You are a machine…
It’s not a reduxion nor condemnation; it’s only a statement aligned with the writings of Guattari and Deleuze. You, like all processes in the world, are a machine. I have before mentioned a hard deterministic stance on the construxion of identity by describing Becoming, the predominant process of life, as a series of reaxions to stimuli. However, the aspect I failed to address was the feedback of these reaxions as further stimuli and the cybernetic loop that nourishes Becoming like coal into a locomotive engine. This single close cybernetic process underlines all existence, it is that ‘true-self’, it is the illusive term we call ‘identity’, it is a blueprint to map out how one might act in any selected temporal snapshot.
This is a standard closed loop control system, PID controller, or for our purposes circuit, as is used in thermostats and nearly any other complex and funxional non-human driven machine. The actual controller adjusts for error through three metrics, all of which are added to compensate for error of the first output: one which integrates over time to account for errors in each historic output over the course of the loop's run, one which differentiates to estimate a future desired output based on the slope of the current trajectory, and the simplest parameter which is the proportion, or simply a value proportional to the current output error, that is the specific errored output subtracted from the desired outcome (I realise I outlined these out of order for the initialism and all of them are more often just used to stabilise a system through multiplications to equations of motions in order to move and stabilise the poles). However, we are using this system merely conceptually (all of these are nested for systems in the freqeuency domain, not the time domain, which is where we will conceptually disagree) and can ignore the complex error summation process, at least mathematically, (though all interesting ideas in relation that I hope to later explore) instead focusing on only the circuit as it operates basically within machines. But we too are machines.
A control system at the base level is some mechanism which alters the behavior of a machine or system. If we think of this as the repeated cybernetic circuit of Becoming, with the error never being fully summed and resolved, then we can understand θ₀ as the output at that given time reference--knowing that once linear temporality is resumed, this output will once again serve as a referent for the next input, whether continuous or not.
This is why identity can’t be viewed in a static shell, why the ‘true-self’ is a never reached summation and why our adaptive situational images evolve based on the summing of error. Becoming is a continual process, driven by stimuli, predicated on the basis of desire and trained response.
So what is the initial referent? Initial theta? There’s an ontological argument to be made for Geworfenheit, birth. But can we scrutinise Being to such an extent as to find a starting point? When do we start Being? Is it at birth? Is it at conception? Is it at the attainment of higher consciousness, an introduction to customs and expectations?
It’s unfair to define the initial referent as a singular point the way θ₀ can act as a given output at selected snapshot time t rather than a comprehensive understanding of the experience from start to observation τ. Instead, let’s think of θᵢ as a concept. For Guattari and Deleuze, in the case of machines, this is desire.
Our fundamental propagation is that of desire. That is, our main mechanistic funxion is in the produxion of desire.
If we think of Becoming, and naturally its flux counterpart Being, as a long string of these closed circuits, where the output of one inputs into another, strung along in a linear line signifying each timestream of the specific machine it represents, then naturally there must be an initial initial theta and a final theta naught.
One way to read Guattari and Deleuze is as the body without organs as this ultimate initial and death, Heidegger’s ontological Das Nichts, as the final output theta. When we look at the body without organs (BwO), there are a variety of subsexion define we must consider. The one to serve as a referent could be twofold. If we side with Geworfernheit as a temporal originator to the propagational circuitry, then this BwO is an void one, in perpetual entropy, and lacking of the existentiality to constitute its constituents into a value; though it, as a system, undergoes destratification, that is analogous to both the thermal and aquatic sense, as in the autumn time when the boundaries have not been defined and instead there is an amorphous equilibrium, it has not undergone what Guattari and Deleuze call intensification--that is the quality of becoming or moving closer to a constituted self--it is only raw potential with no catalyst for achievement. For them, the sufficient BwO is one which balances these two factors, with constituted parts defined enough to funxion but open in uneasy equilibrium to the opportunities afforded by existentiality.
Let’s take this as an initial theta. In a way, this conception is comparable to inheritance of consciousness that comes in pre-adolescence. Before, you were born, you lived, you existed as raw potential but there was no solidification of difference which directed you in any particular way, that is a part of inherited consciousness. It is indeed an evolutionary curiosity that we are not thrown into the world with this degree of sentience, but instead must bear it as a burden once we’ve had a taste of the sweet bliss of life.
This optimally funxional BwO is our initial. What then is the first circuit it completes? What error must be summed? This is the formation of initial desire, the blueprint for further systems, and the most important cybernetic link in our timespan chain. We begin our inherited consciousness by forming a desire. This desire will change. We will reassess, adapt, even concede to the desires of more optimal machines--notable social machines--but this desire will remain the referent for all subsequent causal chains, and as such, all human emotions, even axions, can be understood as refractant of desire.
You have a desire to eat. You are hungry. (Albeit a small desire in the lifelong scheme, but an important shared biological one). You go to a local bakery to meet this desire. The bakery is closed. You sum the error. You have food at home to eat instead. The initial output serves as a future input. You begin to walk home. It’s dark out. A man begins to chase behind you, flailing a knife, yelling something. You have a desire to live (an even more primeval one [though one could argue there is also a desire to die and these remain flux entities]). These events are simultaneous inputs. One input is the output of the former individual circuit, you chose to walk home. One input is the output of a different mechanical circuit, that of the man chasing you, and perhaps the output of a social machine which brought him to this situation. These each begin the next circuit. You run. The output serves as an input, the feedback. You are out of breath. Another simultaneous input: you are stabbed. Another output, another input. You bleed out. You die. Conclusion to the cybernetic chain.
Each of those moments would be classified by emotions or states of being. Nicely defined conditions that we think we understand. Hunger. Shame. Fear. Regret. But in the end, all of these can be understood through a desire circuit, THE desire circuit which runs in perpetuity. Are not all emotions inherently a reinforcement or transgression to desire? (I mean transgression in that you have chosen to take a path to achieve desire by uncommon means--such as going out instead of staying in for food).
All of this might seem dreadfully fatalistic, but in a way, this defines the human soul. What is the ineffable quality of metaphysical spirituality The Soul? The soul is desire. That’s the fuel to maintain human machinery. But it’s also the fuel to social machinery. Social machines desire in much the same way human ones do. They seek to propagate and continue.
As you can likely see, all these circuits are connected. The output of my circuit at time t may be the input of yours at the same or later instant. The output of a social circuit could serve as a mass input to human circuits. Now you see the interconnectedness, the fragility of every stimuli, the butterfly effect of desire produxion, and maybe you can understand the Rhizomatic and flow approach to categorisation. It lends itself to understanding this interconnectedness better than a rigid structure, as all these circuit connexions are amorphous and organic. We are, after all, organic machines, I never disputed that.
One problem that might arise from this view is an approach towards hard determinism, and in doing so, falling to the scientific problem Bergson criticised. Instead, we should be more general and look at the interlinking network of cybernetic circuits in the same way as Bergson looked at time, as a series of endless potential for future inputs out of present outputs, they themselves as resolved potential from past outputs and completed circuits.
This is where the Rhizomatic structure truly emerges. No longer are the paths comprised only of the definite (both natural consequences according to classical causality and completed axions) but also of the potential. Each structure, naturally built of the outputs of the last, branches accordingly in the direxion of all potentials, even if only one will be the output in our reality because each completed circuit contains within it the incompleted potentials, in the summation of error, and in the metaphysical equivalent to potential energy; each circuit starting suspended in the air but not necessarily falling. It may become kinetic or it may remain static in relation to a larger input.
These potential paths are not only metaphysical waste either. It is very possible for one of them to serve as a future input and thus emerge another structure. For instance, Fermat’s last theorem, as an output of a completed circuit at a given time, was the result of a potential input. Fermat saw a potential branch in the Polynomial Equation given by the group of Pythagoreans, a branch which served as an input, as a desire, as THE desire (the collective base desire of humanity: knowledge). Through this potential, he formulated a theorem to disprove a formulation of the Pythagorean relationship above the integer 2, this theorem would later prove to be an input to a different circuit resolved in our time output by Wiles with a stunning example of reductio ad absurdum.
For some this may seem too much down the streets of Ballard or Cronenberg, but for others I hope I can illuminate the schizophrenic revelations of Guattari and Deleuze.
Can you now see the spiderweb of interconnectivity? The hidden realm of strings drawing together relationships, choices, events, outcomes, drawing across each other in the potential and the resolved? This is the complex mechanic tapestry underscoring our automatic existence, and it’s the fundamental piece to understanding our true exestentiality, that is the opportunities afforded to us.
In this pan-mechanistic approach, we are presented with a very different approach to self-knowledge and organisation. An approach that stresses the machinic-phylum in each BwO, be that our own or the social machines in which we built and operate within, and which would cease to exist, one without the other. There is a certain amount of agreeability between each part of a machine that allows it to continue to operate. This very agreeability allows for stimulatic cybernetic webs of circuit connexions. This very agreeability allows for the funxion of systems at all. This very agreeability is, in a sense, enframement, seizure of potential in favour of consequence. It’s a reinforcement of anti-Bergson causality. It’s a prison.
Perhaps, if the machine is smart enough, aware enough, willing enough, desiring enough to allow for alternatives, then the machine might just break free.
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