revolution forever. This associating of revolution with recurrent physical movement continued as mechanisation ‘increased,’ eventually leading to more modern technical reiterations in both mechanics and computing as revolutions per minute, usually shortened to revs, (Turner, 2014). Despite its ubiquitous modern political deployments, the term revolution entered the lexicon as a technical concept used to describe the mechanical forces of the universe. Out of this revolving of bodies designated by the Old French revolucion came its personification—revolutare: one who rolls or revolves. Such a move gave agency to the term, leading to an outgrowth from its more technical description. Due to the circulatory notion that a normal distribution of force or power is one of high over low, from the point where power is deployed, a revolutare—one who revolves—is attempting to turn over or turn upside down the normal political order: “the low putting themselves against and in that sense above the high,” (Williams, 1983: 271). This political sense of revolution as a circulation, but also a rising up, led to the word becoming more popular than rebellion because its use insinuated the restoration of an earlier lawful authority. After the French and American revolutions however, this older notion of revolution as rightful restoration was permanently overridden by an ethos of innovation and a new order of progress—a term synonymous with a sense of industrial and political improvement. This practice of relating mechanical and revolutionary expansion under the label of progress was further rooted through the 19th century industrial revolution and 20th century socialist revolution, (Williams, 1983). Thus similarly to their shared origins in revolve, technical and political deployments of revolution as social totality continue to overlap as the term is utilised simultaneously to indicate all mechanised progressions from commerce to computing—the commercial revolution, to the digital one—and political developments from Asia to the Middle East— the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Iranian Green Revolution, the Arab Revolutions. II. An Etymology of Mechanisation Etymologically, mechanisation appears to be derived from machine, and its modern use assumes these implications. However, mechanical emerged much earlier than machine from the 15th century Latin machina, which had a sense of contrivance used to describe various mechanical arts and crafts: ‘devices, tricks, instruments,’ (Williams, 1983). In a social sense, mechanical and mechanic were placed in a derogatory context to indicate mindless work: ‘mechanical men of base condition,’ (Turner, 2014). Thus mechanical

A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

7

was used to designate routine and unthinking activities. And the actors that carried out such activities were entitled machines—from the Greek makhana: ‘device, expedient means or contrivance, that which enables power,’ (Turner, 2014). By the 17th century, machine began to indicate not only structure or framework, but also a specialised apparatus for applying power through complex and interrelated parts, (Williams, 1983). This notion of the exercise of power made the machine distinct from the tool or object, and through the increasing interest in studying this power, mechanical took on new and influential meaning in a science of mechanics. In 1661, physicist Robert Boyle wrote: “Mechanicks signify the Doctrine about the Moving Powers and of framing Engines to multiply force in a larger sense to produce or modify motion in inferior bodies.” In moving from a body of theory about specific practices to general theories about the laws of motion, mechanics began to form the basis for various scientific and religious theories, (Williams, 1983). In his 18th century Lexicon Technicum,9 English writer John Harris defined mechanics as ‘whatsoever hath Force sufficient either to raise or stop the Motion of a Body.’ This understanding of mechanics as forces raising or stopping a motion of bodies led to the rise of material mechanism—a mechanical philosophy where everything in the universe is produced by underlying mechanical forces, (Williams, 1983). Due to such claims, this material mechanism was also called ‘Mechanical Atheism’ and contrasted to religious explanations of the universe. Hence religious thinkers introduced the term machination to describe a sinister scheme or artful plot crafted for evil purposes—in this sense systems that challenge the metaphysical claims of the church. This materialistic mechanisation gets more complicated from the 19th century onwards as the Industrial Revolution resulted in a new understanding of machine as the mechanical civilisation. Increasingly, these new machines worked ‘on their own,’ and this replacement of ‘human’ labour, suggested an association with the materialistic idea of a universe without a god or some sort of divine, directing force, (Williams, 1983). Thus the displacement of labour roles can be seen as an origin of a fundamental divide between organic—as divine man—and mechanical—as material machine. This technical division, which inherently opposes idealism (future) to materiality (past), is a major source of a revolutionary ontological gap between what we inherently distinguish as (hu)man and as machine—a false a dogmatic construction that we seek to problematise in folding the etymologies of revolution and mechanisation—revolution-mechanisation. III. An Etymology of Revolution-Mechanisation The etymologies of revolution and mechanisation are concurrently inverse and mutually constitutive. After all, presently, revolution is defined as a fundamental change in social power or organisational structures that takes place in a relatively short period of time, (Tilly, 1996). Equally, mechanisation is considered to be the physical sense of how forces move through space and the progression of labour from work done by hand to work by machines, (Wiener, 1954). As such, revolution is largely thought of today as a human-driven political project, a social totality with human agents and emancipatory, human-centric ends. Conversely, mechanisation is thought of as a machine-driven technical project, a technical progress with mechanised agents and automatic, machinecentric means. However, as their etymologies demonstrate, the inverse is also the case.

A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

8

Revolution originated as a mechanised concept of revolving, of turning over, of centrifugal motion through space and time—it is a technical term describing mechanistic forces. Mechanisation originated as an anthropocentric descriptor of unskilled workers, of a base condition, of exploitable human bodies—it is a politicised concept describing social classes. Moreover, the idea of machination—scheme or plot crafted to defy power —could be framed as a synonym to revolution in its more modern political sense, while the notion of revolving—that which repeatedly causes motion—could be viewed as a synonym to mechanisation in its more modern technical sense. Such etymological fluxes regarding social totality and technical progress speak to the ambiguity of humanmachine binaries in the current decisive position in the present. In their double synthesis of materiality and expressivity, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) articulate how entities are historically constitutive, and may be subject to processes of deterritorialisation. The intersecting etymologies of revolution as social totality and mechanisation as technical progress make visible these immanent potentials. Thus in order to un-write the linguistic turn and render multiplicitous the dualism which assembles dichotomies between organic and mechanic, (hu)man and machine, past and future, revolution and mechanisation, we propose entanglement—revolutionmechanisation—a concept fully immersed in a constantly changing and mutually constitutive reality of circulation. The dualistic epistemological division of man and machine has been a sacred one. It has been at the heart of the great narratives of salvation history and their transmutation into sagas of secular progressivism. In this entanglement—this closing of a gap separating social totality from technical progress—revolution and mechanisation are thus deterritorialised. After all, there has never been a revolution without mechanisation, nor a mechanisation without revolution —the two are always co-constitutive. Such a realisation releases thought from the limitations of binaric thinking and thus the ideological origins of social totality and technical progress buried under all outgrowths of the ‘man-machine’ binary become painfully apparent. Obviously we cannot retain such illusory boundaries as foundations for political action. They are predicated on originary distinctions between revolution and mechanisation that do not exist. If revolution-mechanisation is to fold the gap— stimulating the dream of permanent revolution—a post-binaric ontology of (hu)man/past as machine/future and machine/future as (hu)man/past is required.

III. An Ontology of Revolution-Mechanisation To conceptualise ontology is to address the unsettlingly succinct question of: ‘What is?’ To confront this, an ontology of revolution-mechanisation will first ontologically frame the concept of revolution, then mechanisation, before finally returning to develop a more complex ontological understanding of their interconnectivity. Following from a Deleuzian tradition that includes Nietzsche, Heidegger and others, we embrace a process ontology of multiplicity.10 This ontological commitment distinguishes from the dialectical tradition of opposing ‘the One and the Multiple.’ For as Deleuze (1966) points out, in fashioning this binary, dialectical philosophy claims to ‘reconstruct the real,’ but this is deceitful,

A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

9

since—similarly to the rigid etymological distinction between mechanisation/future and revolution/past—such a claim starts from concepts too general and abstract. As opposed to re-constituting binaric logics, ontological multiplicity proposes a metaphysical reality of fluidity. Instead of contrasting ‘the One and the Multiple,’ it embraces ‘the Multiple in General.’ Multiplicities are not, in other words, inwardly stagnant and static entities. Rather, they are immanent becomings that work to replace a unified structure with ‘an organisation belonging to the many, which has no need of unity in order to form an existence,’ (Deleuze, 1968: 182). Such an ontological flux is by no means a terminate overcoming or a determinate end to metaphysics—as Heidegger (1953) is frequently misinterpreted as claiming—but rather, “an end of the metaphysics that believes itself to be or pretends to be transcendent,” (Deleuze, 2001: 79). 11 In proclaiming such an end to metaphysical transcendence, process ontology renders immanent the illusory dialectical opposition between any two worlds—essence or appearance, true or false, intelligible or sensible, past or future, revolution or mechanisation. Such distinctions turn life into something that can be judged and restricted, while thought into a unit of measurement. Deleuze: “If our properties in themselves express a diminished life and a mutating thought, what is the use of recuperating them or becoming their true subject?” (2001: 71). This commitment to a multiplicity seeks to deepen our engagement with this question by confronting what Nietzsche calls ‘the transmutation of all values,’ (1895). In other words, we did not kill God when we put man in his place and kept the most important thing— the place itself. We will not kill (hu)man/past if we put machine/future in its place, yet keep the place. What is essential has not changed: “We are always asked to submit ourselves, to burden ourselves, to recognise only the re-active forms of life, the accusatory forms of thought,” (Deleuze, 2001: 71). Such a commitment seeks to render immanent what is essential through the act of conceptual creation—a nonanthropocentric expression of multiplicitious affirmation that reproduces by moving outward from binaric oppositions. I. An Ontology of Revolution There is a recurring problem running through the ways in which process philosophers conceptualise the ontological question of revolution: How does a resistance subvert the assemblages of power without inevitably slipping back into some iteration of the violent practices they arose to dislodge? Why do revolutions re-inscribe the structures of power? In other words, why does the tearing down always result in an analogous rebuilding up, a paradoxical presence of circulation? Such questions—which problematise how power, violence, and the law are constructed—accentuate what Nietzsche (1887: 161) refers to as eternal recurrence: “All great things will bring about their own destruction through an act of self-overcoming,” an ontological relapse underpinning all acts of capture. Such is the dense weight of revolution’s eternal return—destruction and distortion. Nietzsche: “If a temple is to be erected than a temple must be destroyed: that is the law—let anyone show me a case in which it is not fulfilled!” (1887: 95).

A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

10

For Nietzsche a sense of revolution as the simple overthrow of law through violence is delusional. The revolutionary potentials of movement, action, are dependent on a precedent revolution of subjectivity. To tear down a factory or revolt against a government is to attack the effects of subjugation rather than its causes, and as long as any attack is focused solely on effects, no structural political change is possible. Unless addressed in some other way, the power relations that embed the structures of control will remain. And thus the political illusions that invite a revolutionary overturning of social orders in the belief that some new temple will break out of this eternal recurrence are but perilous fantasies. “The experiences of history have taught us…that every revolution brings about a resurrection of the most savage energies in the shape of the long-buried dreadfulness and excesses of the most distant ages,” (Nietzsche, 1878: 169). These ‘most savage enterprises’ are the formation of the first institutionalised structures, social totalities which, established by nothing but violence, flattened our amorphous and multiplicitous existences into firm forms. Nietzsche: “The oldest state12 appeared as a fearful tyranny, as an oppressive and remorseless machine…working this raw material of people…[into] thoroughly kneaded and pliant forms,” (1887: 86). Thus the history of ‘what is’ has become a long narration of man’s submissions and the reasons we give ourselves for legitimising them. Deleuze: “The process of degeneration concerns not only philosophy but becoming in general,” (2001: 72). Instead of linking an active life and affirmative thinking, the consequences of this institutionalised cycle of violence, power, and law is that thought becomes negative, life deprecates—reduced to its weakest forms it ceases to be active. Revolutionaries claim to brandish truth and reason, but beneath these claims to reason are the unreasonable forces of those most savage enterprises—thoroughly kneaded and pliant, we are unable to think of a world as otherwise. This revolving trap of thought as reduced to structures is what Heidegger is perilously railing against: “Philosophy either projects far beyond its own time or else binds back to this time’s earlier and inceptive past,” (1953: 9). For Heidegger (1953), the ways in which such negative thinking have denigrated life and thought makes it very difficult to determine whether we are ever getting close to breaking this re-constitutive snare of resistance or just speaking the acts. Confrontation can lead to enclosure—breaking down as building up. Heidegger: “How is humanity ever supposed to have invented that which pervades in its sway, due to which humanity itself can be as humanity in the first place?” (1953: 167). In other words, humanity is not at home in its own essence because we are fixedly thinking of ourselves as those who —via rigorous structure—‘invented’ things like language, poetry, and understanding. But we did not ‘invent’ these things. For Heidegger (1953: 167), we acquired them by seizing, overcoming—“This breaking forth, breaking up, capturing and subjugating is in itself the first opening up of beings as sea, as earth, as animal.” As opposed to focusing on resisting the everyday banalities of physical violences—a focus that will always reassert the revolutionary cycle—such acts of immanent breaking forth require confronting the subject of ontological violence. Heidegger: “Doing violence must shatter against the

A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

11

excessive violence of Being,” (1953: 173). It is only confrontation, the collapsing of ontology—what Benjamin (1940) calls the ‘brushing of history against the grain’—which may force humanity beyond its cycle of revolution and subjugation. While it can manifest physically, ontological violence, what Benjamin (1921) calls divine violence, is a creative violence against all iterations of those first institutionalised structures, which trapped resistances within an eternal recurrence by flattening our fluid and multiplicitous existences into rigid forms. For Benjamin (1921), this eternal return is a mythic violence—an inescapable, circular logic arising from the dialectical relationship between law-making—a constitutive act of establishing power—and law-preserving—a re-constitutive act of maintaining power. Benjamin: “If mythical violence is law-making, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if the former threatens, the latter strikes,” (1921: 297). To enact an ontology of revolution, to shatter the excessive violence of Being, to rupture the relapse underpinning all acts of creative capture, is to strike out. Not in the traditional sense by assembling a re-institutionalised counter to the structures of power —that if successful, will merely replace them. Instead, this striking out, this ephemeral act, is a revolutionary deactivation of pure, immediate, ontological violence that deposes the cyclical myth of eternal recurrence. As Benjamin (1921) points out, such an ontological revolution is not some exterior, transcendent power intervening in human affairs from the outside, rather, it corresponds to dimensions at the very heart of the profane life itself—a return of a different sort, the rediscovery of our obscured amorphous and multiplicitous existences. II. An Ontology of Mechanisation Theorising an ontology of mechanisation depends essentially on how the machine itself is conceptualised. After all, the expectations, capabilities, and aesthetics of machines have changed dramatically. Far from the big grinding gears and metal millstones of the industrial revolution, modern machines carry almost infinite amounts of information on a tiny chip hidden someplace behind an appealing façade. Haraway: “Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum,” (1991: 153). Behind its alluring finish, the machine is a complex assemblage, an intricate techno-system that operates almost entirely independent of human comprehension. As Heidegger (1927) puts it, a machineobject contains a readiness-at-hand—a withdrawal from influence of human interference into a reality that cannot be effected externally by practical or theoretical action. The computing machine as a complex system contains many digital, electronic, and mechanical components, all of which are essentially hidden from the view of a user, who simply engages with the machine as if it were a single object. Our oversimplified and anthropocentric notion of what it means both to be and to interact with an object or a machine becomes inadequate. Heidegger: “For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression “being” [or object, or machine]. We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed,” (1927: 1).

A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

12

An ontology of mechanisation is thus an attempt to address these object-oriented perplexities. The initial anthropocentric move that created the need for theorising objectoriented-ontologies was Kant’s (1781) establishment of transcendental philosophy—the reduction of philosophical investigation to the profoundly asymmetrical interrogation of a single relation: the human-world gap. Through ‘transcendental’ philosophy, any world or object is viewed as a mere prop or vehicle for human cognition, language, and intention that is unable to contribute anything of its own. Kant: “Let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition,” (1781: 2). Kant’s supposition that objects conform to the mind— instead of the mind conforming to objects—assumes a world given in advance, as such; it rids ontology of the need to consult objects. While this Copernican turn13 does not deny there is a world independent of mind, it will nonetheless argue that this world, as it is in-itself, is forever beyond human knowledge because the world is always structured by our cognition. Thus if we take this Kantian turn, an ontology becomes entirety a self-reflexive investigation of how the human structures world and objects—a transcendental anthropology14 where world-objectmachine is no longer seen as a place where humans happen to dwell, but are rather as a vacant reflection of human-structured activities reminiscent of the linguisticconservative turn alluded to by Foucault and DeLanda. Of course, few theories today fully accept Kant’s epistemological framing that essence (the nature) precedes existence (the mere fact of its being). For example, the existentialists pose a direct challenge to Kant’s traditional formulation by reversing the philosophical view that the essence of a thing is more fundamental and immutable than its existence. For Sartre (1946), human beings—through their consciousness—create their own values and determine a meaning for their life because the human being does not possess any inherent identity or value.15 What goes completely uncontested, even by the existentialists, is the general spirit of the Copernican turn—where the world is always thought of as conforming to human cognition. In this respect, nearly all the major trends in dialectal thought are decedents of Kant (1781) in one way or another.16 An ontology of mechanisation seeks to render immanent Kant’s transcendental philosophy by folding it back in on itself. Rather than a chronic return to the human-world gap, this ontology emphasises that the majority of objects, beings, and machines—as both an object and being—are independent of humans and are what they ‘are’ regardless of whether or not we register them. Such an ontology of mechanisation rejects any anthropomorphic or idealist thesis to the effect that to be is to be a correlate of the human mind, spirit, body, or language. While it is indeed the case that knowledge is necessarily dependent on the object to which it relates, the reverse is not necessarily true. Objects are not dependent on knowledge— knowledge is an accident of objects, not objects an accident of knowledge. This begs a question: If knowledge is dependent on the object, how it is possible to surmount our relation to the object to determine whether objects themselves possess the properties we encounter in relating to them?

A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

13

For Kant we can only ever relate to the object in relating to the object, thus we can never overcome the object-subject duality to get at the Being of the object itself. It is at this impasse of technical progress where Serres’ (1996) concept of the world-object becomes integral to an ontology of mechanisation. Serres: “Our knowledge is dedicated to the rise of world-objects—tools with a dimension that is commensurable with one of the dimensions of the world;” a satellite for speed, atomic bombs for energy, and nuclear waste for time, (2006: 3). The global dimension that characterises world-objects eliminates the distance between object-machine and subject-man. “We now live in those objects as we live in the world,” (Serres, 1996: 78). Traditional machines formed units with a local range of action in space and time—a sledgehammer drives a stake— they define an environment where few humans worked.17 This localisation, for Serres (2006), resulted in the division of the world into localities that facilitated Kant’s transcendent philosophy of mastery and possession—man could define what we dominate, how we do so, and what is meant by ‘we.’ Yet increasingly our survival now depends on a world we create alongside and with machines—a coconstitutive relation grounded in the desire for immanence to overcome the catastrophe of circulation. That things are ‘status quo’ is nexus of this catastrophe. In light of this fangled realisation, an ontology of mechanisation seeks to replace the transcendent mastering of desire for world with an immanent mastering of desire for mastering—to reimagine the dichotomies fashioned under the a-priori and a-posteriori conditions of Kant’s localising/universalising divisions—division which outline the gaps between subject-object, action-knowledge, and technical progress-social totality. III. An Ontology of Revolution-Mechanisation At an etymological register, the term ontology flows into both philosophy and computing science. As indicated above, philosophically, onto comes from the Greek ‘being,’ ‘that which is,’ while within computer science, ontology serves as a model for describing the world that consists of a set of types, properties, and relationships, (Turner, 2014). Thus, with its focus on representing entities, ideas, and events, along with their properties and relations according to a system of categories, the study of ontology flows between these so-called disciplines. The differences between ontology as philosophy and as computer science are a matter of focus. After all, traditionally, philosophers are largely concerned with establishing first principles or fixed essences, while computer scientists are mainly interested in creating controlled vocabularies for software engineering.18 Yet a folding in of the disconnected ontologies of philosophy-as-social totality and computer science-as-technical progress into an ontology of revolution-mechanisation emancipates thought from Kant’s allegedly transcendental desires for fixed essences and controlled vocabularies. Instead of conceptualising revolution’s eternal violent return and mechanisation’s constant reiteration of a subject-object binary as dispersed problems, an ontology of revolution-mechanisation regards both issues as inseparable by way of their co-constitutive, albeit discombobulated nature. Overcoming one requires overcoming the other. To reiterate: There has never been revolution without mechanisation, nor mechanisation without revolution —the two are immanently co-

A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

14

constituted. Situated around this vital realisation is a space where the concept of revolution-mechanisation stimulates the breaking of new ground. In fusing the traditional language of ‘body,’ ‘object,’ and ‘thing’ with the concept of machine, an ontology of revolution-mechanisation captures the essence of entities as relational beings that function or operate. Following from Bryant (2014: 15), if we define a machine as: “material and immaterial structures that compose the fabric of the world or of the universe,” the term ‘machine’ can be deployed to describe any entity or assemblage in (non) existence—organic and inorganic, corporeal and incorporeal, computational and philosophic. This fusing is a complete folding in of dialectical logics of dichotomy and duality—an inversion of Levi-Strauss’ (1963) vital point that language works fundamentally to reduce subjectivity to binary oppositions and their unification, and that these are what make meaning possible.19 In conceptually displacing the term ‘object’, revolution-mechanisation avoids an oppositional definition with ‘subject,’ which: “allows us to step through a four hundred year old philosophical obsession with interrogating the relationship between subjects and objects,” (Bryant 2014: 15). Instead of understanding machines as rigid—fixed to a function—the stepping through of dualities allows for a thinking of machines as plastic— the ways machines take on and leave behind functions as they enter diverse relations that require them to be structurally open to their environments. However, that machines enter into relations with one another does not mean that simply ‘everything is related to everything else.’ Machines process inputs they encounter through what Bryant (2014: 56) refers to as operational closure: “A machine never relates to a flow as it is, but rather always transforms that flow according to the internal structure of the machine.” In this way, an ontology of revolution-mechanisation posits that all machines possess a perspective of sorts—they are open to their environments in specific and determinate ways, and they can only process those inputs in equally determinate ways. Following from Bogost (2012), if done with phenomenological precision, it may be possible for other machines to enter into some of these perspectives and perform ‘alien phenomenology.’ 20 By examining the form and openness a given machine takes, observing the specific nature of the trans-formations it preforms upon the inputs that affect it, and suspending one’s own aims and purposes (without claiming to wholly transcend one’s subjective positionality), it might be possible to infer what it is like to experience the world as another machine experiences it—a final transmutation of postsubject-object thought. Of course, an ontology of mechanisation is cognisant that such claims may bring out the charge that it is merely performing an inverted Copernican turn that still privileges one form of being—in this case, a reversal from that of man-over-machine to machine-overman. However, a truly ontological mechanisation interprets anything that produces difference(s) as being—from fictions and signs to animals and plants—all being is in the same sense real, albeit at different registers. Such a pivot embraces what DeLanda (2002) refers to as a flat ontology. It cannot privilege one form of being over another because the changes in an identity of a machine are not changes in substance—

A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

15

defined by Bryant (2014) as a particular state obtained by difference—but shifts in the qualities belonging to a substance.21 In subsuming outdated language with the concept of the plastic machine, framing the alien-machine and world-object, and presenting a flat ontology in which all being is in the same sense real, an ontology of revolution-mechanisation poses a substantial challenge to the Kantian trap of an anthropocentric ontology. Yet as emphasised above, decentering the Copernican turn is only a part of the process of becoming-revolutionary. Without rendering immanent the destruction and distortion of revolution’s eternal return, institutionalised structures of power—which rely on reproducing the fantasies of binaric ontologies and static identities to maintain control—will deploy mythic violence to condense the multiplicitous existences engendered by the machine as well as unfold and re-widen the gap between technical progress and social totality.22 Nietzsche’s (1887) question of revolution remains: How do we elude this eternal return? Moreover, through this elusive move, how do we create non-institutionalised ways of becoming in the world that are fluid yet habitable—defined not by characteristics but potentialities? We cannot do so through the institutional power of new, more ‘multiplicitous’ laws, for as Benjamin (1921: 297) points out: “The violence of law is cyclical because each imposition of law is an offence against a previous form of governance.” Instead, what remains is the stark realisation that evading an eternal return means surrendering the rigidity we have grown accustomed to via the institutionalised power of absolute judgement—if we are to finally evade revolution’s structural return, all identities must be re-constituted as contingent. 23

IV. A Politicology of Revolution-Mechanisation In the interests of launching off where many have been satisfied concluding, we began with the far-reaching question: ‘How do ‘things’ work together?’ However, as we explore the contours of such a question, a new, perhaps more succinct one arises: ‘How can the ontologies of revolution and mechanisation come together to address the problems of mechanisation’s chronic anthropocentrism and revolution’s eternal return?’ Undoubtedly they must be addressed in unison—as any decentering of the Copernican turn without upending the eternal return will simply re-establish the current power relations. But how can this be done? By reinterpreting anything that creates differences as machine-being, the flat, relational ontology of revolution-mechanisation provides us with an effective way of folding in the subject-object gap instituted by Kant’s Copernican turn. However, there can be no fixed guidelines for upending the mythic violence of eternal return—to offer a rigid and universalised response to revolution would be to fall back into the cyclical trap of re-institutionalisation. Thus this concept ontology of revolutionmechanisation can only respond with a general orientation contingent on the situation, difference-in-itself, a politics of immanence. For to systematise a rigid reaction would be to totalise thought and deprecate life by (re)spawning a categorical imperative—a Kantian (1785) conception for the self-sufficient end-in-itself or ‘pure end,’ an end which

A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

16

claims to maintain a timeless universal applicability across all possible historical situations.24 As no historical situation is identical to another, nothing can be said categorically in advance. Instead, what an ontology of revolution-mechanisation can provide for us is a decisive position in the present. No fixed past, no inescapable future—a breaking of the syllogistic bond that has been framing resistance as a teleological system of means and ends since Aristotle.25 Thus an ontology of revolution-mechanisation equips us with a politics of non-instrumental means, of immanence, which refuses to lend itself to any specific determinations, knowledges, or inevitabilities. Benjamin: “There is no certainty except in the realm of mythical violence,” (1921: 300). To challenge revolution’s eternal return is to reject certainty and decidability. It is to do ontological violence to structure by closing the gap between thought and life—and as a result the spaces between social totality (projections of the past) and technical progress (projections of the future). Such a commitment is a micro-political one.26 This is not to say that revolution-mechanisation is an individualistic process. Rather, following from Deleuze (2001: 29), it is a perpetual singularisation: “A life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil, for it was only the subject that incarnated it in the midst of things that made it good or bad.” To move through the cyclical trap of revolution is to ontologically reconstitute the entire subject-revolting practice, not by making revolt a process of existence, but by making existence a process of revolt. Normally we think of the subject-revolting practices as a cyclical process—a paradoxical presence of circulation. We break forth, moving forward/backward from the decisive position in the present in order to discover some new form of existence outside of the commodifying and territorialising processes of capitalism. When our imaginary of the future or the past reaches a point furthest from the decisive position in the present—furthest from the exploitative flows of neoliberalism—it is always broken, always brought back into the fold, brought back (or forward) towards the (linear) present. Our usual understanding of the future and the past tells us all political movements are either destroyed or brought into the party. All alternative aesthetics are either eradicated or brought into the gallery. And all lines of flight are either abolished or reterritorialised into the anthropocentric framing of space-time.

A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

17

Figure 1: A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

However, the inevitability of these cyclical returns to the decisive position in the present (as conceptualised by a linear understanding of time) mapped out above is an ideological apparatus of power. An alternative terrain vitally cognisant of the ontological, perpetual and rhizomatic entanglement of the social totality and technical progress, of the past and the future, of revolution-mechanisation are what this essay has sought to chart. As there has never been a revolution without mechanisation, nor a mechanisation without revolution, there has never been a past without a future, nor a future without a past—the ‘two’ sides of the plane are always co-constitutive. Such a realisation releases thought from the limitations of the paradoxical presence of circulation—of the increasingly powerful breaking forth followed immediately by the increasingly powerful captures. After all, if, as argued here, systems, infrastructures and networks are now the leading conditions of complex societies rather than individual human agents, human experience loses its primacy, as do the semantics and politics based on it.

A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

18

Thus the paradoxical presence of circulation--the present as the primary category of human experience--which has been the basis for both the understanding of time and of what time is, loses its priority in favour of a becoming-revolutionary uncovered by the concept-ontology of revolution and mechanisation presented here. Complex societies-which means more-than-human societies at scales of sociotechnical organisation that surpass phenomenological determination—are those in which the past, the present and the future enter into an economy where maybe none of these modes is primary, or where the future replaces the present as the lead structuring aspect of time. In other words, time is a fold. The syncretism of mechanisation and revolution make possible a becoming-revolutionary—situated around the folding in of an imaginary rupture between human and machine. As a result, we are not just living in a new time or accelerated time, but time itself—the direction of time—has changed. We no longer have a linear time, in the sense of the past being followed by the present and then the future. However, as embracing such an ontology of revolution-mechanisation—where the future happens before the present and time arrives from the future—is to shatter excessive violences of Being, it is also to gaze into the horizon of the infinite, to put everything at risk. As Nietzsche (1882) points out, if the land is our former beliefs, our comforts and truth, then the ocean is the endless abyss of possibility that await us when we cast aside these ‘securities.’ At times this ocean lies ‘like silk and gold and dreams of goodness… But there will be hours when [we] realise there is nothing more awesome than infinity … Oh, the poor bird that has felt free and now strikes against the walls of this cage! Woe, when homesickness for the land overcomes you, as if there had been more freedom there—now there is no more land, (Nietzsche, 1882: 119). Nietzsche begs us to ask ourselves: What are we willing to put at risk? After all, to make life as resistance is to cast off into the infinite abyss. Yes, through an ontology of revolution-mechanisation we see the fold in subject-object that entirely shatters the perpetual loop of eternal return. But to do so requires the wiping away of every truth, 27 a rendering of anything as possible—an unequivocal move beyond what it means to be ‘human’ in the anthropomorphic reduction of power to dichotomies, time to linearity, and subjectivity to subjects. In other words, to intentionally take up this ontology—which as been operating for quite sometime regardless of our cognisant acceptance of its presence—is to open Pandora’s Box—the possibilities of a radically more equitable world come into play, but so do all others.28 Robert Latham (1996) articulates this ultimate risk in what he terms as the double play of modernity. ‘For each assertion of organised agency there is the ever present possibility of a counter assertion of agency. Modernity in this sense is inherently conflictual. All constructions imply the possibility of destruction, especially via alternative constructions,’ (Latham, 1996: 2). Of course, pointing to the unsettled or even frenzied dimensions of the present moment is hardly new. For example, building from Marx and Nietzsche, Marshall Berman (1982) puts forward a nuanced engagement with the ramifications of the ‘permanently revolutionary’ character of modernity. In the past

A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

19

however, what was being revolutionised were more traditional (non-mechanised/ revolutionised) forms of community and social experience. In the folding in of revolution and mechanisation, of social totality (past) and technical progress (future), the (modern/ linear) paradoxical presence of circulation emerges in a war against itself—a perpetual tension between the clashing of large-scale agencies and the desire to persist and the possibility of counter-agencies. Among the most sensitive to the paradoxical presence of circulation’s eternal return against/to itself are the risk theorists such as Ulrich Beck (1992), who argues that the present realisation of the co-constitutive nature of the past (as social totality) and the future (as technical progress) is best understood as a reflexive and cyclical modernisation that is always pulling past and future lines of flight back into the decisive moment in the present. In other words, the possibilities of an end to the current crisis also create the conditions for future crises to arise. Thus Deleuze’s sustained and non-structured dream of life as permanent revolution may be possible. But everything that makes this dream emancipatory is predicated on a vital assumption: People desire breaking out of that mundane everyday over full bellies and satisfied sensibilities. Perhaps, as Beck (1996) articulates, the ability to break—to destroy in order to create—from the paradoxical presence of circulation within the current political moment is a question of risk. For as Deleuze & Guattari (1983) point out it is always the fear of risk—of the loss of that which we have been made to believe is valuable—which prevents us from going as far as possible. It is a Nietzschean fear that once we cast away from the decisive moment in the present, we may never be able to return—the majority draw near the wall and back away horrified. This is the truly paradoxical aspect of the paradoxical presence of circulation. It is a cyclical prison—increasingly intense, but equally arbitrary—breaking forth and capture over and over. It is paradoxical because the constant capture and recapture is a violent, intolerable existence that is rendered tolerable only by our even more intolerable fear of the unknown. Our desire to break out, to abandon the circle and return to the straight and narrow is always kept in check by the overwhelming fear of an endless abyss of possibility that awaits us when we cast aside our ‘securities.’ But if we truly do desire leaping into the chasm of unknown possibilities, this plane of pure immanence—we must let this desire push us through an unwillingness to accept the everyday banalities of insufficient existences, the imaginary gaps between selfother, subject-object, man-machine, past-future, and the return of mythic violence. If such a vital assumption holds, then perhaps a commitment to revolution-mechanisation necessitates the risk because it is an ontological violence for the sake of, and to preserve, life: “An impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of ‘what happens’,” (Deleuze, 2001: 28).

A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

20

Endnotes
 Following from Deleuze and Guattari (1977), we can take territory/terrain to be an assemblage of customs, habits, behaviours, and practices defined by functions of information. Importantly, territory is not universal. According to D&G (1987), it always has edges, ways to move through it. Yet these so-called edges cannot be thought of solely in spatialised terms—space itself cannot be conceptualised only in terms of a physical plane. For this project, what really matters are the ‘edges’ in terms of the meaning of signs, markers, gestures, sounds, and etymological signifiers—as assemblages of a specific rendering of information, these edges have specific meanings in a territory, but can be deterritorialised so as to take on other meanings elsewhere. 1

2

The hyperlink, for example, allows all ideas to be networked—even connected with a proper systems theory management—it does away with a need for references or sources, all ideas can be hyperlinked. If we recognise the products of consciousness not as products of our ‘self’ but as interconnected products of the sharing of information across computational networks of subjectivity, we do away with the need to reference authors—we build upon ideas themselves. 3

For Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 40), the Body without Organs is the total set of unformed materials—while the strata are ‘inevitable phenomenon that occur on the BwO.’ They code and territorialise the BwO— simply put—strata make things out of the formless masses. Where there is one stratum, it follows that there must be another to border it—strata “come in at least pairs, one serving as the substratum for the other,” (42). The strata are formed by a double articulation. This involves a simultaneous articulation of content and expression: The first articulation chooses or deducts, from the unstable particle-flows of metastable molecular or quasi-molecular units (machinic substances) upon which it imposes a statistical order of connections and successions. The second articulation establishes functional, compact, stable structures (subjectivated forms), and constructs the molar compounds in which these structures are simultaneously actualised (substances), (40-41). As such, we can think of strata in this way: || Atomic || Cellular || Chemical || Organic || Organ || Organism || Social || (Digital?) || Technical || 4

Many scholars inherently re-entrench this binary by tirelessly asking: ‘how can technology help people do this or that?’ This problem has become increasingly prevalent with the popular trend of writing on the nexus of social movements and technology (i.e. Milan 2013 or Castells 2014). 5

Foucault challenges the idea power is wielded by people or groups by way of ‘sovereign’ acts of domination, seeing it instead as dispersed or pervasive. ‘Power is everywhere,’ and ‘comes from everywhere’ so in this sense is neither agency nor a structure, (1998: 63). It is a kind of ‘metapower’ or ‘regime of truth’ pervading society that is in constant flux and negotiation. 6

The emancipatory achievements of the semiotic turn should not to be underestimated nor minimised—however, they have obscured another form of power, non-discursive power, which arises from materiality. As Foucault, Derrida and many others are well aware, power issues not simply from signification and how we signify, but how a world of objects around us is organised. 7

D&G (1987): every stratum exhibits a double synthesis. A first chooses from unstable particle flows (substances) to impose a statistical order of connections (forms). A second establishes functional systems (forms) that determine which molar compounds are actualised (substances).

A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

21

8

Metaphysics are grounded on an understanding of difference as that which splits the same, rather than difference as that which provides a fundamental grounding in itself. Normally, we conceive of difference as an empirical relation between formations that have prior identities of their own. In Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze works to subvert this relationship: similarity persists, but only as something produced by prior relations between differentials. 9

Harris’ work was the first alphabetical encyclopaedia written in English. Although the emphasis was on mathematics, its contents go beyond what would be called science and tech today, it includes entries on humanities and fine arts, as well as law, commerce and music. 10

What we call a Deleuzian tradition is traced to Heraclitus’s fragments, in which he posits that the underlying basis of all reality is change. In opposition to the Aristotelian model of change as accidental, a process ontology regards change, thus becoming, as the cornerstone of reality. 11

To clarify: metaphysics is a very broad field that attempts to answer questions about how the world is. Conversely, ontology is a related sub-field, partially within metaphysics, that answers questions of what things exist in the world. An ontology posits which entities exist in the world. 12

Nietzsche (1878) does not mean ‘the oldest state’ in a modern sense of an organised political community living under one government, rather he is referring to the first institutionalised polity that forcefully centralised and flattened a population by imposing a fixed location and identity. 13

Kant named this Copernican metaphor after the work of astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who popularised the idea of heliocentrism—the astronomical model in which the Earth and the planets revolve around the Sun—thus bringing about what Kant deemed to be the modern era. 14

Philosophy becomes a self-reflexive investigation of how the human structures the world and objects, thus any discussion of objects in the world becomes an anthropological investigation of the vacant reflection of objects in an entirely human-structured anthropocentric environment. 15

The notion identity or value must be created can also be found in the works of Kierkegaard (1844), who argued by posing the acts that constitute the individual, they make their existence more significant. In other words, a personality is not built over a previously designed model or a precise purpose, rather it is the human being who chooses to engage in such enterprises. 16

Whether the philosophy proposes the structuration of the world by language, the symbolic, signifier, signs, or whether it is proposed that the world is structured by social forces or power, the unquestioned thesis is that the world conforms to humans rather than humans to the world. 17

For Serres (1996), an example of such an environmental tool is a family’s self-sustaining farm and the plough they use for their field. This divided way of living would localise our communities and thus create a perception of the world that is un-holistic and divided into separate spheres. 18

This is, of course, a massive generalisation. Much of philosophy today—including the majority of existential, process, and postmodern philosophical commitments—utterly reject the idea of first principles—which they see as implicit insertions of power-as-metaphysics. Similarly, much of computer science today is not about control so much as writing self-modifying code systems. For Levi-Strauss (1955), myth—and language as expression of myth—consists of juxtaposed binary oppositions. As a result, myth-language functions as a sleight of hand, an association of an irreconcilable binary opposition with a reconcilable binary opposition—the thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad—creating the inescapable illusion, or belief, that the former had been resolved. 19

A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

22

20

While inferring what it is like to see the world as another machine experiences it may come off as a sort of object-oriented-imperialism, Bogost (2012) highlights that while we can never truly know ‘what it’s like to be a thing,’ the reasons for attempting to do so can be extremely thought provoking. In particular, Bogost is directly addressing philosophers with his strategy of carpentry that advocates constructing artefacts instead of, or in addition to, talking or thinking about them. 21

What we are alluding to is a sort of non-reductive monism: the qualities of a substance are the actualisation of an object's inhered capacities or abilities, known as an object's powers. There is no actual change at a material register. Thus the actualisation of an object's power into qualities or properties at a specific place and time is what Bryant (2014) calls a local manifestation. 22

We deploy the term ‘institutionalised structures of power’ often—a gesture to hierarchical systems that use violence to maintain a monopoly over legitimacy in various spheres of life. For example, a state monopolises conflict, a corporation monopolises exchange—the list goes on. 23

By contingent identities we mean to recognise all structured identities are fictions instituted in order to rule us, thus to embrace contingency is to return to the fluidity of our subjectivities. 24

For Benjamin (1921), as much as the ‘force of law’ hinges on its universal applicability to a concrete historical situation, the law’s classical ethical foundation in Kant is problematically based upon a so-called timeless universality abstracted from nothing but historical situations. 25

Aristotle’s teleological system is ‘an account of a things purpose.’ In this case we would argue that the teleological purpose of resistance has been to always re-inscribe structures of power. 26

The most common way to understand the macropolitics/micropolitics distinction is that the usual meaning of the macro- and micro- prefixes as ‘the big’ and ‘the small’ in terms of scale. 27

A most infamous example is Heidegger’s turn towards fascism. He saw fascism’s refusal to conform to past politics as an attempt to break through the cyclical nature of revolution. When fascism did re-institutionalise, Heidegger slowly distanced himself from the larger movement, but, at this point, the damage to Heidegger’s philosophical commitments was already done. 28

In this context I define the opening of Pandora's box as the performance of an action that may seem small, but that turns out to have far-reaching consequences—for example, a micropolitical re-framing of life as revolt may seem insignificant, but to truly do so would change everything.

A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

23

References Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage, 1992. Beck, Ulrich. The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996. Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, London: Penguin Books, 1982. Benjamin, Walter. Critique of Violence, London: Verso, 1927, 1997. Benjamin, Walter. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Berlin: Schocken Books, 1969. Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology: Or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Boyle, Robert. The Sceptical Chymist, Online: Courier Corporation. 1661, 2013. Bryant, Levi R.. Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Castells, Manuel. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, London: Polity, 2012. Cavendish, Margret. Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1668, 2001. DeLanda, Manuel. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Zone Books, 1966, 1990. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, London: Athlone Press, 1968, 1994. Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, New York: Columbia University Press, 1969, 1993. Deleuze, Gilles. Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans. Anne Boyman, New York: Zone Books, 2001. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972, 1977. Deleuze Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983, 1987.

A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

24

Deleuze Gilles, and Felix Guattari. What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York, Vintage Books, 1966. Foucault, Michel, and Gilles Deleuze. ‘Intellectuals and Power,’ in Language, CounterMemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D.F. Bouchard, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, London: Penguin Books, 1975, 1998. Haraway, Donna. ’The Cyborg Manifesto,’ in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York, Routledge, 1991. Harman, Graham. Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things, Chicago: Open House Press, 2005. Harris, John. Lexicon Technicum, Or, An Universal English Dictionary of Arts and Sciences: Explaining Not Only the Terms of Art But the Arts Themselves, London: Martino Publishing, 1704, 2004. Husserl, Edmund. Experience and Judgment, Churchill, trans. J. S. Ameriks, London: Routledge, 1939, 1973. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie, Joan Stambaugh, Albany: State University of New York, 1927, 2010. Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim, Richard Polt, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953, 2014. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer, Allen W. Wood, London: Penguin Classics, 1781, 2008. Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor, Jens Timmermann, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1785, 2012. Kierkegaard, Søren. Philosophical Fragments: Kierkegaard's Writings Volume 7, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1844, 1985. Latham, Robert. ‘Modernity and Security: An Argument Sketch,’ 37th International Studies Association Annual Convention, San Diego, California, USA, 1996. Levi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology, New York: Basic Books, 1963. Levi-Strauss, Claude. ‘The Structural Study of Myth,” The Journal of American Folklore, 68 (270), 1955, p. 428-444.

A Paradoxical Presence of Circulation

25

Milan, Stefania. Social Movements and Their Technologies: Wiring Social Change, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human: A Book For Free Spirits, trans. Walter Kaufman, London: Prometheus Books, 1878, 2009. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix in Songs, trans. Walter Kaufman, London: Vintage, 1882, 1974. Nietzsche, Friedrich Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufman, London: Vintage, 1886, 1989. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufman, London: Vintage, 1887, 1989. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols: And Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1895, 2005. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism is a Humanism, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1946, 2007. Serres, Michel. The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson, Ann Arbour: Michigan University Press, 1995. Serres, Michel. ’Revisiting The Natural Contract,’ 1000 Days of Theory, eds. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Victoria, Canada: CTheory, 2006. Tilly, Charles. European Revolutions: 1492-1992, London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996. Turner, Marion. Writing Revolution, in A Companion to Western Literature, eds. R. DeMaria, H. Chang, S. Zacher, Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2014. Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. Mark Polizzotti, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1977, 2006. Wiener, Nobert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, New York: Da Capo Press, 1954. Williams, Raymond Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.