THE SEMIOTIC REVIEW OF BOOKSVOLUME 17.2 2007 ISSN 0847-1622http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/srb

Editorial

AllagmaticBy Jakub Zdebik

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Editorial: 1-5AllagmaticBy Jakub Zdebik

Remodeling Selfhood 6-8By Darin C. Bradley

Insight: 8-11Take Five: Visions of Deely By Inna Semetsky

Archive: 12The First SRB Editorial By Paul Bouissac

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THE SEMIOTIC REVIEW OF BOOKSVolume 17.2 (2007)

Table of Contents

1.Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuzeand Sobriety

“Sobriety, sobriety,” Gilles Deleuze andFélix Guattari announce in A ThousandPlateaus, “that is the common prerequisite forthe deterritorialization of matters, themolecularization of material, and thecosmicization of forces” (Deleuze andGuattari 2005: 344). It is a rallying callwithout exclamation. In its quiet way,sobriety links the flower to the cosmos. Andthe philosopher Gilbert Simondon showshow the individual plant is opened on eitherend to that which is geological, as it pumpsnourishment out of the soil, and to thecosmos, as it imbibes the sun’s rays throughphotosynthesis (Combes 1999: 12-13). If,according to Alain Badiou (2000: 16-17),Deleuze is the monotonous philosopher ofthe One, then Simondon is parsimoniouswith his concepts. With Guattari, Deleuzehas constructed a system populated bydeterritorializations, molecularizations andcosmicizations, a kaleidoscopic multiplicity ofconcepts. While constructing the Bodywithout Organs, the rhizome and thediagram, Deleuze and Guattari have given anumber of philosophers a new life.Simondon is not just another figure holdingup the Deleuzoguattarian assemblage. He isat once subterranean and ubiquitous in theircorpus, but most importantly, he is sober.

Simondon’s system is an “entirephilosophy,” as Deleuze (2002:120-24) callsit, and links the formation of crystals to thesplitting of cells, the formation of coral reefsand termites’ nests to the psychic make up ofindividuals and their composition of a societywith very few key concepts: transduction,

metastability, hylemorphism, structure andoperation, crystallization and modulation areall woven together through the notion ofanalogy. Transduction is a biological termfrom which Simondon isolated a theory ofsystematic information sharing. Atransduction is “the transfer of geneticdeterminants from one microorganism toanother or from one strain of microorganismto another by a viral agent” (Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary).

It is hard to sketch a whole system andits articulation in one trait. Yet, at the endof the massive L’individuation à la lumière desnotions de forme et d’information, relegated tothe last appendix is a section titled“allagmatic,” from the very end of thephilosophical system Simondon offers a keythrough which to read the notion of analogyvisually while giving an ontological depth tothis logical operation.

Allagmatic is an ontological study of thecrux of the relation between structure andoperation. Allagmatic theorizes a schism, ablind spot that is productive in itsarticulation of thought. The theory of theallagmatic provides the opportunity tovisualize an unrepresentable process that isno less actual because it is virtual, reversinga cleft into a depth. This theory proposes avisual semiotic tool of interpretation ofaesthetic objects.

2. Hylemorphic basis for a rift

Let’s start with the very sober brick.And the very sober mould and earth neededto form the brick. The “entire philosophy”begins with an evocative example involvingall the possible facets of brickmaking from

the earth (the matter) out of a mould (theform). The dyad of matter and formpresupposes the concept of individuationthat renders it static, with no possibility of adynamic becoming. Simondon proposes inits place to look at the concept in medias res,throwing out equilibrium and stability as thefoundation for the individual and insteadlooking at individuation from a metastableperspective. Slowly, Simondon reveals thedynamism involved in the brick takingshape, the underlying event being theindividual brick emerging from a metastablesystem. The mould does not perform therole of a stable limit on the earth, thesubstance of the brick. It is constantly atplay: the boundary delimited by the mould isfluctuating with the force of the earthsettling, pushing on its structure. Thematter and the form are in a state offluctuation, of metastability. Simondon goesas far as to expose this process from a widerangle: the brick is never the same for theworker who makes it, even though theindustrialist who employs the worker seesonly one brick. This is related to the effortthe brick-maker puts into every single brick,thereby further shaping their individuality. Itis a preliminary illustration of the concept ofoperation which envelops the structure. Thebrick/mould structure is enveloped in theoperation of brickmaking. The operation isendowed with an ontological force thatmakes the structure, mediated by theconscious individual, a system.

Anne Sauvagnargues, in her essay “GillesDeleuze. De l’animal à l’art,” offers aninsightful summary of the thesis guidingSimondon’s system: Simondon asks when wecan speak of ‘one’, whether it is oneindividual, one animal, one crystal(Sauvagnargues 2004: 133). The question isanswered by being transposed onto the planeof the form and matter problematic, orhylemorphism, from hylé (matter) andmorphé (form). Can the principle ofindividuation explain the genesis of theindividual, the process of becoming oneindividual and then, can the individuation,that is, ‘becoming individual’ and ‘individualthat has become’ taken together, beconsidered one? In other words, when theprocess of individuation, through which theindividual is formed, is superimposed ontothe individual that has become, do theymatch up? The answer is obviously no.From the very first principle in Simondon’ssystem we are introduced to the productiveincongruence that will be described as thedisparation. Based on the hylemorphicschema, the problematic of matter and form,the question of individuation, cannot beanswered. A rift opens up. Theincongruence between the individual and

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the process of individuation is key inSauvagnargues’s interpretation of Simondon:not only does it inaugurate the distinctionbetween operation and structure; it alsoprovides a material opening of difference.Deleuze writes about the disparities presentwithin oppositions and the intensive deptharising from them: “These are the source ofthe illusion of the negative, but also theprinciple of the denunciation of this illusion.Only depth resolves, because only differencegives rise to problems” (Deleuze 1994: 235).The reconciliation of the difference will notbridge the gap. The differenciation of thedifference between the oppositions willemboss this gap as intensity. “Oppositionsare always planar; they express on a givenplane only the distorted effect of an originaldepth. This has often been commentedupon for stereoscopic images” (Deleuze 1994:236). The solution can be found in visualterms, as if the negative of the dark gulfbrought it back to light.

Simondon teaches us how a philosophycan move dynamically and juggle the oneand the many in a reciprocal dynamism.Therefore, this crucial link between material,physical individuation and psychic-socialindividuation slides seamlessly andsystematically between materiality andthought. As an operation that opens thepossibility of a systematic continuation of thematerial in thought through analogy, thesystem is seen as fluid and virtual rather thanrigid and repetitive.

3. An Image of Analogy

It would be unfair to try to captureSimondon’s system without mentioning theunderlying idée fixe that guides hisphilosophy: the process of crystallization fromwhich he analogizes the operation of thoughton the principle of crystalline growth. Heraises the possibility of actual, physicalanalogies in the midst of his philosophy whenhe asks whether it would be productive todevelop an entire system of analogy based onthe individuation of crystals: “a similar rulecould be found in the growth of flowerage, inthe development of a tree, in the formationof a colony, in the genesis of mental images,as if the dynamic dominance gave a structureto ensembles from a singularity” (Simondon1995: 196. My translation). If this image isstriking, it is also promising. For the purposeof figuring out Simondon’s concepts as avisual theory of comparison, we can moveinto the visual field and give a spatial imageto the notion of analogy.

In her book Visual Analogy, BarbaraMaria Stafford (1999) shows how analogy isseen as an engine of thought that travels thewide gap between the immanent and thetranscendental in order to provide anintelligible image of that which is intangible.Stafford’s book deals with the mechanism ofanalogy within works of visual art that bringsus on par with the visualization of a system.She herself visualizes the analogical process:it moves upwards.

Her argument starts with the pre-Socratics, who developed the concept ofanalogy as a way of mediating between thedivine and the worldly to give an intellectualimage to the senses of that which was notimmediately manifest. Later turning away

from “simple, vertical anthropomorphism,”analogy was refined into a “methodologicaltool of science” (Stafford 1999: 105). Platoadds a third element to analogy’s binarymechanism: the mediator that makes “appearat the core of experience what does notappear” (Stafford 1999: 105). Logoi, Staffordstates, “embody the analogical notion thatconceptual representations, or images, enableus to make the transition from sensible thingsto otherwise unseizable intelligible Forms”(Stafford 1999: 106). Analogy gave a senseof the intangible by giving it flesh in animage, a tangible shape in the form of animage seized by the mind.

Analogy reaches vertically into theunknown, as the etymology of the termdemonstrates a directional arrow: “Whereana means ‘up’, ‘upwards’, and gives the ideaof a passage or a surpassing, a transcendencewhen it is a question of passing into asuperior order. From the animal to thehuman, for example, from the human to thedivine” (Stafford 1999: 106). The concept ofanalogy serves to bring together the world ofthe unknown and the familiar world bytranslating one in terms of the other. This iswhat Simondon explains of the analogy usingPlato’s Sophist (Simondon 2005: 562). Andjust like the construction that appears out ofthe crystallization process, where each crystalspawns another identical to itself, as if it wasa self-generating architectural edifice, theanalogy is also compared to a “bridge thatcrosses over a border. But this border is notabolished by the bridge: rational proportiondoes not destroy real differences” (Stafford1999: 106). The bridge constructed over thegulf underlines the fact of the gulf.

Simondon’s own use of analogy isingenious because he establishes an order tohis philosophy that equalizes the realdifferences between a human and a crystal,through an analogical short-circuit (seeToscano 2005). Simondon achieves thisproductive devaluation through theoverarching process of individuation. Assuch, to be human or crystal, that is, a being,is a process which is delicately organized intoa system. If the individual is never finite,and the being of this individual is in process,it is the same process, the very real process ofcrystallization. Simondon explains thephysical aspect of this process through thenotion of depth in binocular vision, wherethe form taking operation is based onincompatibility and sursaturation as in crystalformation (Simondon 2005: 547-48).

Muriel Combes cites the process ofcrystallization as a material manifestation ofan operation which coincides ontologicallywith the generation of thought (see Atlan1986). It must be understood that thisoperation does not function metaphorically.Rather, the mechanism of crystallization isrepeated in the operation of analogy. Andso, because crystal formations expand onlywith the basis of the model that offers itselfas a platform for the expansion of othersubsequent crystals, the method of thinkingbecomes as ‘real’ as the crystal through theoperation present in the analogical process.Combes explains how the power of analogyfor discovery, for bridging ‘upwards’, is basedon the model of “crystallization in thedomain of physical individuation” (Combes1999: 23. My translation). The operation of

analogy is analogous to crystallization. Butthe operation must be independent from theterms of the analogy. What makesSimondon’s particular use of analogy a potentmethod for thought is precisely the fact thatit is explained in terms of an analogy with aphysical process.1

The analogy generates its own analogy inthought. The terms may not be fullysuperimposed, entirely compatible, but thedifference is productive. The crown is to theking what the sword is to the warrior. Butthe crown is not a sword and the king is notalways a warrior. The gulf is bridged but thegulf remains. What Simondon proposes byhis theory of allagmatic is to study that gulf,the operation.

4. Allagmatic and the Geometers

Allagmatic exists as a word, albeit with aprefix, in the language of law where it meansto bring two parties together under acontract: synallagmatic. In effect, it meansto form a couple, to bring two perspectivestogether. It comes from the GreekSunallagmatikos that in turn comes fromsumallattein which means to bring together, tounify. Compare to the etymology of symbol:from Late Latin symbolum baptismal creed,from Late Greek symbolon, literally, token,sign, from Greek; in other senses, from Latinsymbolus, symbolum token, sign, from Greeksymbolon token of identity (verified bycomparing its other half), sign, symbol, fromsymballein to throw together, compare,contribute, from syn- + ballein to throw.

Allagmatic could be defined, based onthe Greek allagma, by the word ‘change’,transformation; Valérie Carayol (2004)defines it as ‘changement’.

Following Simondon, Jacques Roux seesit as “the operative passage from onestructure to the next” (Roux 2005). IfSimondon is able to create a system spanningfrom the mechanism of crystal formation tothe functioning of human society whilepassing incrementally through unicellulardifferentiation, the organization of animalsocieties and human psychology, it is becausehe strings these elements together by thedevice of analogy. Allagmatic, at onceremoved from the objects contained in theterms of the analogy, gives these objects anontological depth by stretching the frame soas to encompass what surrounds the terms ofthe analogy – its operation.

Simondon introduces the figure of thegeometer in order to illustrate the operativeaspect of the device. What is most strikingabout this example is its graphic dimension.The tracing of the shape by the geometerilluminates right away the visual aspect ofthe allagmatic process. Thus, the way theexample is laid out in its intricacies must bevisualized in order to be grasped.

The inextricable ontological relationbetween operation and structure is shown bythe geometer in the midst of performing theaction of tracing “a line parallel to thestraight line through a point taken outside ofthis straight line” (Simondon 2005: 559 Mytranslation). The line being traced accordingto the straight line and the point on thepaper is the structural aspect of the action.The second part of the action is the

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operation which involves not what is beingtraced on the paper, but the general aspect oftracing. Simondon writes that: “This gestureof tracing possesses its own schema”(Simondon 2005: 559. My translation). Theoperating system consists of that whichbrings about the structure: “it supposes theavailability of certain energy that finds itselfreleased and ordered by the mental gesturethrough the interlinking of complexconditional causalities” (Simondon 2005:559-60. My translation). Both operation andstructure are the parts necessary for theresulting action; both are complementary. Itis the brick-maker seeing his brick takingshape.

Whereas analogy bridges terms inthought, the allagmatic process bridges termson the principle of sight (they exist, then,because they can be perceived through thematerial organism of the eyes). Furthermore,the terms in an allagmatic process depend onthe presence of an ontic being to carry outthe operation. It therefore constitutes amaterial manipulation of the process.

The figure of the geometer is not whollyoriginal when philosophers considerphilosophy, especially when they ponder theproblem of abstraction and concreteness, orthe passage between theory and reality. Thefigure of the geometer appears also in YoungAhn Kang’s excellent text Schema andSymbol: A Study in Kant’s Doctrine ofSchematism (1985). Kant summons thegeometer to illustrate the operation ofanalogy.

Kant first chooses to determine theground of possibility of the thing that is realwhen he is confronted with two differentpossibilities. He thus raises the a prioripossibility of synthetic judgments inmathematics before considering whether thescience of metaphysics is possible. Sincemathematics exists and is real, butmetaphysics as science – since we are talkingabout their possibility – is not, Kang explainsthat a question on the former will determinethe ground of the possibility of the latter.Whether or not metaphysics as science ispossible is not a question based on themodeling of metaphysics on mathematics,“but rather… [on] ‘disclosing’ the sourceand ground of a priori cognition” (Kang1985: 48-49). The analogy is not madebetween the terms of metaphysics andmathematics. In the matter of metaphysicsas science, the operation present in thestructure of one question must be transposedonto the structure another. In the secondpreface of The Critique of Pure Reason, rightbefore the Copernican revolution inmetaphysics is introduced, Kant explainsthat the ‘true method of mathematics’ is “notto inspect what he [the geometer] discernedeither in the figure, or in the bare concept ofit, and from this, as it were, to read off itsproperties” (Kang 1985: 48-49). It is rather“to bring out what was necessarily implied inthe concepts that he had himself formed apriori, and had put into the figure in theconstruction… (B xii)” (Kang 1985: 48-49).Kang defines ‘construction’ as the “act ofdetermining the concept in mathematicalcognition” (Kang 1985: 49). Kang proposes,in effect, an alternative way of thinkingabout construction not framed in terms ofmaterial objects. But similarly, as the

allagmatic device is based on visualperspectives and therefore needs the visionand the materiality of the eye to function,Kant’s construction is made material by onevery important element. The method is notderived from experience or from theboundaries of the figure traced by thegeometer: what is material here is the factthat this transcendental act is performed bythe subject, the geometer, the italicized he.The subject is part of the act of construction:“This constructive act is not to ‘read off’ theproperty of the concept from experience andfigure, but rather to ‘read’ (and a stepfurther, to ‘interpret’) it in accordance withthe transcendental act of the subject” (Kang1985: 49). The place of the subject withinthis operation draws attention to anontological dimension in the space ofmateriality. Therefore, in the allagmaticmethod, the ontic subject is a necessaryelement in the passage from one structure tothe next.

Both geometer-figures as parallel threadsbetween Simondon and Kant cursorily showhow the focus is not solely geared towardsthe geometric structure traced on the paper.A whole system surrounding the paper, thetracing and the one who perpetrates theaction is involved. The illustration of thegeometer can be rendered more life-like inthe context of aesthetics.

5. The Aesthetics of the Allagmatic:Disparation

Contrary to Kant, an analogy can be placedon a single univocal and material ‘plane’rather than an equivocal and metaphysical‘dualism’ repeating the split of the empiricaland transcendental. Alberto Gualandi (2004:24) explains that Deleuze believes itnecessary to replace Kant’s onto-theology,which he deems to be “analogical andequivocal” through a philosophy ofimmanence and univocity of being.

Deleuze’s desire to eradicate the classicalmodel of the double-bind analogicalrepresentation must be negotiated throughthe visual aspect of an allagmatic materialism.Analogy, as a representational deviceoperating through metaphors and symbols(where everything means everything else, asDeleuze and Guattari note in “On SeveralRegimes of Signs” in A Thousand Plateaus,pp. 112: “There is a simple general formulafor the signifying regime of the sign [thesignifying sign]: every sign refers to anothersign, and only to another sign, ad infinitum”.Out of this notion of exchange that leads toinfinity, the road to transcendence, Deleuzeand Guattari draw the following formula: “Itdoesn’t matter what it means, it’s stillsignifying”) must be replaced by the spatial,orientative operation of the allagmatic.Spread on a spatial surface, we do notperceive something as if it was another, butinstead, something and another at the sametime. The function of the allagmaticcollapses two things, makes them one, andalso, through the stereoscopic process of thematerial function of vision, provides depth,giving an ontological dimension to theobjects that retains the difference in therepetition.

The Russian Constructivist El Lissitzky isthe allegorical image of the two geometer-

figures invoked by Kant and Simondon.Lissitzky is the geometer as constructor (seeFigure 1a. The Constructor Self-Portrait,1924, gelatin silver print, 19 x 21.2 cm. LosAngeles, Getty Research Institute). “Thecollocation of the pair of compasses, graphpaper, and cranium; the insertion of theLatin letters XYZ with their simultaneousevocation of universality and anonymity . . .the cool black, white, and gray palette of thephotographic medium – each of thesecomponents emphasizes the apparentrationality and sobriety of Lissitzky asconstructor” (Bowlt 2005: 136). As opposedto the collage technique in which images arejuxtaposed, Lissitzky superimposes twodifferent photographs, creating a photogram.In this “photogram,” Lisstizky is surroundedby geometric objects – compass, lines andgraph paper patterns. His eye, peeringthrough a superimposed palm of a hand,captures the notion of the geometer’s agencyconstituting a frame of the process of tracinga line, in this case, an unfinished circlespringing from his head. The constructor isthinking what the eye is seeing what thehand is doing. (Cf. Figure 1b from 1914)

A duality can be read into the picture:“Although using the compass to indicate histrust in science and technology, bypositioning an eye in the center of the palmof his hand Lissitzky also reminds the viewerthat the artist’s visual acuity was central tohis new constructivist identity” (Tupitsyn2003: 179). But rather than the duality ofart and science brought together throughvision, it is the idea of the allagmatic that isillustrated: “The sobriety of the assemblageis what makes for the richness of theMachine’s effect” (Deleuze and Guattari

Figure 1a: El Lissitzky, The Constructor (self-portrait), 1924

Figure 1b: El Lissitzky, Self-Portrait, 1914

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2005: 344). Lissitzky illustrates the processneeded to create the photogram within thevery work through a sober superimposition ofseveral disparate images, in effect taking theface of a clock to expose its gears.

Through the superimposition of images,Lissitzky exposes the articulation within thenotion of the allagmatic: the concept ofdisparation. Deleuze writes aboutdisparation as a way of capturing theontological ground of assemblage: “GilbertSimondon has shown recently thatindividuation presupposes a prior metastablestate – in other words the existence of a‘disparateness’ such as at least two orders ofmagnitude or two scales of heterogeneousreality between which potentials aredistributed” (Deleuze 1994: 246).Disparation, disparateness. It is the schism,the incongruity necessary for vision. As YvesCitton (2005. My translation) writes in “Septrésonances de Simondon”: “It is the disparatenature of the image perceived by my left eyewith that of my right eye that allows toaccede to a perception of this thirddimension which is depth; it is a tensionbelonging to these incompatibilities, to thesedisparations, that nourishes the emergences ofnew significations, and of the superior formsof individuation – and not their conversionto the flattening logic of homogeneity.”

Sobriety, sobriety. Paradoxically, it isthrough the eyes of the drunk that theconcept can best be illustrated. ClémentRosset (1977:41. My trans.) shows theinverted view, and plays with the oppositionbetween sobriety and drunkenness: “Drunkshave the reputation of seeing double.” Rossetdescribes the doubled view of a drunk byreferring to Malcolm Lowry’s Under theVolcano:

Man possesses two eyes andconsequently two real images thatnormally are superimposed on eachother; when he is drunk, thissuperimposition is not made well,from which comes the fact twobottles instead of one dance in frontof the drunkard’s eyes. But thisduplication of the real is a purelysomatic phenomena, it does notaffect the depth of the real in theperception of the drunk. On thecontrary: the drunk perceives simply,it is rather the sober man who,habitually, sees double.

It is on this principle that the allagmaticassembles two orders of terms, as in ananalogy, but whereas the bridge betweenterms in an analogy remains flat because theschism is never resolved – indeed is necessaryfor the analogy to function – the allagmaticgives the schism its three-dimensional reality.Rosset’s example shows how upholding anillusion is important for its subsequentdenunciation (as in Deleuze’s illusionresolved by depth in Difference and Repetition,1994: 235).

Allagmatic is the theory of exchangesthat results in the transformations of asystem (Simondon 2005: 559). It is a theoryof operations. In the present case of turningthe allagmatic into a visual theory, the coreof the operation is the blind spot, theincongruence that puts system into motion:“An interval signifies in fact the possibility of

a relation and a relation consists of anoperation” (Simondon 2005: 559. Mytrans.).

The bridging of two terms has to be seenas more than metaphorical. Concepts, inDeleuze and Guattari’s rich corpus, such asthe diagram that relies on tracing andmapping, assemblages of the wasp and theorchid or images such as the archipelago andthe spine, uphold within their duality anontological core that makes these groupingsinto viable concepts. These images, qua idea,should not be confused with mentalrepresentations, illustrations or metaphors.Instead, they must be read as a “virtualdifferentiated complex. This intensive andvirtual difference actualizes itself bydifferenciating itself (with a c) when itindividuates itself. Such an individuationcomes to be a stabilizing liaison, whichresolves the difference in the initialpotentiality” (Sauvagnargues 2004: 138. Mytrans.). This is crucial to an understandingof what Deleuze means when he is talkingabout a non-representational image ofthought. The stabilizing union modeled onSimondon’s ‘disparation’ thus solves theproblem of two flat, two-dimensional images,each on the wall of each eye that then givesrise to a third dimension. The three-dimensional image is the idea which solves aproblem as a process and comes to be. Theincongruence is a negative space: productivein its negativity because part of the wholesince it is necessary for the resulting figuresin the positive space to exist. If the negativespace is read in its positivity, it is read as afigure of the virtual which cannot bepositively presented: the virtual exhaustsitself in the actualization. The negativespace is an abstract representation ofsomething that is unrepresentable: thevirtual. This is what is at stake when theoperation is manipulated instead of the termsin an analogy, when the blind spot of the‘disparation’ is not seen as a lack, butprovides the three dimensional depth and, indoing so, provides an ontological fullness toanalogy as allagmatic. This blind spot is anegative space until it is stared at enough soas to become positive and then provides aninkling of an unrepresentable dimension.

Brian Massumi, in his essay “TheDiagram as Technique of Existence,” explainshow the blind spot within the field of visionneeds to be overcome for the eye to see:“How could we literally see a continuoussurface-surround of space when our very ownnose sunders our field of vision in two – notto mention the holes poked in both halves bythe blind spot of each eye? Bridge it over….We see unity of form in excess of our eyes”(Massumi 1998: 44). The eyes are inconstant motion in order to compensate forthe blind spot: “If the jerking stops, visionblanks out” (Massumi 1998: 44). Massumi’sdescription of the physical actions involvedin the covering over of the incongruousschisms within vision mimics the image ofthe directionality involved in the analogicaloperation: “The continual variation drawsthe protofigural lines of the ambient arrayacross the gaps between the rods and cones,across the nose hole, and across the blindspots. The discontinuities are giddily bridgedby a continuity of movement” (Massumi1998: 45). But Massumi is able to clearly

shed some light into the void in order toreveal the mechanism at work underneaththe texture of reality: “The bridging yields acomplex of moving lines of light continuingacross invisible abysses of darkness.Protobridges of contintuity, self-standing,over a void of vision” (Massumi 1998:45).Into the void, Massumi throws in the notionof the virtual.

The operation surrounding the structureof an analogy in the concept of theallagmatic has been extrapolated and itsontological depth extricated throughdisparation. The ontological depth thatemerged from an analogy and augmentedinto the allagmatic takes on an independentexistence as the methodological mechanismin the formation of a philosophical systembased on visual image. One way todemonstrate the methodological validity ofthe function is to examine how it performsalong aesthetic lines.

In 1957, Robert Rauschenberg paintedhis Factum I and Factum II (Factum I is at theMuseum of Contemporary Art, Los Angelesand Factum II, is at the Moma in New York;see Figures 2 and 3). The titles infer, likesynallagmatic, a legal term based on thenotion of fact and act. They are parodyingthe notion of gesture and acting. They areworks illustrating the process of stereoscopicvision by the ontological gap dividing themand providing them with an individualspatial positioning (as disperse as theirlocations, in New York and on the other sideof the country, Los Angeles, allow). DidierDebaise, in his Simondon lexicon entitled“Le langage de l’individuation” isolates anexplanation of disparation as the instance oftwo ensembles that do not fully resembleeach other and so cannot be collapsed intoeach other, when “twin ensembles are nottotally superimposable” (Debaise 1995. Mytrans.). Factum I and Factum II are splitgeographically but they are not fullysuperimposable. Rauschenberg’s works aremeant to parody the Abstract Expressionistidea of original creation. Along these lines,the works consider the operative process ofartistic production, not simply thetranscendental notions of subject matter.

Figure 2: Robert Rauschenberg, Factum I, 1957 (Moca)

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However, beyond the fact that they arecommentary on uniqueness and simulacrum,originality and reproducibility, they are theemblem of the allagmatic. We can imagineFactum I and Factum II as the separateimages projected into each eye: “An imageappears on the right and the left retinas andit is then doubled. One object is captured bytwo images in a single system. But sincethere are two images, they are necessarily attwo different locations; they cannot becompletely the same. The fact that bothidentical images are captured in an ensemble“allows the formation of a unique ensembleof superior degree” (Debaise 1995: citing IPB223. My trans.). The subtle differenceswithin the reproduction of their content(which led John Cage to comment about theblind seeing) has led to speculation aboutdifferences within their repetitions (seeBrandon 2001); the simple fact remains thatthey cannot be superimposed. The thirddimension of depth that results from theirincompatibility is the denunciation ofillusions. They show the artificiality of thereal by showing the flaws in the single (flat)image as the illusion of the original AbstractExpressionist gesture. Furthermore,Rauschenberg enacts the motion and takesinto consideration the outer frame of theoperation. But the differences betweenFactum I and Factum II dissipate according totheir spatial location and provide the three-dimensional blur sticking out like ananamorphosis, underlining the operativetouch of the artist’s hand.

The concept of the allagmatic is anoperative theory that puts images on a singleplane and inserts depth into the space ofdifference. This depth injects an ontologicaldimension into a simple comparison,rendering images into concepts. Theallagmatic upholds the material ground ofthe analogy that sutures Simondon’s systemand the notion of assemblage in Deleuze andGuattari’s philosophy. Its manifestation invisual works of art only begs the question if itcan be applied to other forms of expression;if, for example, it can fill the blind spotDeleuze sees in the works of “modernnovelists” (Deleuze 1994: 199). If the

allagmatic can become a critical theory, itwill have to do so with a sober strategy thatnevertheless giddily bridges the flower to thecosmos.

Jabuk Zdebik received his PhD in 2007 fromCentre for the Study of Theory and Criticismat the University of Western Ontario.

References

Atlan, Henri (1986) Entre le cristal et lafumée: essai sur l’organisation du vivant. Paris:Éditions du Seuil.

Badiou, Alain (2000) Deleuze: TheClamor of Being. Trans. Louise Burchill.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bowlt, John E. (2005) “ManipulatingMetaphors: El Lissitzky and the CraftedHand,” in Situating Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin,Moscow. Eds. Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed.Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute,pp. 129-52.

Carayol, Valérie. Communicationorganisationnelle: une perspective allagmatique,L’Harmattan: Paris, 2004.

Citton, Yves (posted online 05/05/2005)“Sept résonances de Simondon.” Multitudes(web).http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article1571.html

Chabot, Pascal (2002) “L’encyclopédieidéale de Simondon,” in Gilbert Simondon:une pensée opérative. Ed. Jacques Roux.Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Universitéde Saint-Étienne, pp. 149-61.

— (2003) La philosophie de Simondon.Paris: J. Vrin.

Combes, Muriel (1999) Simondon individuet collectivité: Pour une philosophie dutransindividuel. Paris : PUF.

Debaise, Didier (posted online05/05/2005). “Le language de l’individuation,”Multitudes(web).http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article1579.html

Deleuze, Gilles (2004) Desert Islandsand Other Texts, 1953-1974. Ed. DavidLapoujade. Trans. Michael Taormina.Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

— (1994) Difference and Repetition.Trans. Paul Patton. New York:

Columbia UP.

— (2002) L’île déserte et autres textes:textes et entretiens 1953-1974. Paris: LesÉditions de Minuit.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix(1995) L’Anti-Œdipe: capitalisme etschizoprénie. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.

— (2005) A Thousand Plateaus :Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. BrianMassumi. Minneapolis: U of MinnesotaPress.

— (1980) Mille plateaux: capitalisme etschizophrénie 2. Paris: Les Éditions deMinuit.

— (1994) What is Philosophy? Trans.Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell.New York: Columbia UP.

Fenves, Peter (1996) “The Genesis ofJudgment: Spatiality, Analogy, and Metaphorin Benjamin’s ‘On Language as Such and onHuman Language,’” in Walter Benjamin:Theoretical Questions. Ed. David S. Ferris.Stanford: Stanford UP, pp. 75-93.

Gualandi, Alberto (2003) Deleuze. Paris:Les Belles Lettres.

Heidegger, Martin (2001) Poetry,Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter.New York: Harper Collins.

Joseph, Branden W. (2001) “ADuplication Containing Duplications: RobertRauschenberg’s Split Screens,” October 95:3-27.

Kang, Young Ahn (1985) Schema andSymbol: A Study in Kant’s Doctrine ofSchematism. Amsterdam: Free UniversityPress.

Kant, Immanuel (2001) Critique de laraison pure. Trans. Alain Renaut. Paris:Flammarion.

Massumi, Brian (1998) “The Diagram asTechnique of Existence,” ANY (23) 42-47.

Rosset, Clément (1977) Le réel: traité del’idiotie. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.

Roux, Jacques (posted online05/05/2005) “Penser le politique avecSimondon,” Multitudes (web).http://multitudes.samizdat. net/article1573.html

Sauvagnargues, Anne (2004) “Deleuze.De l’animal à l’art,” in La philosophie de GillesDeleuze. Paris: PUF.

Simondon, Gilbert (2005) L’individuationà la lumière des notions de forme etd’information. Grenoble: Millon.

Stafford, Barbara Maria (1999) VisualAnalogy: Consciousness as the Art ofConnecting. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Stephanson, Anders (2004) “FurtherHorizon: David Hockney in Perspective,”Flash Art 37.238: 94-101.

Toscano, Alberto (2005) “La disparation.Politique et sujet chez Simondon.” Multitudes(web).http://multitudes.samizdat.net/spip.php?article1576

Tupitsyn, Margarita (2005) “AfterVitebsk: El Lissitzky and Kazimir Maelvich,1924-1929,” in Situating Lissitzky: Vitebsk,Berlin, Moscow. Eds. Nancy Perloff andBrian Reed. Los Angeles: The GettyResearch Institute, pp. 177-95.

Notes 1 “En effet, le pouvoir de découverte de

l’analogie dans l’ordre de la pensée est lui-même conçu par analogie avec l’opération de cristallisation dans le domaine de l’individuation physique: ‘à partir d’un germe cristallin microscopique, on peut produire un monocristal de plusieurs décimètres cubes. L’activité de la pensée ne recèlerait-elle pas un processus comparable, mutatis mutandis?’ (IPC, p.62). Anne Fagot-Largeault, dans sa contribution au colloque consacré à Simondon en avril 1992, conclut de ce passage que la ‘fécondité de cette démarche analogique de la pensée est elle-même expliquée par une analogie physique’” (Combes 1999: 23-24). IPC refers to Individuation psychique et collective. The conference consecrated to Simondon that took place in 1992 that Combes has in mind has been published. The text in question is: Fagot-Largeault, Anne. “L’individuation en biologie.” Gilbert Simondon, une pensée de l’individuation et de la technique. Actes du colloque organisé par le Collège International de Philosophie 31 mars-2 avril 1992. Paris: Albin Michel, 1994, pp.19-54.

Figure 3: Robert Rauschenberg, Factum II, 1957 (Moma)

SRB 17.2 (2007) - 6

Paul J. Thibault’s second book-lengthexamination of ecosocial semiotics,Agency and Consciousness in Discourse:

Self-Other Dynamics as a Complex System, is aworthwhile and contributive volume tocontemporary cognitive and semioticsciences. It lengthens his discussion of thenature of discursive, ecosocial environments,specifically their roles in interpersonalmeaning-making, first explicated fully inBrain, Mind, and the Signifying Body: AnEcosocial Semiotic Theory. The presentvolume (henceforth Agency) focusesprimarily on the development andindividuation of “self” as other-primary – inThibault’s words, “self-awareness may be anevolutionary innovation which first arose outof a growing social need to know the other”(3).

Thibault structures his examinationaround the idea that an infantile awarenessof other precedes an awareness of self, in thatthe infant in question must necessarily effectwhat it needs (states of experiential proto-consciousness, we might say – Thibault’s“iconic” awareness) through an agent morecapable than itself. As the infant is, overtime, entrained by over-arching ecosocialdiscourse into a self, it generates a “self” as amodel of sourced agency. From here(Thibault’s “indexicality”), the developingand individuating self comes to know theterrain between self and other, including itsmany topological hindrances. Negotiatingthrough and around these hindrances is thenature of world-building, motivatedperception, moral discourse, and a host ofothers.

To these ends, Thibault recruits anumber of useful viewpoints, including J. L.Lemke’s Principle of Alternation, CharlesSanders Peirce’s theory of semiosis, KarlBühler’s deictic field theory, Gibson’secological perception, as well as variedextrapolations of previous conclusions bytheorists such as M. A. K. Halliday, ColwynTrevarthen, Christian Matthiesen, GeorgeLakoff and Mark Johnson, Ferdinand deSaussure. Further, Agency implicitlycoordinates the work of other contemporarythinkers into ecosocial interactivity,including Daniel C. Dennett, Ernest Keen,David Bohm, Ulric Neisser, and CatherineLutz.

In the course of the study, Thibaultprogresses through a number of salientmethodologies for a discursive theory ofagency and consciousness. Divided into fourparts, Agency focuses first upon meaning andits discursive sources, introducing the readerto Thibault’s central self-other dyad, thethree-level scalar hierarchy, and socialheteroglossia. Part two concentrates furtherupon establishing points of departure for amore fully realized developmental theory ofagency, proto-intentionality and proto-language, egocentric speech, multi-modality,and the role of discursive interactionbetween micro- and macroscopic time scales

in the ontogenetic trajectory of selfhood. Tothese ends, Thibault analyzes a number ofthoroughly explicated case studies. Partthree, rather dauntingly titled simply“Consciousness,” amplifies Agency’s earliercommentary upon reflexivity, semioticperception, material friction, the role ofgrammatical mood and metafunction, andsemiotic-dynamical heterarchy. Part four, inconclusion, focuses on metaphor. Here,Thibault engages in extensive discourse tosituate his ecosocial primacy-of-othersagainst Lakoff and Johnson’s embodiedrealism, and congruency and themetaphorical nature of nominalization figureprominently. The study concludes somewhatabruptly with an eye to categoricaldistinction and the role of lexico-grammarand its (now-thorough) semiotic integrationinto the negotiations of self, other, andworld.

Necessarily, Agency relies heavily on thegroundwork established in Brain, Mind, andthe Signifying Body as its primary concern issituating a theory of self within ecosocialdiscourse. However, this is not to say thatAgency is not an independent study. While areader will doubtlessly benefit from afamiliarity with the first volume, the seconddoes an apt job of summarizing the necessarydiscussions that it imports. For acomprehensive review of the first volume,see Scott Simpkins, “Ecosocial Semiotics”(2006: 5-10).

The Three-level Hierarchy

According to Thibault, “consciousness isalways grounded relative to an intentionalsource, or a viewpoint” (20). Essential to hismodel of this process of grounding are threeparameters: indexical, intertextual, andmeta-discursive. These parameterscorrespond to a hierarchy of semioticgrounding: iconic, indexical, and symbolic(Thibault 2003: 343). Importantly, forThibault, this three-tiered specificationhierarchy does not involve a one-way,upward progression from iconic to symbolicmeaning; rather, iconicity informsindexicality, both of which are increasinglydecoupled during the individual’sontogenetic trajectories, resulting in thesymbolic mode. The symbolic mode, in turn,recursively informs the various sensori-motororientations that specify iconicity.

Thibault explains that “consciousness isiconically grounded in terms of one’s relationto the world on the basis of one’s physiologyand perception… It is based on the body-brain’s mediate relation to its physical-material milieu” (20). In the terms of Peirce’stheory of semiosis, “iconic vaguenesscorresponds to Pierce’ s category of Firstness”(24). However, it would be a mistake to readiconicity as primary (a point Thibault laterexpounds upon in differentiating thediscursive, ecosocially informed nature of hismodel of consciousness from Lakoff and

Johnson’s embodied realism). As Thibaultpoints out, perception is an essentialcomponent of iconicity; however, perceptionis itself a negotiated process (as with thesymbolic to the iconic mode) that, in part,informs iconicity: “the ability to ground theact of perception in the perceptive of theSELF . . . is to posit a relationship betweenthe self and the experienced phenomenon(world)” (167). Perception is a motivated,semiotic process (see also Bohm 2002: 4)determined largely by parameters (orexistential concerns) dictated by the socialheteroglossia (the many discoursing selves)that appropriately orient an ontogeneticallydeveloping individual in relation to theambient flux (the changing “world”). Thisdiscursive model provides a much-neededelaboration upon earlier models, such asUlric Neisser’s ideas of generated expectationand confirmation (1967) and Ernest Keen’smotivated perception (1992: 56). Further, itsituates Mieke Bal’s seminal theory ofnarrative focalization into contemporarycognitive theory, furthering the dynamicexpansion of cognitive studies into literarystudies.

If iconicity is “concerned with being andpotentiality” (24), then indexicality would beorientation based on this state of being.Indexicality corresponds to Peirce’sSecondness, in that, as Thibault explains,“indexicality entails the creating of aboundary or a distinction betweenFirstnesses. In so doing, Secondness emerges.Secondness is concerned with here-nowactuality and with individual existence,hence the creating of the distinction betweenself and non-self.” As Thibault explains, “theindexical act of pointing and the object orlocation which is indicated by the point nowenters into a simple redundancy relation”(21). No less than enculturated perceptionand the symbolic mode discursivelyinforming iconicity, indexicality alsonegotiates itself in a recursive manner withwhat it is indexing. Thibault situates thisnegotiated, recursive process in terms ofLemke ’s “metaredundancy”: “A redundancyrelation exists between the combination ofpoint and the object pointed to when not allpossible combinations of points and objectsare possible. . . . this means that the pointand the object (or the word and the gesture)mutually predict each other’s co-occurrence”(22).

As the self develops and individuatesontogenetically, primarily through dyadicinteraction with caregivers as an infant, “theindividual’s cross-coupling to an emergentstratified linguistic system means, above all,that consciousness is increasingly de-coupledfrom its prior iconic and indexical modes andis now increasingly symbolic” (45). Thibault’ssymbolic mode occurs “in” Peirce’sThirdness, in that “the semiotically salientdistinctions of indexicality pave the way forthe emergent generalities of symbolicmeaning-making. Thirdness entails the

Remodeling SelfhoodPaul J. Thibault, Agency and Consciousness in Discourse: Self-Other Dynamics as a Complex System. London and New York:Continuum, 2004.

By Darin C. Bradley

SRB 17.2 (2007) - 7

mediation of instantiated sign-tokens by anordered field of systemic regularities” (24).Thibault concludes that “the ensuingregularity allows for self-reference: a symbolicfield of possibilities” (24). Importantly, thesymbolic mode occurs during (as part of) anindividual’s transition from the non-individuated dyadic phase of infant-caregiverinteraction into the triadic arena of infant-caregiver-world (236). The triad, like thedyad, is discursive; it involves a negotiationof meaning sourced via attractors, projectedinto and through the ecosocial environment,theorized as (to simplify) “arriving” in theother, and then returning to the self as anawareness of this process. In this manner,each of Thibault’s three parametersprogressively situates the others.

The Dyad

One of the most contributive aspects ofThibault’s theory is his deconstruction of theprimacy of self. Traditionally, models of selfextend outward, beginning from aburgeoning self’s exploratory interactionswith the space-time of its environments (c.f.Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh).It is also a hallmark of the now much-disputed tenets of Cartesian dualism, thatthe division between mind and body is aninsuperable one. Mind, according to thislogic, is generated through personalrealization, development, and individuationas the self learns to interact with thesurrounding world and the others whopeople it. Conversely, Thibault argues thattraditional models have had it backwards.Selves are generated by a primary need tointeract with and know an other beforeknowing one’s “self.” In Thibault’s words,“the ontological firstness of the self (‘I thinktherefore I am’) is the result of a culturallyparticular semiotic polarizing of self-nonself”(171). The correct semiotic entextualization,he argues, “could be ‘I am because othersinteract with and interpret me’ or ‘Othersinteract with and interpret me therefore Iam’” (171). As evidence, Thibault presentsanalyses of early infant interaction withprimary caregivers, predominantly themother.

The infant, Thibault argues, prior toemerging into the symbolic mode, does notmake use of a model of self. Indeed, infantsat this stage of development lack the fullymetafunctional and symbolically realizedaction-trajectories to do so: infants acquirethese later, piecemeal, as they work theirways into ecosocial meaning-negotiation.Instead, infants as developing and proto-individuating selves exist primarily as iconic-indexical action sources. Their mothersinteract with them hyponymically, in thesense that these mothers are already fullydeveloped and individuated – they havebeen “properly” enculturated across a broadtime scale into a social heteroglossia. Assuch, infants’ microscopic, episodicinteractions with their mothers eventuallybegin to de-couple (as scenarios) from theiriconic limitations as the infants move towardthe symbolic phase that realizes themacroscopic world.

Prior to this move, however, infantsorient to and interact with caregivers asagents who can bring about desired states in

the ambient flux. At this stage, “the child’smental resources are pre-cultural andprotolinguistic and are limited to the primaryconsciousness of perceptual phenomena andearly forms of elementary social relations”(64). The child “wants” some existentialchange (e.g., affection, relief of hunger,alleviation of pain, etc.) in its iconic state ofawareness. Effecting this change is sourced inthe infant because “infants have an inborncapacity to attune to and to lock into moresenior others such as parents and theirmeanings. This inborn capacity . . . is aprimitive value bias” (2). As such, anawareness of other is primary, and there is noimmediate distinction between the “self”ofthe other and the infant’s “self.” However, asthe child comes to “know” his or hersituation in the ecosocial environment (atthis point, only proto-semiotically) via his orher caregiver, in time, Thibault argues, bodilyactivity and its relation to other-as-agent-of-self necessarily index the self sourcing thebodily activity.

Thibault’s contentions here providesystematized proof of earlier concerns. ErnestKeen expressed as much in constructing asimilar body-brain model: “Our theory of thebody will have to be a theory of humanexpression. The body’s expressiveness mayeven be more basic than its consciousnesses,in one sense, for we bodily express contentabout ourselves that we are not conscious of,or at least not conscious of expressing”(1992: 51). Keen’s expressiveness, in the caseof Thibault’s infant, is its interaction withthe caregiver who (importantly) is“connected to the higher-scalar system ofsymbolic meaning-making possibilities” (62).As Thibault shows, expressiveness is, in fact,decidedly primary in regards toconsciousness, and this pre-consciousexpressive interaction with the properlyencultured adult participant shedsappropriate discursive light on CatherineLutz’s intersubjectivity of consciousness(1992: 65) as well as her notions of theinextricability of culture (Thibault’s ecosocialsemiotics) from consciousness (1992: 67).

Another important aspect of Thibault’scaregiver taking up and enacting the infant’sdiscursive role is that “she can make linksbeyond the here-now of the dyad to otherspace-time scales that are not available tothe infant” (62). This temporal flexibilityentrains in the infant the ability forconsciousness to, as Keen points out, “timeitself”: “Consciousness times itself in its ownway, a way unlike that conceived in physicsand extended to the analysis of functionalrelations between organisms and theirenvironment” (1992: 47). The atemporalityof conscious semiosis may not be an accidentof iconic-indexical de-coupling; rather, it isan entrained technology for negotiatingcomplicated ecosocial semiotic planes.

As the infant’s proto-lexicon expands (inaccordance with its increasing grasp of proto-metafunctional organization), it necessarilyre-envoices the discourse genres of theenculturated caregiver. A realization of aspatio-temporal arena within which the I-Youinteraction must take place co-occurs with ashift into the symbolic mode, where “a sign isalways made through the contextualintegration in the perspective of the SELF ofthe two modes of conscious experience – the

conscious and the material – at the interfacebetween the body-brain system and itsexternal environment” (71). The material(the other-as-agent, the environment)interactively situates existential need andsourced-intention-for-change (in the infant)as the “conscious” mode.

Consciousness

The recursive nature of Thibault’s three-level hierarchy is a fundamental element ofhis larger theory of consciousness. As hesays, “in terms of the three-level hierarchyview, the self and its system of interpretanceare boundary conditions or constraints onlower levels” (165). Each “level” necessarilydelimits the orientations of the others in thesystem, essentially building “world” and“consciousness” simultaneously by definingwhat aspects of the ambient flux warrant(conscious) attention in alleviating orsustaining the overarching concerns of self.Thibault’s articulation speaks to Dennett’sconclusions, albeit in an explicitly semioticfashion. To reiterate Dennett’s conclusionsregarding perceptual world-construction: “Insuch a cycle, one’s current expectations andinterests shape hypotheses for one’sperceptual systems to confirm or disconfirm,and a rapid sequence of such hypothesisgenerations and confirmations produces theultimate product, the ongoing, updated‘model’ of the world of the perceiver. Suchaccounts of perception are motivated by avariety of considerations, both biological andepistemological” (1991: 12). Indeed, “world”and “consciousness” necessarily co-occurbecause “the self-perspective whichnecessarily informs consciousness is a selfwhich is embedded in the supersystemtransactions which inform its perspective.(Self-)consciousness connects thesesupersystem transactions between self andnonself to the Meaning System in theindividual’s Innenwelt at the same time thatit includes itself in its domain” (164).

Even more importantly, in Thibault’smodel, consciousness is not discrete.Traditionally, it has been held as anexclusively interior, black-boxedphenomenon; however, Thibault posits that“the meanings we make within our ownconsciousness, however idiosyncratic andpersonal they are, are always part of a largerecosocial semiotic dialogue. Our minds arenot separate, individual entities, but areshaped by the meanings and the patterns ofaction in which we participate with othersalong our historical-biographical trajectory”(201). Or, in Dennett’s words “selves are notindependently existing soul-pearls, butartifacts of the social processes that createus” (1991: 423).

Equally important to the non-discreteconcept of consciousness and the co-occurrence of self and world are therecursively negotiated natures of self-other.Indeed, a self’s projected model of the otherwho will receive his or her re-envoicementof normative heteroglossic discourse genres isa projection of self-as-other, which is used asa self-reflexive measure of self (180). It is thismeasure which, to a large degree, delimits,attracts, and sources bodily interaction (viz.expressiveness and language). This aspect ofThibault’s study offers systemic expansion of

SRB 17.2 (2007) - 8

This ‘SRB Insight’ is a reflection onJohn Deely’s tome Four Ages ofUnderstanding: The First Postmodern

Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to theTurn of the Twenty-first Century (2001). Theessay will specifically focus on the triadicstructure of a Peircean genuine sign.Contrary to the dualistic division betweenman and nature, the triadic relationestablishes a semiotic bridge between thetwo. What constitutes such a triad? Buildingon Deely’s explanations of the types ofcausality and Peirce’s three (onto)logicalcategories, this essay will propose amathematical structure of a genuine signconstructed on the complex plane. Thisapproach, as the argument develops, willhelp to solve at least two “mysteries”: first,

the paradox of new knowledge, and second,the as yet unexplained relationship between“three worlds” posited by Roger Penrose(Penrose [Penrose, Shimony, Cartwright,Hawking] 1997; Penrose 2005). Thecorollary is such that the semiotic structureof the natural world – defined as asemiosphere by Lotman (1990) andHoffmeyer (1993) alike; or later assignoshere by Deely (2001) – is not only aphysical possibility but also a logicalnecessity. The essay concludes by assertingthat in order to participate fully in a play ofsemiosis we have to understand the languageof signs. Will it then become the 5th Age ofUnderstanding?

Peirce’s triadic structure of a signpresupposes a sign-object-interpretant

relation (Fig. 1), and the triadic relation aspertaining to reasoning includes also the Firstcategory of abductive inference.

Peirce gave the name semiosis to theprocess of generation, exchange, andinterpretation of signs, that is, a continuouscommunication and interaction between

Neisser’s extended ecological self. Neisser’sexpanded self as an anticipatory agent, inThibault’s model, is also a semiotictechnology for constructing theaforementioned self-regulating self-as-other.Neisser theorizes that “in imagining whatmay happen and recalling what hashappened, we leave the realm of objectiveawareness. Our consciousness extends to thepossible as well as the actual . . . Theextended awareness of imagination requiresan analogously extended ecological self”(1992: 8). Neisser’s extended self precedesthe imagining self in Thibault’s model: it is asystem of discourse genres, inter-textualformations, and other normative trendsdefined by the social heteroglossia. Theextended self is simply a strategic assemblyinformed by the imagining self’s to-dateontogenetic trajectories that, in turn,recursively delimits the extension. The sameis true for the expansion of self into self-as-other, for interactants are necessarilyanchored to their ecosocial environments.

Overall, Agency comprehensively revealsthat individuals negotiate self, self-as-other,and other via interactive discourse. Thenegotiation of meaning between self andother primarily occurs in the linguistic arena,and it does so via metafunctions and themood system. The metafunctions primarilydetermine the assembly and selection of anindividual’s re-envoicements of the socialheteroglossia. Here, Thibault relies on thework of M. A. K. Halliday and others for thecategories (experiential, interpersonal,textual and logical [4]), for a system oflinguistic self-organization. This self-organization is sourced in an individual, whoembodies an array of attractors (discursiveorientations or likelihoods) that networkthemselves based on past experience andfuture projection of the self’s ontogenetictrajectories. However, the discursivenegotiation of self-other meaning is notsimply an instantiation of probabilities. AsThibault points out, mood categories oflanguage are also attractor-networksthemselves, and they organize subject-object,

nominal-complement, figure-clauseviewpoints. It is useful to conceptualize theseviewpoints as loops that posit action-trajectory points of departure while at thesame time charting the roles that theparticipants are likely to adopt in regards toeach other. Thibault explains modaldiscursive teleology as “projects whichentrain the goal-seeking trajectories ofagents. Projects are higher-scalar attractorsof the dynamics of the trajectories –ontogenetic and logogenetic – of theindividual” (205). These projects arethemselves the results of “appeals from astate,” which are “the ways in which desiresfunction as attractors of the dynamics of thesystem” (205). Both of these processes,metafunctional and modal, are themselvesthe nature of discourse information, which isthe probabilistic restriction of possiblemeaning. Maneuvering through theserestrictions is the process of agency, which,for Thibault is self-reflexive evaluation andselection resulting in moral consciousness(e.g., an implicitly envoiced discursive sign-system for an overarching ecosocial system ofbehavioral tolerance; see also Robert Hodge’sand Gunther Kress’s ideological complexesand the logonomic system [1988]). Theessential component in theagency/consciousness segment of Thibault’sstudy is the discursive nature ofsimultaneously negotiating self, world, andother (194). Further, consciousness is not astate (or access to a state); it is a meaning-making process. Agency reveals, quite aptly,that diachronically, consciousness is atrajectory, not a series of discrete locations,opening new insights into a number of linkeddisciplines that concentrate either onselfhood itself or the visible (and recorded –or artistically modeled) effects of selfhood.

Darin C. Bradley is an independent scholarin South Carolina. He is a coeditor at theexperimental electronic journal Farrago’sWainscot http://www.farragoswainscot.comwhere he concentrates on cognitive theoryand the literary “weird.”

References

Bal, Mieke (1985) Narratology:Introduction to the Theory of Narrative.Toronto: U. of Toronto Press.

Bohm, David 2002) Wholeness and theImplicate Order. London: Routledge Classics.

Dennett, Daniel C. (1991) ConsciousnessExplained. Boston: Back Bay Books.

Hodge, Robert and Gunther Kress(1988) Social Semiotics. Ithaca: Cornell UP.

Keen, Ernest (1992) “Being Conscious isBeing-in-the-World,” in Self andConsciousness: Multiple Perspectives. Ed. Kesselet al. Hillsdale, New Jersey: LawrenceErlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 45-63.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson (1999)Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mindand its Challenge to Western Thought. NewYork: Basic Books.

Lutz, Catherine (1992) “Culture andConsciousness: A Problem in theAnthropology of Knowledge,” in Self andConsciousness: Multiple Perspectives. Ed. Kesselet al. Hillsdale, New Jersey: LawrenceErlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 64-87.

Neisser, Ulric (1967) Cognitive Psychology.New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

— (1992) “The Development ofConsciousness and the Acquisition of Skill,”in Self and Consciousness: MultiplePerspectives. Ed. Kessel et al. Hillsdale, NewJersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.,pp. 1-18.

Simpkins, Scott (2006) “EcosocialSemiotics,” The Semiotic Review of Books16.1-2 (2006): 5-10.

Thibault, Paul J. (2003)“Contextualization and Social Meaning-Making Practices,” in Discussing John J.Gumperz. Ed. Susan Eerdmans et al.Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, pp.41-61.

— (2004) Brain, Mind, and the SignifyingBody: An Ecosocial Semiotic Theory. Londonand New York: Continuum.

SRB Insight:

Take Five: Visions of DeelyBy Inna Semetsky

Fig. 1: A triadic relation

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signs by virtue of quasi-utterer (that, forexample, utters the signs of the weather) andquasi-interpreter. Due to the infinite streamof interpretants, that is, the systems relatinga sign vehicle to its object, the total numberof meanings is potentially infinite. At theontological level, the Peircean category ofFirstness is a mode of being as possibility,Secondness – actuality, and Thirdness –potentiality. But because thoughts as thesigns in the category of Thirdness mustinclude Firstness as qualities and Secondnessas facts, the ontological and experientiallevels interpenetrate: the potentia ofThirdness is what connects the possible withthe actual.

Although Peirce assessed meanings as“altogether virtual … [because located] notin what is actually thought, but in what thisthought may be connected with inrepresentation by subsequent thoughts”(Peirce CP 5.289), in futuro, this realm of thevirtual nonetheless constitutes “Realitywhich by some means contrives to determinethe Sign to its Representation” (Peirce CP 4.536); the representation ensuring thatthought has passed from a genuine doubt tobelief. Peircean doubt is, however, not apersonal uncertainty of a Cartesian subject,but has an objective, external, origin.

Deely (2001) expresses the difference inthe following way: “Modern philosophybegan with the universal doubt wherebyDescartes had made being a function of histhinking. Pragmaticism [Peirceanpragmatism] begins rather from a belief inthe reality of what is more than thought, andproceeds by continually putting to test thecontrast between thought and what is morethan thought, between merely objectivebeing and objective being which also revealssomething of the physical universe” (Deely2001: 627, brackets mine).

The problem of being as first known – theprimum cognitum – is addressed by Deelymore than once in his book, beginning withthe famous Plato’s Meno dialogue, to whichDeely devotes ten pages. Elsewhere1, Iattempted to solve the paradox of newknowledge that has been haunting us sinceSocratic times by means of introducingPeircean abduction as capable of creating an“irreducibly triadic” (Deely 2001: 614)relation between experience and cognition.The abductive understanding “comes to usas a flash. It is an act of insight” (Peirce CP 5.181), which is fallible but still has amysterious power “of guessing right” (PeirceCP 6.530) even while being pre-consciousand not rationally controllable. Peircenoticed that “the first premise is not actuallythought, though it is in the mind habitually.This, of itself, would not make the inferenceunconscious. But it is so because it is notrecognized as an inference; the conclusion isaccepted without our knowing how” (PeirceCP 8.64-65).

Abduction appears to functioninstantaneously not because there is notemporal interval of inference, but becausethe mind is unaware of when it begins orends, and represents intuition blending intointellectual knowledge. Intuition for Peircedoes mean cognition that will be determinedby the object outside one’s personal cogitoand is not by itself capable of representation

but needs thought as Thirdness, which “is…a synonym for representation” (Peirce CP 5.105). In the absence of mediation, though, itis indeed the “first, present, immediate,fresh, new, initiative, original, spontaneous,free … Only, remember that everydescription of it must be false to it” (PeirceCP 1.357).

Keeping the paradoxical flavour ofPeirce’s words in mind, I suggest thefollowing model of a sign as a thought-process shown diagrammatically on acomplex plane (Fig. 2). Abduction – as aninsight, or intuition, or imagination – ismodeled by means of imaginary numbers“located” on the vertical axis of the complexplane, and complemented by discursivereason (or physical action alike, capable ofbeing expressed in verbal signs orpropositional language; language as a modeof action). It is modeled horizontally alongthe real axis. Represented by vectors, that is,having in principle both mathematical andphysical properties, together they form thetriangle on a complex plane (Fig. 2),analogous to the genuine triadic sign asshown in Fig 1.

A real general then, as an “indispensableingredient of reality” (Peirce CP 5. 431,quoted in Deely 2001:621), will be modeledby a point on a complex plane expressed by acomplex number (the vertex of the trianglein Fig. 2) that has both real and imaginarycomponents, a+bi. It is at this point where“the physical universe ceases to be merelyphysical” (Deely 2001: 621) – that is,becoming irreducible to its description interms of classical mechanics – because this iswhere“[t]he realm of brute force andphysical interaction as such … becomescaught up in the semiotic web, and theuniverse becomes perfused with signs”(Deely 2001: 621).

This diagram dissolves the analyticparadox: It is the Thirdness as a diagonaltransversal line represented by the resultingvector r that enables the coming into beingof the new objects of knowledge; it casts itsown shadow a as a projection on a horizontalaxis as if in Plato’s infamous cave. Thedyadic relation alone would not lead to thecreation of meanings: a sign, “in order tofulfil its office, to actualise its potency, mustbe compelled by its object” (Peirce CP5.554); therefore it strives to abductively (bi)leap from the unconscious into beingintegrated into consciousness.

If we imagine positioning ourselves in thevery midst of this resultant line, there are

two perspectives that may emerge: “Viewinga thing from the outside, considering itsrelations of action and reaction with otherthings, it appears as matter. Viewing it fromthe inside, looking at its immediate characteras feeling, it appears as consciousness”(Peirce CP 6.268).

The abduction as a quasi-instantaneousaction is informed (as informare in Latinmeans giving material form) by the instanceof the real, here-and-now experience, andthe magnitude along the vertical axis ofimaginary numbers would inadvertentlyaffect the direction the resulting diagonalvector would have taken. A novel hypothesismight literally, as we can see from Fig. 2,bring a new direction into the line ofreasoning. Abduction (or intuition, orimagination, or insight, in mentalistic terms)creates a magnitude along the vertical axisequivalent to logical depth (cf. Hoffmeyer1993). Peirce’s semiotics reflects the noveltythat alone provides “uberty or richness ofthought” (Deely 2001: 627) contained in theThirdness-of-Firstness that carries the levelof reality over and above the customarymechanistic Secondness usually consideredas constituting “the whole truth aboutexistence” (Deely 2001: 627).

The diagrammatic representationexpressed in Fig. 2 is conceptualised on thepremise of what Peirce called “a portraitureof Thought” (Peirce CP 4.11). As such, itconforms to the semiotic categories ofrepresentation, relationality and mediationand appears to be capable, albeit in a staticformat, of “rendering literally visible beforeone’s very eyes the operation of thinking inactu” (Peirce CP 4. 571), or demonstratingthe very dynamics of the reasoning process.The field of the complex numbers isundifferentiated and would appear to be, inPeirce words, “what the world was to Adamon the day he opened his eyes to it, before hehad drawn any distinctions, or had becomeconscious of his own experience” (Peirce CP1.302).

The complex plane as a whole containswhat Peirce would have called an admixtureor, in other words, the weighted sum (cf.Penrose 1997) of real and imaginarycomponents, a and bi. Peircean holismanticipated a peculiar parts-whole system’sorganization, which conceptualises all causalrelations as if flowing in two directions atonce, bottom-up and top-down, therebycreating a strange feedback loop. Thetriangle as per Fig. 2 represents, in terms ofthe logic of explanation, a self-causedisregarded by modern science that hasreduced the four Aristotelian causes,including formal and final, to a singleefficient causation.

As Deely points out (2001: 611-668),based on Aristotle’s fourfold scheme, theLatins later refined the concept of causalityto account for the objective order of physicalphenomena thus abolishing, in a sense, thedualism between cause and reason. Theexternal, ideal, causality – a type ofblueprint, or plan, or design – is introducedfrom without, in contrast to the naturalAristotelian formal cause that organises itsmaterial from within. One more causal type,however, pertains to the role of observer whoexercises a type of objective causality. Deely

Fig. 2: A triadic relation on the complex plane

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(2001: 633) explains its functioning in thefollowing way: “On the subjective side, athinker may try to turn attention toward oraway from [the object]; but the measure ofsuccess lies not in the subjective effort but inthe objective content surviving the effort.And since presenting objects is exactly thefunction of signs, the action of signs is aspecies of this…extrinsic formal causality,called ‘specificative’,” which is irreducible toeither ideal or intrinsic formal cause butretains, as embedded in the total system, theobjective significance for the human subject.

Peirce’s categories of Firstness,Secondness and Thirdness demand such anadmixture of mind-dependent and mind-independent relations that are ultimatelysupposed to solve the problem ofintelligibility and understanding. The fieldto which Adam awoke is indeed theweighted sum of “dream and reality,possibility and actuality” (Deely 2001: 645)in its as yet undifferentiated state of bothmind-dependent and mind-independentrelations that comprise the totality of humanexperience. In other words, the causal loopdemands accessing a quasi-mind, that is, adialogical organism-environmentcommunication as an interaction so as toensure the sign’s potential relation to itself asa condition for ultimate intelligibility.

The triadic structure is a must: it has tocomprise all three Peircean categories so asto reason (Thirdness) in a right way, that is,analytically (Secondness) but also insightfullyor intuitively (Firstness). As Deely pointsout, this is logic as an ethics of thinking(2001: 622), which for Peirce is inseparablefrom human conduct, that is, an ethics ofaction. The very function of abductionconsists in creating a semiotic bridge thatwould have joined the infamous gap betweenexistence and essence. Its effect consists inthe “inward [or] potential actions…whichsomehow influence the formation of habits”(Peirce CP 6.286) precisely because theseactions were initiated due to the causal loop,the circularity of Thirdness having providedconditions for the flight of abductiveinference at the level of “practical,experimental effects” (Deely 2001: 617).

In fact, an abductive guess is essentiallyan experiment. If there were no triadicstructure, then the leap of imagination orinsight as a sign of Firstness, if such indeedwere to take place, would have sunk backinto the dyadic existence, back to the pointof its own departure and, worse, we wouldnot even know this as there would not beany difference for us to interpret and,respectively, to make a difference in theworld of action, to create novelty.

Deely (2001: 617) notices theimportance of metaphysics for Peirce: “therewas more to metaphysics” than posited by areductive British empiricism. It is only at thelevel of Secondness that the natural world islimited to its solely mechanical aspect,similarly to experience being reduced toaction and reaction. Nature is much broaderand includes its own virtual or semioticdimension, which is however never beyondexperience. But in semiotic terms experienceitself is a relational category. Structured bysign-relations, human experience is anexpression of a deeper semiotic process.

Because every sign conveys a general natureof thought, and Thirdness is ultimately amode of being of intelligence or reason,generality does come about from a quasi-mind (the complex plane, in terms of Fig. 2)called by Peirce a repository of ideas orsignificant forms.

Signs are capable of getting information,transmitting something of the thought’sgeneral nature, and transforming it intosignificant meanings that cannot be reducedto either “merely a physical [or] even merelya psychical dose of energy” (Peirce c.1907:ISP nos. 205-6 as quoted in Deely 2001:629). This level of significance is semiotic inits core and, by analogy with the biosphere, ithas acquired the name semiosphere duringpost-Peircean time (Lotman 1990; Hoffmeyer1993). Deely (2001: 630) suggests the all-encompassing term signosphere to pay tributeto what he calls Peirce’s grand vision thathas an advantage of being rooted in sciencerather than in mysticism.

An active interpretation is whattransforms the brute facts of the naturalworld into interpretable signs with which theuniverse is always already perfused. Andinterpretation creates the meaning (for theinterpreter), or provides an experience withvalue that, albeit implicit in each and everytriadic sign, is as yet absent among the brutefacts of Secondness.

Process metaphysics and the absence ofontological dualism therefore presupposewhat physicist Roger Penrose, non-incidentally, has defined in terms of a“contact with some sort of Platonic world”(Penrose [Penrose, Shimony, Cartwright,Hawking] 1997:125), the latter seeminglyanalogous to the Peircean quasi-mind. Therelationship between the three worlds,namely the physical world, the Platonicworld of ideas, and the mental world hasbeen considered a mystery, heavily debated,and dubbed as gaps in Penrose’s toilings(Grush & Churchland 1995).2 The core ofPenrose’s argument is that the physical worldmay be considered a projection of thePlatonic world and the world of mind arisesfrom part of the physical world, thusenabling one in this process to insightfullygrasp and, respectively, understand some partof the Platonic world.

Because the Platonic world is inhabitedby mathematical truths, but also due to the“common feeling that these mathematicalconstructions are products of our mentality”(Penrose [Penrose, Shimony, Cartwright,Hawking] 1997: 96), the mysteriousdependence of the natural world on strictmathematical laws and the tri-relativerelationship can be inscribed in the followingFig. 3:

The relations stop being mysterious if weconsider Penrose’s three worlds asconstituting a semiotic triangle (cf. Fig. 1 andFig. 2) and encompassing Peirce’s threemodes of being. The laws expressed by thePeircean Thirdness of habit-taking wouldthen be represented, for Penrose, by a “partof Platonic world which encompasses ourphysical world” (Penrose [Penrose, Shimony,Cartwright, Hawking] 1997: 97) of matter, orSeconds. Bits of Thirdness, we may say, are“accessible by our mentality” by virtue of theFirstness of insight or abduction, the latterintrinsically non-computable. Indeed, whatin-habits the Platonic world is not only thetrue but also the good and beautiful, whichare all “non-computable elements – forexample, judgement, common sense, insight,aesthetic sensibility, compassion, morality”(Penrose [Penrose, Shimony, Cartwright,Hawking] 1997: 125), all the moral attributesof the psyche that necessarily mediatesbetween world and intellect. The causalcircuit closes up on itself in the process ofcreative semiosis.

The rules of projective geometry (whichserved as a basis for conceptualising thediagram as per Fig. 2) establish the one-to-one correspondence as in a perspectivalcomposition towards a vanishing pointimplying therefore isomorphism, or mappingof the archetypal ideas of the Platonic worldonto the mental and physical worlds3. Thelevel of meanings would exceed referencesbecause it encompasses our thinking (mentalworld) together with our doing (physicalworld, the world of action). Abductionenables the grasp of moral meanings asprimum cognitum making therefore “atranscendental relative” (Deely 2001: 619) infact immanent in (a fine-tuned!) perception.

The brute facts of the physical worldintervene in practice and not only supervenein theory: “Firstness is a dream out of whichens reale, the category of Secondness,inevitably at times awakens a sleeper” (Deely2001: 661). An ex-sleeper who has beenawakened has changed her perspective orher point of view quite literally: aperspectival point is now in the mentalworld, leading to isomorphism appearingbetween a generic mental representation andthe other two worlds, the world of ideastogether with the world of action. Thearchetypal ideas that are, intrinsically,Platonic forms without content acquire thisvery content relationally within the dynamicsof semiosis. The informational contenttherefore always already is, albeit potentiallyor unconsciously. What in analyticphilosophy is called the language of thoughtmust therefore be extra-linguistic: it is asemiotic system comprising the “language” ofsigns that, by definition, would haveincluded not only verbal symbols but alsoicons and indices as per Peirce’s triad. Whilethe language of thought hypothesis considersthe Mentalese to be innate, the grammar ofthe language of signs functions as a semioticbridge over the public-private split thuscreating the meaning for an expandedexperience in which human mind does notsimply observe, but participates in the world.Conversely, our pre-reflexive actions areinstantiations of the language of signs. It isonly logical that in order to participate fullyin a play of semiosis we have to learn how to

Fig. 3: Three worlds and three mysteries (Penrose[Penrose, Shimony, Cartwright, Hawking] 1997: 96)

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read and understand its language. It is theknowledge of the language of signs4 that willmove us closer into what, I believe, we (andDeely) shall call the 5th Age ofUnderstanding, which would have providedus with an unprecedented freedom to actintelligently and wisely in the world perfusedwith signs.

Inna Semetsky is a member of the ResearchInstitute of Advanced Study for Humanity(RIASH) at the University of Newcastle,Australia.

References

Deely, J. (2001) Four Ages ofUnderstanding: The First Postmodern Survey ofPhilosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn ofthe Twenty-first Century. Toronto: Universityof Toronto Press.

Grush, R., and Patricia S. Churchland(1995) “Gaps in Penrose’s Toilings,” Journalof Consciousness Studies 2/1: 10-29.

Hoffmeyer, J. (1993) Signs of Meaning inthe Universe, trans. Barbara J. Haveland.Bloomington & Indianapolis: IndianaUniversity Press.

Lotman, Y. (1990) Universe of the Mind, aSemiotic Theory of Culture, trans. A.Shukman. Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress.

Peirce, C. S. (1860-1911) Collected Papersby Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles Hartshorneand Paul Weiss (Eds.). Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1931-1935.

Penrose, R (2005) The Road to Reality: AComplete Guide to the Laws of the Universe.London: Vintage Books

Penrose, R., Shimony, A., Cartwright, N.,Hawking, S. (1997) The Large, the Small, andthe Human Mind. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Semetsky, I. ( 2005) “Learning byabduction: a geometrical interpretation,”Semiotica 157/1-4: 199-212.

Semetsky, I. (2006) “The language ofsigns: Semiosis and the memories of thefuture,” SOPHIA: International Journal forphilosophy of religion, metaphysical theology andethics, 45/1: 95-116.

Notes 1 See Semetsky, I. ( 2005) “Learning by

abduction: a geometrical interpretation,” Semiotica 157, 1-4: 199-212.

2 Rick Grush and Patricia Churchland (1995) argue against Penrose’s positing a possible direct insight into Platonic truths, and therefore understanding the meanings of the (mathematical) concepts, over following the logic of computational rules. But the logic and psychology of abduction, as advanced in this paper, would have refuted the claim.

3 This is my conjecture solely, albeit supported by Roger Penrose’s positing of the Platonic world as being projected onto the physical. Rigorous proof would have required a detour to set theory and the concept of infinite cardinality and is beyond the scope ofthis paper.

4 See Semetsky, I. 2006 “The language of signs:Semiosis and the memories of the future,” SOPHIA: International Journal for philosophy ofreligion, metaphysical theology and ethics, 45/1: 95-116.

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