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Well, I've read just about everything I can get my hands on regarding complex networks (so long as its not ALL math), but one of the disadvantages of doing real interdisciplinary work is that you go totally beyond your training. So, I want to solidify what I know, and then gain a real facility with the materials at a whole new level. Also, I can't wait to hear what a whole bunch of truly interdisciplinary folks from other fields do with these ideas when put in a room together. Synnergistic thinking is a wonderful thing.
Well, I've read just about everything I can get my hands on regarding complex networks (so long as its not ALL math), but one of the disadvantages of doing real interdisciplinary work is that you go totally beyond your training. So, I want to solidify what I know, and then gain a real facility with the materials at a whole new level. Also, I can't wait to hear what a whole bunch of truly interdisciplinary folks from other fields do with these ideas when put in a room together. Synnergistic thinking is a wonderful thing.


'''''Contact Info:''' chris962x@gmail.com''
'''''Contact Info:''' chris962x [-a-t-] gmail.com''




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'''Texts for theory group:
For the 'Theory Group,' the following texts can be found at the page [[Theory Group Texts]]:
'''


1) from 'How do you make yourself a body without organs?'  in ''A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Part II'', by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 1981. 
1) The Machinic Phylum, by Manuel Delanda


2) The Space of Flows, by Gilles Deleuze


"We come to the gradual realization that the BwO is not at all the opposite of the organs. The organs are not its enemies. The enemy is the organism. The BwO is opposed not to the organs but to that organization of the organs called the organism. It is true that Artaud wages a struggle against the organs, but at the same time what he is going after, what he has it in for, is the organism: The body is the body. Alone it stands. And in no need of organs. Organism it never is. Organisms are the enemies of the body. (17) The BwO is not opposed to the organs; rather, the BwO and its "true organs," which must be composed and positioned, are opposed to the organism, the organic organization of the organs. The judgment of God, the system of the judgment of God, the theological system, is precisely the operation of He who makes an organism, an organization of organs called the organism, because He cannot bear the BwO, because He pursues it and rips it apart so He can be first, and have the organism be first. The organism is already that, the judgment of God, from which medical doctors benefit and on which they base their power. The organism is not at all the body, the BwO;
3) How to Make Yourself a Body Without Organs, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari


rather, it is a stratum on the BwO, in other words, a phenomenon of accu­mulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in order to extract useful labor from the BwO, imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences. The strata are bonds, pincers. "Tie me up if you wish." We are continually stratified. But who is this we that is not me, for the subject no less than the organism belongs to and depends on a stratum? Now we have the answer: the BwO is that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism—and also a significa­tion aid a subject—occur. For the judgment of God weighs upon and is exercised against the Bw0; it is the BwO that undergoes it. It is in the BwO that the organs enter into the relations of composition called the organism. The BwO howls: "They've made me an organism! They've wrongfully folded me! They've stolen my body!" The judgment of God uproots it from its immanence and makes it an organism, a signification, a subject. It is the BwO that is stratified. It swings between two poles, the surfaces of stratifi­cation into which it is recoiled, on which it submits to the judgment, and the plane of consistency in which it unfurls and opens to experimentation. If the BwO is a limit, if one is forever attaining it, it is because behind each stratum, encasted in it, there is always another stratum. For many a stra­tum, and not only an organism, is necessary to make the judgment of God. A perpetual and violent combat between the plane of consistency, which frees the BwO, cutting across and dismantling all of the strata, and the sur­faces of stratification that block it or make it recoil.
4) The Event in Deleuze, by Alain Badiou


Let us consider the three great strata concerning us, in other words, the ones that most directly bind us: the organism, signifiance, and subjectification. The surface of the organism, the angle of signifiance and interpreta­tion, and the point of subjectification or subjection. You will be organized, you will be an organism, you will articulate your body—otherwise you're just depraved. You will be signifier and signified, interpreter and interpreted—otherwise you're just a deviant. You will be a subject, nailed down as one, a subject of the enunciation recoiled into a subject of the statement—otherwise you're just a tramp. To the strata as a whole, the BwO opposes disarticulation (or n articulations) as the property of the plane of consistency, experimentation as the operation on that plane (no signifier, never interpret!), and nomadism as the movement (keep moving, even in place, never stop moving, motionless voyage, desubjectification). What does it mean disarticulate, to cease to be an organism? How can we convey how easy it is, and the extent to which we do it every day? And how necessary caution is, the art of dosages, since overdose is a danger. You don't do it with a sledgehammer, you use a very fine file. You invent self-destructions that have nothing to do with the death drive. Dismantling the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and territor­ies and deterritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor. Actu­ally, dismantling the organism is no more difficult than dismantling The other two strata, significance and subjectification. Signifiance clings to the soul just as the organism clings to the body, and it is not easy, to get rid of either. And how can we unhook ourselves from the points of subjectification that secure us, nail us down to a dominant reality? Tearing the con­scious away from the subject in order to make it a means of exploration, tearing the unconscious away from signifiance and interpretation in order to make it a veritable production: this is assuredly no more or less difficult than tearing the body away from the organism. Caution is the art common to all three; if in dismantling the organism there are times one courts death, in slipping away from signifiance and subjection one courts falsehood, illu­sion and hallucination and psychic death. Artaud weighs and measures every word: the conscious "knows what is good for it and what is of no value to it: it knows which thoughts and feelings it can receive without danger and with profit, and which are harmful to the exercise of its freedom. Above all, it knows just how far its own being goes, and just how far it has not yet gone or does not have the right to go without sinking into the unreal, the illusory, the unmade, the unprepared ... a Plane which normal con­sciousness does not reach but which Ciguri allows us to reach, and which is the very mystery of all poetry. But there is in human existence another plane, obscure and formless, where consciousness has not entered, and which surrounds it like an unilluminated extension or a menace, as the case may be. And which itself gives off adventurous sensations, perceptions. These are those shameless fantasies which affect an unhealthy con­scious. ... I too have had false sensations and perceptions and I have believed in them."18
5) an intro to Lacan's theory of 'mathemes' and the 'Four Discourses'


You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of signifiance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations, force you to; and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality. Mimic the strata. You don't reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying. That is why we encountered the paradox of those emptied and dreary bodies at the very beginning: they had emptied themselves of their organs instead of looking for the point at which they could patiently and momentarily dismantle the organization of the organs we call the organism. There are, in fact, several ways of botching the BwO: either one fails to produce it, or one produces it more or less, but nothing is produced on it, intensities do not pass or are blocked. This is because the BwO is always swinging between the surfaces that stratify it and the plane that sets it free. If you free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged toward catastrophe. Staying stratified—organized, signified, subjected— is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done. Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the oppurtunities it offers find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, con­jugate, continue: a whole "diagram," as opposed to still signifying and sub­jective programs. We are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified for us and in us and at the place where we are; then descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage within which we are held; gently tip the assem­blage, making it pass over to the side of the plane of consistency. It is only there that the BwO reveals itself for what it is: connection of desires, con­junction of flows, continuum of intensities. You have constructed your own little machine, ready when needed to be plugged into other collective machines. Castaneda describes a long process of experimentation (it makes little difference whether it is with peyote or other things): let us recall for the moment how the Indian forces him first to find a "place," already a difficult operation, then to find "allies," and then gradually to give up interpretation, to construct flow by flow and segment by segment lines of experimentation, becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, etc. For the BwO is all of that: necessarily a Place, necessarily a Plane, necessarily a Collectivity (assembling elements, things, plants, animals, tools, people, powers, and fragments of all of these; for it is not "my" body without organs, instead the "me" (moi) is on it, or what remains of me, unalterable and changing in form, crossing thresholds).
6) Eight Theses on the Universal (on the ethics of the event), by Alain Badiou
 
'''
In the course of Castaneda's books, the reader may begin to doubt the existence of the Indian Don Juan, and many other things besides. But that has no importance. So much the better if the books are a syncretism rather than an ethnographical study, and the protocol of an experiment rather than an account of an initiation. The fourth book, Tales of Power, is about the living distinction between the "Tonal" and the "Nagual." The tonal seems to cover many disparate things: It is the organism, and also all that is organized and organizing; but it is also signifiance, and all that is signifying or signified, all that is susceptible to interpretation, explanation, all that is memorizable in the form of something recalling something else; finally, it is the Self {Moi), the subject, the historical, social, or individual person, and the corresponding feelings. In short, the tonal is everything, including God, the judgment of God, since it "makes up the rules by which it apprehends the world. So, in a manner of speaking, it creates the world."19 Yet the tonal is only an island. For the nagual is also everything. And it is the same everything, but under such conditions that the body without organs has replaced the organism and experimentation has replaced all interpretation, for which it no longer has any use. Flows of intensity, their fluids, their fibers, their continuums and conjunctions of affects, the wind, fine segmentation, microperceptions, have replaced the world of the subject. Becomings, becomings-animal, becomings-molecular, have replaced history, individual or general. In fact, the tonal is not as disparate as it seems: it includes all of the strata and everything that can be ascribed to the strata, the organization of the organism, the interpretations and explanations of the signifiable, the movements of subjectification. The nagual, on the contrary, dismantles the strata. It is no longer an organism that functions but a BwO that is constructed. No longer are there acts to explain, dreams or phantasies to interpret, childhood memories to recall, words to make signify; instead, there are colors and sounds, becomings and intensities (and when you become-dog, don't ask if the dog you are playing with is a dream or a reality, if it is "your goddam mother" or something else entirely). There is no longer a Self[Moi] that feels, acts, and recalls; there is "a glowing fog, a dark yellow mist" that has affects and experiences movements, speeds.20 The important thing is not to dismantle the tonal by destroying it all of a sudden. You have to diminish it, shrink it, clean it, and that only at certain moments. You have to keep it in order to survive, to ward off the assault of the nagual. For a nagual that erupts, that destroys the tonal, a body without organs that shatters all the strata, turns immediately into a body of nothingness, pure self-destruction whose only outcome is death: "The tonal must be protected at any cost."21 We still have not answered the question of why there are so many dangers, and so many necessary precautions. It is not enough to set up an abstract opposition between the strata and the BwO. For the BwO already exists in the strata as well as on the destratified plane of consistency, but in a totally different manner. Take the organism as a stratum: there is indeed a BwO that opposes the organization of the organs we call the organism but there is also a BwO of the organism that belongs to that stratum. Cancerous tissue: each instant, each second, a cell becomes cancerous, mad, proliferates and loses its configuration, takes over everything; the organism must resubmit it to its rule or restratify it, not only for its own survival, but also to make possible an escape from the organism, the fabrication of the "other" BwO on the plane of consistency. Take the stratum of signifiance: once again, there is a cancerous tissue, this time ofsignifiance, a burgeoning body of the despot that blocks any circulation of signs, as well as preventing the birth of the asignifying sign on the "other" BwO. Or take a stifling body of subjectification, which makes a freeing all the more unlikely by forbidding any remaining distinction between subjects. Even if we consider given social formations, or a given straticapparatus within a formation, we must say that every one of them has a BwO ready to gnaw,proliferate, cover, and invade the entire social field, entering into relationsof violence and rivalry as well as alliance and complicity. A BwO of money(inflation), but also a BwO of the State, army, factory, city. Party, etc. If thestrata are an affair of coagulation and sedimentation, all a stratum needs is a high sedimentation rate for it to lose its configuration and articulations, and to form its own specific kind of tumor, within itself or in a given formation or apparatus. The strata spawn their own BwO's, totalitarian and fascist BwO's, terrifying caricatures of the plane of consistency. It is not enough to make a distinction between full BwO's on the plane of consistency and empty BwO's on the debris of strata destroyed by a too-violent destratification. We must also take into account cancerous BwO's in a stratum that has begun to proliferate. The three-body problem. Artaud said that outside the "plane" is another plane surrounding us with "an unilluminated extension or a menace, as the case may be." It is a struggle and as such is never sufficiently clear. "How can we fabricate a BwO for ourselves without its being the cancerous BwO of a fascist inside us, or the empty BwO of a drug addict, paranoiac, or hypochondriac? How can we tell the three Bodies apart? Artaud was constantly grappling with this problem. The extraordinary composition of To Be Done with the Judgment of God: he begins by cursing the cancerous body of America, the body of war and money; he denounces the strata, which he calls "caca"; to the strata he opposes the true Plane, even if it is only peyote, the little trickle of the Tarahumaras; but he also knows about the dangers of a too-sudden, careless destratification. Artaud was constantly grappling with all of that, and flowed with it. Letter to Hitler. "Dear Sir, In 1932 in the Ider Cafe in Berlin, on one of the evening when I made your acquaintance and shortly before you took power, I showed you roadblocks on a map that was not just a map of geography, roadblocks against me, an act of force aimed in a certain number of directions you indicated to me. Today Hitler I lift the road­blocks I set down! The Parisians need gas. Yours, A.A.—P.S. Be it under­stood, dear sir, that this is hardly an invitation, it is above all a warning."22 That map that is not only a map of geography is something like a BwO intensity map, where the roadblocks designate thresholds and the gas, waves or flows. Even if Artaud did not succeed for himself, it is certain that through him something has succeeded for us all.
 
The BwO is the egg. But the egg is not regressive; on the contrary, it is perfectly contemporary, you always carry it with you as your own milieu of experimentation, your associated milieu. The egg is the milieu of pure intensity, spatium not extension. Zero intensity as principle of production. There is a fundamental convergence between science and myth, embryol­ogy and mythology, the biological egg and the psychic or cosmic egg: the egg always designates this intensive reality, which is not undifferentiated, but is where things and organs are distinguished solely by gradients, migra­tions, zones of proximity. The egg is the BwO. The BwO is not "before" the organism; it is adjacent to it and is continually in the process of construct­ing itself. If it is tied to childhood, it is not in the sense that the adult regresses to the child and the child to the Mother, but in the sense that the child, like the Dogon twin who takes a piece of the placenta with him, tears from the organic form of the Mother an intense and destratified matter that on the contrary constitutes his or her perpetual break with the past, his or her present experience, experimentation. The BwO is a childhood block, a becoming, the opposite of a childhood memory. It is not the child "before" the adult, or the mother "before" the child: it is the strict contem­poraneousness of the adult, of the adult and the child, their map of compar­ative densities and intensities, and all of the variations on that map. The BwO is precisely this intense germen where there are not and cannot be either parents or children (organic representation). This is what Freud failed to understand about Weissmann: the child as the germinal contem­porary of its parents. Thus the BwO is never yours or mine. It is always a body. It is no more projective than it is regressive. It is an involution, but always a contemporary, creative involution. The organs distribute them­selves on the BwO, but they distribute themselves independently of the form of the organism; forms become contingent, organs are no longer any­thing more than intensities that are produced, flows, thresholds, and gradi­ents. "A" stomach, "an" eye, "a" mouth: the indefinite article does not lack anything; it is not indeterminate or undifferentiated, but expresses the pure determination of intensity, intensive difference. The indefinite arti­cle is the conductor of desire. It is not at all a question of a fragmented, splintered body, of organs without the body (OwB). The BwO is exactly the opposite. There are not organs in the sense of fragments in relation to a lost unity, nor is there a return to the undifferentiated in relation to a differen-tiable totality. There is a distribution of intensive principles of organs, with their positive indefinite articles, within a collectivity or multiplicity, inside an assemblage, and according to machinic connections operating on a BwO. Logos spermaticos. The error of psychoanalysis was to understand BwO phenomena as regressions, projections, phantasies, in terms of an image of the body. As a result, it only grasps the flipside of the BwO and immediately substitutes family photos, childhood memories, and part-objects for a worldwide intensity map. It understands nothing about the egg nor about indefinite articles nor about the contemporaneousness of a continually self-constructing milieu.
 
The BwO is desire; it is that which one desires and by which one desires. And not only because it is the plane of consistency or the field of immanence of desire. Even when it falls into the void of too-sudden destra-tification, or into the proliferation of a cancerous stratum, it is still desire. Desire stretches that far: desiring one's own annihilation, or desiring the power to annihilate. Money, army, police, and State desire, fascist desire, even fascism is desire. There is desire whenever there is the constitution of a BwO under one relation or another. It is a problem not of ideology but of pure matter, a phenomenon of physical, biological, psychic, social, or cos­mic matter. That is why the material problem confronting schizoanalysis is knowing whether we have it within our means to make the selection, to dis­tinguish the BwO from its doubles: empty vitreous bodies, cancerous bod­ies, totalitarian and fascist. The test of desire: not denouncing false desires, but distinguishing within desire between that which pertains to stratic pro­liferation, or else too-violent destratification, and that which pertains to . the construction of the plane of consistency (keep an eye out for all that is fascist, even inside us, and also for the suicidal and the demented). The plane of consistency is not simply that which is constituted by the sum of all BwO's. There are things it rejects; the BwO chooses, as a function of the abstract machine that draws it. Even within a BwO (the masochist body, the drugged body, etc.), we must distinguish what can be composed on the plane and what cannot. There is a fascist use of drugs, or a suicidal use, but is there also a possible use that would be in conformity with the plane of "consistency? Even paranoia: Is there a possibility of using it that way in part? When we asked the question of the totality of all BwO's, considered as substantial attributes of a single substance, it should have been under­stood, strictly speaking, to apply only to the plane. The plane is the totality of the full BwO's that have been selected (there is no positive totality  including the cancerous or empty bodies). What is the nature of this totality? Is it solely logical? Or must we say that each BwO, from a basis in its own genus, produces effects identical or analogous to the effects other BwO's produce from a basis in their genera? Could what the drug user or masochist obtains also be obtained in a different fashion in the conditions of the plane, so it would even be possible to use drugs without using drugs, to get soused on pure water, as in Henry Miller's experimentations? Or is it a question of a real passage of substances, an intensive continuum of all the BwO's? Doubtless, anything is possible. All we are saying is that the iden­tity of effects, the continuity of genera, the totality of all BwO's, can be obtained on the plane of consistency only by means of an abstract machine capable of covering and even creating it, by assemblages capable of plug­ging into desire, of effectively taking charge of desires, of assuring their continuous connections and transversal tie-ins. Otherwise, the BwO's of the plane will remain separated by genus, marginalized, reduced to means of bordering, while on the "other plane" the emptied or cancerous doubles will triumph."
 
from http://deleuzeatgreenwich.blogspot.com/2007/01/gilles-deleuze-links.html
 
 
2) "The Event in Deleuze," by Alain Badiou, from 'Logic of Worlds', 2006, at http://www.lacan.com/baddel.htm
 
 
"The idea [of the Event] is central in Deleuze, as it is in my own enterprise-but what a contrast! The interest of this contrast is that it exposes the original ambiguity of the idea itself. It effectively contains a dimension of structure (interruption as such, the appearance of a supernumerary term) and a dimension of the history of life (the concentration of becoming, being as coming-to-self, promise). In the first case, the event is disjoined from the One, it is separation, assumption of the void, pure non-sense. In the second case, it is the play of the One, composition, intensity of the plenum, the crystal (or logic) of sense. The Logic of Sense is the most considerable effort on the part of Gilles Deleuze to clarify his concept of the event. He does so in the company of the Stoics, they for whom the 'event' must be integrated into the inflexible discipline of the All, according to which Stoicism orients itself. Between 'event' and 'destiny', there must be something like a subjective reciprocation.
 
I will extract from The Logic of Sense what I will call the four Deleuzean axioms of the event.
 
Axiom 1: "Unlimited becoming becomes the event itself."
 
The event is the ontological realisation of the eternal truth of the One, the infinite power (puissance) of Life. It is in no way a void, or a stupor, separated from what becomes. To the contrary, it is the concentration of the continuity of life, its intensification. The event is that which donates the One to the concatenation of multiplicities. We could advance the following formula: in becomings, the event is the proof of the One of which these becomings are the expression. This is why there is no contradiction between the limitless of becoming and the singularity of the event. The event reveals in an immanent way the One of becomings, it makes becoming this One. The event is the becoming of becoming: the becoming(-One) of (unlimited) becoming.
 
Axiom 2: "The event is always that which has just happened and that which is about to happen, but never that which is happening."
 
The event is a synthesis of past and future. In reality, the expression of the One in becomings is the eternal identity of the future as a dimension of the past. The ontology of time, for Deleuze as for Bergson, admits no figure of separation. Consequently, the event would not be what takes place 'between' a past and a future, between the end of a world and the beginning of another. It is rather encroachment and connection: it realises the indivisible continuity of Virtuality. It exposes the unity of passage which fuses the one-just-after and the one-just-before. It is not 'that which happens', but that which, in what happens, has become and will become. The event as event of time, or time as the continued and eternal procedure of being, introduces no division into time, no intervallic void between two times. 'Event' repudiates the present understood as either passage or separation; it is the operative paradox of becoming. This thesis can thus be expressed in two ways: there is no present (the event is re-represented, it is active immanence which co-presents the past and the future); or, everything is present (the event is living or chaotic eternity, as the essence of time).
 
Axiom 3: "The event is of a different regime than the actions and passions of the body, even if it results from them."
 
Whether thought of as the becoming of becomings, or as disjunctive eternity, the event intensifies bodies, concentrates their constitutive multiplicity. It would therefore be neither of the same nature as the actions and the passions of the body, nor supervene on them. The event is not identical to the bodies which it affects, but neither is it transcendent to what happens to them or what they do, such that it cannot be said any longer that they are (ontologically) different to bodies. It is the differenciator of actions and passions of the body as a result. What then is an immanent One of becomings, if not Becoming? Or difference, or Relation (other Deleuzean terms)? However, Becoming is not an idea, but what becomings become. Thus the event affects bodies, because it is what they do or support as exposed syntheses. It is the coming of the One through them that they are as distinct nature (virtual rather than actual) and homogenous result (without them, it is not). This is the sense that must be given to the formula: 'The event is coextensive with becoming'. The event of Life will be thought as the body without organs: of a different regime than living organisms, but uniquely deployed or legible as the result of the actions and passions of these organisms.
 
Axiom 4: "A life is composed of a single and same Event, lacking all the variety of what happens to it."
 
What is difficult here is not the reiteration of the One as the concentrated expression of vital deployment. The three preceeding axioms are clear on this point. The difficulty is in understanding the word 'composed'. The event is what composes a life somewhat as a musical composition is organised by its theme. 'Variety' must here be understood as 'variation', as variation on a theme. The event is not what happens to a life, but what is in what happens, or what happens in what happens, such that it can only have a single Event. The Event, in the disparate material of a life, is precisely the Eternal Return of the identical, the undifferentiated power (puissance) of the Same: the 'powerful inorganic life.' With regard to any multiplicity whatsoever, it is of the essence of the Event to compose them into the One that they are, and to exhibit this unique composition in a potentially infinite variety of ways.
 
With these four axioms, Deleuze reveals his response to evental ambiguity: he chooses for destiny. The event is not the risky (hasardeux) passage from one state of things to another. It is the immanent stigmata of a One-result of all becomings. In the multiple-which-becomes, in the between-two of the multiples which are active multiples, the event is the destiny of the One.
 
It is enough to invert these four axioms-here as in Book II (of Logiques des mondes), 'inversion' reveals negations-in order to obtain a quite good axiomatic of what I call 'event', that which is a site, appearing in maximal intensity, and equally capable of making absolute its own inexistence in apparition (l'apparaître).
 
Axiom 1. An event is never the concentration of a vital continuity, or the immanent intensification of a becoming. It is never coextensive with becoming. It is, on the contrary, on the side of a pure break with the becoming of an object of the world, through the auto-apparition of this object. Correlatively, it is the supplementation of apparition (l'apparaître) by the emergence (surgissement) of a trace: what formerly inexisted becomes intense existence.
 
There is, with regard to the continuity in the becomings of the world, at once a lack (the impossibility of auto-apparition with the interruption of the authority of the mathematical laws of being and the logical laws of appearance) and an excess (the impossibility of the emergence of a maximal intensity of existence). 'Event' names the conjunction of this lack and this excess.
 
Axiom 2. The event would not be the inseperable encroachment of the past on the future, or the eternally past being of the future. It is, to the contrary, a vanishing mediator, an intemporal instant which renders disjunct the previous state of an object (the site) and the state that follows. We could equally say that the event extracts from a time the possibility of an other time. This other time, whose materiality envelops the consequences of the event, deserves the name of a new present. The event is neither past nor future. It makes us present to the present.
 
Axiom 3. The event would not be the result of the actions and passions of a body, nor does it differ in nature from them. To the contrary, an active and adequate body in a new present is an effect of the event, as we have seen in detail in Book IV (of Logique des mondes). We must here reverse Deleuze-in the sense in which, after Nietzsche, he himself wanted to reverse Plato. These are not the actions and passions of the multiples which are, under the title of an immanent result, synthesised in the event. It is the blow of an evental One which animates multiplicities and forms them into a subjectivisable body. And the trace of an event, which is itself incorporated in the new present, is clearly of the same nature as the actions of this body.
 
 
Axiom 4. An event does not make a composite unity of what is. There is, to the contrary, a decomposition of worlds by multiple evental sites.
 
Just as it performs a separation of times, the event is separated from other events. Truths are multiple, and multiform. They are exceptions in their worlds, and not the One which makes them converge. Deleuze often adopts the Leibnizian principle of Harmony, even as he defends the idea of divergent series and incompossible worlds. The eternal and unique Event is the focal point at which the ingredients of a life converge. Beyond the 'chaosmos' in which the divergent series and heteroclite multiplicities are effectuated, 'nothing but the Event subsists, the Event alone, Eventum Tantum for all contraries, which communicates witih itself through its own distance, resonating across all its disjuctions.' No, this 'resonance' does not attract me. I propose rather a flat sound, without resonance, which in no way modifies the the apparition of a site, and nothing is disposed in harmony-or in disharmony-either with itself (considered as subsisting solitude) or with others (considered as the reabsorption of contraries). There is not-there cannot be-a 'Unique event of which all the others are shreds and fragments.' The one of a truth is initiated on the basis of the without-One of the event, its contingent dissemination.
 
This dispute is without a doubt, as Lyotard would say, a differend, since it bears on the fundamental semantic connection of the word 'event': with sense for Deleuze, and with truth for me. Deleuze's formula is without apology: 'The event, which is to say, sense.' From the beginning of his book, he forges what is for me a chimera, an inconsistent neologism: the 'sense-event.' Such a claim communicates with the linguistic turn of the great contemporary sophists, much more than Deleuze would have wished. In maintaining that the event belongs to the register of sense, the entire project finds its ground on the side of language. Consider: 'The event is sense itself. The event belongs essentially to language, it is in an essential rapport with language.' It would be necessary to detail the dramatic reactive consequences of this kind of statement, and of many others: for example, '[The event] is the pure expressed in what happens which makes us signify.' Here is the kernel of the aestheticisation of everything, and the expressive politics of the 'multitudes', in which the compact thought of the Master is today dispersed. Insofar as it is the localised disfunction of the transcendental of a world, the event does not have the least sense, nor is it sense itself. If it only remains as trace, it can in no way be supported on the side of language. It only opens a space of consequences in which the body of a truth is composed. Like every real point, as Lacan saw, it is absolutely on the side of this unsensed which by itself can only maintain a rapport with language by making a hole in it. And nothing sayable, nothing of the order of the transcendental laws of language (du dire), can fill this hole.
 
Like all philosophers of vital continuity, Deleuze cannot abide any division between sense, the transcendental law of appearance, and truths, eternal exceptions. He even seems sometimes to identify the two. He once wrote to me that he 'felt no need for the category of truth. He was certainly justified in such a claim: sense is a name sufficient for truth. There are, however, perverse effects of this identification. Vitalist logic, which submits the actualisation of multiplicities to the order of the virtual One-All, overlooks the fact that, in the simultaneous declaration that events are sense, and that they have, as Deleuze proclaims, 'an eternal truth,' we find religion in its pure state. If sense has in effect an eternal truth, then God exists, having never been anything other than the truth of sense. Deleuze's idea of the event would have had to convince him to follow Spinoza to the end, he who Deleuze elects as 'the Christ of philosophers,' and convince him to name 'God' the unique Event in which becomings are diffracted. Lacan knew well that to deliver that which happens over to sense is to work towards the subjective consolidation of religion, since, as he wrote, 'the stability of religion is provided by sense, which is always religious.'
 
This latent religiosity is all too apparent in the disciples eager to praise the supposed inverse and constituant moment of an unbridled Capital, the 'creativity' of the multitudes: those who believe they have seen-or what they call seeing-a planetary Parousia of a communism of 'forms of life' in the anti-globalisation demonstrations in Seattle or Genoa, in which disaffected (désoeuvrée) youths participate in their own way in the sinister meetings of the financial establishment. Deleuze, often sceptical towards the formulations of those concerned with political matters, would have, I believe, laughed to himself about such pathos. Having openly conceptualised the place of the event in the multiform procedures of thought, Deleuze had to reduce this place to what he called 'the ideal singularities which communicate in a single and same Event.' If 'singularity' is inevitable, the other terms are of dubious value. 'Ideal' could be taken as 'eternal' if Deleuze was not overly obsessed with the real of the event. 'Communicate' could be taken as 'universal' if Deleuze did not interdict any interruption of communication which would immediately connect any rupture to transcendental continuity. Of the 'single and same,' I have already noted its unfortunate nature: the effect of a One, on bodies, of an evental blow (frappe) is necessarily transformed by the absorption of the event by the One of life.
 
Deleuze has very strongly marked the nature of the philosophical combat in which the destiny of the word 'event' is played out: 'A double struggle has as its object the prevention of every dogmatic confusion between event and essence, and also every empiricist confusion between event and accident.' There is nothing to add. Except that, when he thinks the event as intensified result and continuity of becoming, Deleuze is an empiricist (which he, in any case, continually proclaimed). And that, when he reincorporates it into the One of 'the unlimited Aion, the Infinitive in which it subsists and insists', into the always-there of the Virtual, he is tendentially dogmatic.
 
To break with empiricism, the event must be thought as the advent of what is subtracted from all experience: the ontologically un-founded and the transcendentally discontinuous. To break with dogmatism, the event must be released from every tie to the One. It must be subtracted from Life in order to be released to the stars."
 
 
3) a readable introduction to Jacques Lacan's theory of the four discourses, use of mathemes, etc., (from "Hysterical Academies: Lacan's Theory of the Four Discourses," by Christopher Robert McMahon, http://www.educ.utas.edu.au/users/tle/JOURNAL/Articles/McMahon/McMahon.html)
 
 
Context of student protest
In the wake of the 1968 upheavals, Lacan gave what may have been his most politically engaged seminar - "L'envers de la psychoanalyse" (1969-70) - in which he introduced a schema for the dissection of discourse in general. Literally, the title could be translated as "The reverse of psychoanalysis". In many ways, the hysterical academy alluded to by Lacan was the academy in the grips of student revolt. It might just as easily have been the rule of the Red Guards. The schema proposed by Lacan is concerned with the way the content of speech is typically allied to structurally describable positions that are themselves associated with various styles of speech. These positions differ from each other, therefore, in that they are not simply positions within a social field, but have their own internal economy or semiotic form. They are socially competitive and occupy different power niches and also infrapsychologically different in structure. In other words, the schema looks at the "external" structure of power relations, as well as the "internal" structure of each position within that set of "external" power relations. By analysing the deployment of the elements that constitute these different discourses, it becomes possible to understand how a particular discourse (or set of arguments or utterances) serves a particular set of social interests by reinforcing a particular type of infrapsychic structure. Lacan's Four Discourses seminar was designed so as to be generally applicable to any social situation, but it was primarily an investigation into the power relations, situations of desire, and subjective orientations at work within the academy. (cf. Lacan, 1982, p.161; Jameson, 1977, pp.111ff & Sarup, 1992, pp.41-43)
 
 
Four algebraic marks
According to Lacan, the multiplicity of discourses can be categorised in terms of a table where four markers stand in for subindividual and suprasubjective "agencies" (i.e. active principles or "powers").
 
Four Discourse diagramLacan's four markers are: the Transcendental Signifier[S1]; the chain of signifiers[S2]; the divided subject[$]; and the object(s) of subjective desire(s)[a]. Each discourse is constituted by a particular arrangement of these agencies. Each marker bears a direct relation to two other markers, but influences all the markers in the system. The situation of each term is overdetermined in so far as it is gripped by the hands of the adjacent terms. In this way the term opposite, though removed, might be said to assert a double influence.
 
The four discourses "look" like this in Lacan's symbolic system:
 
Discourse of the Master
S1          S2
-----        ------
$      ====> a
 
 
Discourse of the University
S2            a
-----        -----
S1    ====>  $
 
 
 
Discourse of the Hysteric
$            S1
-----  ====> -----
a            S2
 
 
Discourse of the Analyst
 
a            $
----- =====> -----
S2            S1
 
 
 
 
The Transcendental Signifier
The Signifier[S1] could be thought of as the supersignifier, or principle that controls signification and significance. It bounds and limits affect, and comprises the limits and centre(s) information and affects. Its essential "ties", consequently are to the signifying chain[S2] and the divided subject[$]. In a sense, the Signifier[S1] is the "Truth" that qualifies discourses and utterances[S2] as "true" (or productive) or "false" (or unproductive). Like the logos - or the phallus - the Signifier[S1] is presented by power structures as the "origin" of "meaning" both in discourse and for the subject; which is to say that the Signifier[S1] violently constructs a line, of inheritance. Learning under the regime of the Signifier[S1] certainly "empowers" students within academic fields, particularly the successful students, but the Signifier[S1] can also be used to keep students in their places. The Signifier[S1] is thereby conventionally used to sacrifice the hysteric (and her difficult questions) in order to guarantee meaning on behalf of the "normal" system of generation associated with a particular discipline, or "genre". The Signifier[S1] thus serves those with substantial investments in the reproduction of that line.
 
 
The Chain of Signifiers
Signifying chains[S2] refers to the Lacanian/Structuralist idea of syntagmatic (e.g. collocative) and paradigmatic (i.e. denotative and connotative) links between signs that are more or less regulated by the Signifier[S1]. These are conventionally thought of as parole(s): acts and speech acts related to practices, codes, conventions, protocols, habitual collocations, discourses, and "unwritten laws". The signifying chain[S2] links back to the Signifier[S1] and to the object of desire[a]. This allows the Signifier[S1] to influence the choice of "proper" objects of desire by way of its repressive force,which, in turn, promotes productive actualisations of paroles which select proper objects of desire. Accordingly, repression says "no" in such a way as to promote a certain kind of productivity. But because the chain of signifiers[S2] orbits a dead centre - the Transcendental Signifier[S1] - the chain of signifiers never reaches its "proper" destination. As Lacan found himself continually repeating, nobody has the Truth that could be spoken so as to finalise discourse, or give it a final meaning. For Lacan, then, the dialectic of desire operates between a divided subject[$], and the Signifier[S1] by way of "deferral". Deferral - which means "putting off till later" as well as "putting ahead" - here suggests a style of suspenseful or "partial" gratification that tends toward the "masochistic" in that it involves the renunciation of instant gratification in favor of long term projects. Deferral, consequently, is intimately tied up with submission to power. As the flipside of repression, in a world where all desires cannot be satisfied, "wishes" come to occupy the spaces of desires those that cannot be actualised. But this also means that "basic" forms of gratification (such as eating) can be transformed into more "complicated" and "educated" techniques of pleasure (e.g. the pleasures of Literary Criticism). These "educated pleasures", even when directing our love towards its "proper" destination (the Signifier[S1]), do not satiate. Instead of reaching the Signifier[S1], the chain of linked signifiers[S2] shuttles through various positions in language, including the positions of despot, teacher, hysteric and listener. Each position, as such, is a particular style of deferral. The Lacanian subject, accordingly, is always "divided", full of wishes, never satisfied, and typically wanders through life with a sense of having been missing out, of having lost something along the way, a long time ago, or of wanting something that cannot be had.
 
 
The divided subject
A "subject" is a whole person. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, this subject is "divided", created by a lack of power. It is linked both to the Singnifier[S1] and its objects of desire[a], and is torn between propriety and perversity. It loves and yet plots against the Signifier[S1] that stands opposite. The Subject[$]'s desire is thus the product of a fundamental sense of loss or incompletion. The violence of this splitting thus begins the hysterical question: Who am I and what do I want? This hysterical subject[$], then, is one who rebels antiproductively as a response to the weight of conscience (and its demand on behalf of reproduction). She knows that she should love the Signifier[S1] as the thing that could relieve her pain, and also, therefore, that the Signifier[S1] is the origin of her pain. She suspects its fraudulence, but cannot dispose of its influence over her life.
 
The subject is thus in a double-bind. On one hand, the fulfilment of desire would be the apocalypse of the Subject[$] - but on the other hand, as the Lacanian Subject[$] has come to rely on the deferral of desire for her pleasure- the cessation of desire would result in an apocalypse no less horrifying. To maintain the dialectic of desire the Subject[$] therefore interposes "objects of desire"[a] between itself and the Signifier[S1].
 
 
The object of desire
The objet petit 'a'[a] is thus a fraudulent object of desire that is called upon to sustain desire. As such, there is always a sense of deflation involved in the final possession of the object[a]. This deflation is associated with processes of demystification. The maintenance of the object[a] thus involves a partial possession. The relation between the subject[$] and the object[a] is like that of a lover who wishes both to control her beloved and yet fears the demystifying results of such control. As noted already, objects of desire[a] can be "appropriate" or "perverse" according to their relationship to the Signifier[S1], which, among other things, is concerned with instigation of basic gender divisions and the enforcement of sex roles (which extend to the situation of men and women in knowledge practices) and "normal" genetal sexuality.
 
 
An economy of counter-clockwise rotation
These four markers are rotated around and arrow and two sublatory bars. The arrow stands for the principle of production in the widest sense (including reproduction and antiproduction). The bars represent the Hegelian form of dialectical logic: a "rising up" (aufehbung) that forces one term "down" and the another term "up" while incorporating both terms into a new entity. This sublation or "rising up" is a form of conquest that retains or reserves the lower term in the service of a totality ruled by the higher term (sometimes translated "synthesis". Yet Lacan only develops the four discourses that are produced through strict rotation and uses only four markers. For example, the discourse of the hysteric is the only configuration offered by way of a system of rotation that begins with desire and subjectivity. We could nevertheless make an item [a/$] which would could be termed "schizophrenic" rather than "hysterical" in its positioning of the subjective construct under the dominion of the object construct, but only by violating the economy of rotation.
 
 
The four discourses summarised
The four discourses, described by Lacan, Rose, and Mitchell et al, are those of the Master, the University, the Hysteric and the Analyst. Summarising: the discourse of the master is basically despotic; the discourse of the university is "disciplinary" and regulative; the discourse of the hysteric is that of the obsessive questioner; and the discourse of the analyst is that of the ethical listener. These discourses, however, rarely appear in their "pur" forms. (Sarup, 1992, p.41) The fact that these positions within discourse are both "smaller� and "bigger" than the "individual" means that we are not talking about specific persons - as though one is automatically boxed and stuck in the role of a Master or a Hysteric. Though, in practice, because we tend to teach the way we were taught, individual teachers are often predisposed to a particular approach, usually a switching back and forth between "masterly" and "disciplinary" practices and arguments. But actually, these four modes of voice are more like roles or personae which specific individuals might adopt from time to time. This does not mean that the discourses merge so as to loose their characterisics. We can usually tell the precise moment when somebody stops talking like a Master and starts talking on behalf of the University, or when the discourse of Hysteria stops and is replaced by the voice of "reason". The "discourse analysis" techniques of Applied Linguistics, for example, are particularly good at noting such shifts in genre, direction and register.
 
In our academies, however, it is the "hegemonic" discourses of the Master and the University that are most commonly heard, and which struggle over the authority to organise courses, assessments, teaching regimes, research grants and so forth. (cf. Gramsci, 1971)
 
 
The Discourse of the Master
From Mitchell and Rose:
 
    S1/$ > S2/a: discourse of the master: tyranny of the all knowing and exclusion of fantasy: primacy to the signifier (S1), retreat of subjectivity beneath its bar ($), producing its knowledge as object (S2), which stands over and against the lost object of desire (a); (Mitchell & Rose (eds) Lacan, 1982, pp.160-161)
 
 
Here the teacher is situated as the master and producer of knowledge as power, demanding the recognition of his autonomy at the expense of the perversity of students' desire. (Foucault, 1970 & 1980) The students are expected to "reproduce" the discourse of the Master. As such, there is complete disregard for students who fail to adulate the Master or his approach to the text. Commonly, the Master will be found in the staffroom complaining about the way students seem to be getting more and more stupid, the general fall in standards and the unsuitability of some students in particular (who should have become waged labour at age fifteen). The educational process, according to a Master, involves an initiation through pain that thereby "civilises" the desire of students who would otherwise remain feral. The Master takes it upon himself to rescue "educated pleasures" from "brute gratifications". The mark of a civilised student is that she appreciates the Master and the body of knowledge which belongs to him and offers elevated pleasure at the expense of dedication. The inscribing process is thus legitimised. Under a "Society of Discourse" or "commentary" based regime (where Masters are particularly at home), education is seen as the necessary effect of students' painful or happy interaction with the text as "in itself it really is". (cf. Foucault, 1970) Masters, especially when operating in Societies of Discourse, typically place great emphasis on their own expertise and argue from their own experience as students to general principles for education. Even the requirements of the academy - particularly "modern" academies that are now attempting to prescribe "progressive" practices - are likely to be seen by a Master as thorns in the flesh. A real Master is even quite likely to be contemptuous of the state of affairs that dominates his own field (or where it is heading) and will cling instead to his "own" reactive (or radical) understanding of how the discipline should be. The Master is always "out of step" with the status quo, and can see himself as the champion of tradition or of progressive thinking. But he will rarely see himself as simply the agent of the academy or the state.
 
Here it should be noted that while the text is often positioned "phallocentrically", "centrally" (and is used regulatively) by a Master's discourse, it is actually very common to find the text positioned as the "feminine" partner in the seminal production of the Master's commentary. Positioning the student's as feminine "receptacles" and feminising the text means that we are here to learn how to be "sensitive" to the text - "women" in a sense, but not hysterical women. Indeed Terry Lovell goes as far as to suggest that the process of "humanisation" by means of student-textual interaction is primarily a process of the "feminisation" of students, no less phallocratic than masculinisation of women or the commodification of students as "womanly" receptacles. (cf. Lovell, 1987) So we have the situation, described by Lovell, of the rank and file English students, mostly women, who sit at the feet of the male professor, ready to take his civilising message out into the schools where the really feral students are supposedly working at becoming even more illiterate.
 
Essentially, the discourse of the Master is the "Tyranny of the all-knowing and exclusion of fantasy [before which we experience the] retreat of subjectivity...." (Rose & Mitchell, 1985) This best describes the ultimate in despotic classrooms where teacher says and students are not allowed to disagree. It is certainly grounded on a "delusion of Truth and mastery", but it is a delusion that is often endorsed by knowledge practices that prove themselves performatively (the discourse of the Master is not automatically the discourse of an idiot).
 
 
The Discourse of the University
The discourse of the University, on the other hand, is more subtle, more pervasive, and conceals egotism and personal "empire building" far more effectively. From Mitchell and Rose:
 
    S2/S1 > a/$: discourse of the university: knowledge in the place of the master; primacy to discourse itself constituted as knowledge (S2) [sound familiar?- ed], over the signifier as such (S1), producing knowledge as the ultimate object of desire (a), over and against any question of the subject ($); (Mitchell & Rose (eds) Lacan, 1982, pp.160-161)
 
 
Here, knowledge or disciplinary competence takes the place of the Master. What is at stake is the ability of a student to operate in the field in a "competent" manner. A body of knowledge and technique is constituted as the "core" with the subsequent demand that students "empower" themselves by learning certain techniques of knowledge production. Presently, in English Studies, such techniques might include a command of Critical Theory, a particular sophisticated style of "close reading", or a knowledge of historical and biographical contexts and intertextualities. (Foucault, 1970 & 1980; Derrida, 1981) Competence with regard to such practices separates the educated from the uneducated response. For the discourse of the University essentially attempts to regulate students and Masters on behalf of "sound educational practices", responsibility, accountability, the productivity of the field and, ultimately, the state.
 
For the Master, his signature is a mark of authority, for the University all signatures must be acquired as marks of assent. Paradoxically, the well-meaning teacher who feels the weight of the academy often feels a responsibility to regulate the discourse of the classroom so as to guarantee sound education. The University demands that time must not be wasted. The easiest way to do this is to monopolise the space(s) of speech. When the academy demands "student-centred" practices, and does so without revising its assessment protocols so as to allow for deviant forms of activity, the teacher finds herself in a double-bind which only "faith" in the ultimate "effectiveness" of well researched teaching practices can easily resolve. Thus the academy typically promulgates the requirement of such faith by advancing a utilitarian discourse grounded on the research findings endorsed by those currently in control. These research findings invariably rely on the value of performativity that accomodates the discourse of the University, rather than on Truth as such. When egalitarian, they are premised on the idea of the superior productivity of equal distribution, not on the idea of a categorical imperative which would demand an ethical response even at the cost of production. Because of this double-bind, the teacher might be encouraged to feel guilty if she is not constantly "improving". This is typical of what Foucault calls a "disciplinary" regime where surveillance is at maximum, as opposed to a "legislative" regime where once you have your papers you are on your own (the latter being an excellent recipe for producing Masters). Under such a disciplinary regime, the academy is quite ready to get inside your soul. During the compilation of staff "development" or "appraisal" profiles, for example, teachers can be considered egotistical and dishonest if they refuse to confess their frailties. When this happens, teachers quickly learn the ropes: confess to minor "problems", make the right noises about "improving in problem areas", but never let on that there you are having any serious difficulties. Filling in staff development questionnaires often leads to "mentoring", which, when compulsory, can be a rather degrading process, and is probably supposed to be. The first question a hysteric asks is "who mentors the mentors"? A teacher who refuses to take all this "prying" seriously - and most of them are acting like Masters - could, particularly in the current climate of renewable contracts and voluntary redundancies, even feel too threatened to really become "recalcitrant".
 
Nothing is too "small" or too "big" for the discourse of the University to concern itself. The discourse of the University reaches from the minutiae of how to record student marks to the "vision" of the academy as competitive in the "global market", and "pro-active" in its response to "government initiatives". The University even announces creativity its "top priority". But it's a kind of efficient and productive creativity. Everybody must speak, and speak in a way appropriate to the field. Thus in the classroom, tutorial or seminar, it is not infrequently observed that the teacher often forms what could be described as an "incestuous" alliance with one or two higs. Higs (high input generators) talk a lot. And they usually talk in acceptable ways. While this seems to be activating the discussion, an objective survey or discourse analysis would quickly reveal the price paid by ligs (low input generators). For those teachers who are themselves erstwhile higs, it is even more essential that pro-hysterical practices be engaged. In short, teacher-hig alliances maximise desire within the alliance, but minimised desire outside the alliance. Under such regimes, hysterics are hardly to be blamed for their internalisations, underproduction(s), or antiproductive outbursts.
 
This regime basically corresponds with Foucault's description of a "Discipline". (Foucault, 1970) In English Studies, this "disciplinary" element becomes tied to the performance of commentary, which is why it is strange in some sense to talk about the "discipline" of Literary Criticism (which has traditionally been highly idiosyncratic). But as Literary Criticism becomes less of a "Society of Discourse" and more of a "Discipline", it is becoming less idiosyncratic - and besides, personal style was never a matter of "individual taste" (it was always associated with a Society of Discourse). Let us hope it never freezes enough to be called a "Dogma". (Foucault, 1970) Presently then, our English institutions operate as mixed and unstable regimes, but almost always with an eye to regulating revolutionary commentary in so far as it remains productive.
 
 
The Discourse of the Hysteric
Once again, the discourse of hysteria is completely different. It is crazy and utopian - even when suicidal:
 
    $/a > S1/S2: discourse of the hysteric: the question of subjectivity; primacy to the division of the subject ($), over his or her fantasy (a), producing the symptom in the place of knowledge (S1), related to but divided from the signifying chain which supports it (S2); (Mitchell & Rose (eds) Lacan, 1982, pp.160-161)
 
 
The hysterical question is "unrealistic", paranoid, delusional, hypochondriac, unstable and fluxatious, troublesome. Hysteria violates textual and disciplinary codes, rules, conventions, modes of production, technologies of knowledge, discursive bounds or limits. Hysteria is self-contradictory and "uninformed": the "symptom" of the question takes the place of the real business: the text, the ego of the master, or the need to make a worthwhile contribution to the field. Hysteria disinvests the academic socius through the "fantastic" production of a disseminative surplus (eg: a "waste" of time, resources etc). (Derrida, 1981 & Spivak, 1987, esp. p.82) Hysteria makes spurious economies where counterfeit circulates. Hysteria turns the question/reply transaction into a ruse. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, 1987; Derrida, 1981; Cixous & Clement, 1986; Irigaray, 1985a, 1985b, 1991a, 1991b, 1993b) The hysteric raises the "question of subjectivity" (Mitchell & Rose, 1985), but not necessarily in a direct manner. The hysteric need not say: "Who am I?" or "What is Being?", but might ask another question, or pose a silence that nevertheless has the effect of alienating us from the certainties of knowledge and identity that we tend to buy into as we go about our daily business. Desire, for a hysteric is in the form of question that threatens the construct of subjectivity from below. It is the "old mole" of subjective revolution. As such, the discourse of the Hysteric might be seen as corresponding to the position granted (or more usually forced upon) the "subject" who has "failed" under a commentary regime, a Discipline, or even a Dogma (hysterics make excellent heretics). (cf. Foucault, 1970) Habituses (i.e. learned predispositions) and the rules that govern fields are not completely irrelevant to the hysteric, but are part of the problem. They are used to judge the hysteric. (Bourdieu, 1990) You could say that the hysteric has a dysfunctional or badly adapted habitus (or "feel for the game"), but you would be talking the discourse of the University. The hysteric, because she is dysfunctional, has no knowledge, but she is still supposed to love the Master or Analyst precisely because of her ignorance. (Lacan, 1977b & 1985). But, in fact, hysterics don't just have badly adapted habituses, they are actively and antiproductively engaged in destructuring both habitus and field. Hysterics are like sorceresses, positioned on the fringes. They are intermediaries between the "civilised" and the "wild", between the structured and the unstructured, between the formal and the heterogeneous, which is why listening to a hysteric can be so thought provoking.
 
The typical "University" solution, however, is to "nurture" the hysteric back to quiet "ligdom", or if possible, even higgish productivity. Otherwise, just fail her. Repression and inscription are the enemies of the hysteric, they are what she is tired of. The hysteric is the scapegoat (Cixous & Clement, 1986) accused of pretending, of hypochondria, of manipulation, of masochism, of selfishness, sadism, inconstancy, irrationality, and bad social skills. A hysteric is "producing the symptom in the place of knowledge". (Rise & Mitchell, 1982) But the preamble to such a symptomography is that, somewhere "inside her", the hysteric already knows too much. Contestation arises when, from the hysterical "knowing place", the hysteric feels free to raise the question of whose knowledge of whom.
 
 
The Discourse of the Analyst
This is where the role of the Analyst begins:
 
    a/S2 > $/S1: discourse of the analyst: the question of desire; primacy to the object of desire (a), over and against knowledge as such (S2), producing the subject in its division ($) (a > $ as the very form of fantasy), over the signifier through which it is constituted and from which it is divided. ........ Hence Lacan's description of psychoanalysis as the "hysterisation of discourse" ........ Lacan therefore poses analysis against mastery, hysteria against knowing...... (Mitchell & Rose (eds) Lacan, 1982, pp.160-161)
 
 
It is important to remember that the Lacanian analyst does not reply until the hysteric has given utterance to her splitting - but the corollary of this therapeutic reserve is that the analyst already knows that the hysteric's problem is that she loves and loathes the Signifier[S1]. (Lacan, 1977, pp.31ff) Her problem stems from an unwillingness - or inability - to make the "normal" compromises. On the bright side, the discourse of the analyst is the regime of the teacher who listens to the students without pre-empting their desires or immediately moving to negate or recuperate their voices. On the dark side, the Analyst is commonly just the Master or the University in disguise. It is, for example, commonplace didactic strategy to rephrase a student's utterance in "acceptable" terminology. This is obviously a recuperative practice, and when applied to the discourse of the hysteric, it can only further her sense of alienation. Operating the discourse of the Analyst does not mean listening only to offer this sort of comprehensive reply. The discourse of the Analyst is a small discourse. It is a belated discourse. It is a discourse that stops itself from knowing too soon. It waits, but while it waits it modifies itself so as to hear better, so as to produce situations where heterogeneous voices can feel comfortable. It is the regime of the "ethical" teacher who is prepared to make sacrifices and alter her mode of teaching and subject matter; who replies to the courage of those hysterics willing to risk disagreeing with the teacher, text, or field. Briefly, "ethics" is an intersubjective and pragmatic concern for subjective alterity and politico-relational equality. Like a Master, then, the Analyst is also "out of step". The University, itself, makes certain demands which effectively curtail the potentially ethical dynamic of hysteric and her ethical teacher. An Analyst is always in danger of becoming an agent of the University, just as she is always liable to lapse into mastery.
 
 
Revolutionary hysteria
Hysterics are usually seen as trouble, but they are actually good for many reasons. Not only are they inventive, but they also ask the so called "dumb questions" that so often get at the roots of what is going on (though often in such a way that the question looks like a "red herring" or "sidetrack"). Hysteria is a threat to knowledge, but not necessarily bad for the field. However antiproductive, the pleasures of hysteria are not just "brute" pleasures, they are more often pleasures of a particularly refined and rigorous kind. The hystericisation of English Studies, for example, would not necessitate the "impoverishment" of English Studies that Edward Said objects to when he attests to the "superiority" of students trained in "traditional" English discipline(s). (cf: Said, 1993, esp. pp.367ff). Such impoverishments arise from despotic and/or disciplinary regimes that work to reduce in order to regulate students' desires the state's vision of its labour requirements. The buzz word "relevance" typically refers to the needs of the capitalist mode of production rather than to the emancipation of antiproductive activity. Similarly, the Hysteric does not make the text vanish, she re-energises it. Techniques such as close reading and deconstruction do not automatically loose their "fecundity" in the hands of a Hysteric, rather, they become invested as technologies for desiring production (including writing). Sadly though, Irigaray is quite right when she observes that she has "never heard the word `hysteria' being used in a valorising way....." (Irigaray, 1991, p.47) Irigaray continues: "Yet there is a revolutionary potential in hysteria.... It is because they want neither to see nor hear that movement that they so despise the hysteric." (Irigaray, 1991, p.47) Replying to the question of students' desires, therefore, does not mean addressing the issue of students' "needs", or "failings", the "gaps in their knowledge" or the deficits in their "skill resources". All that belongs to the discourse of the University. For the Analyst, the desires of the students take precedence over the demands of either "Master" or "knowledge" - even if that desire is antiproductive.
 
 
 
 
 
4) "Eight Theses on the Universal," by Alain Badiou, 2004, from http://www.lacan.com/badeight.htm
 
"1. THOUGHT IS THE PROPER MEDIUM OF THE UNIVERSAL
 
By "thought", I mean the subject in so far as it is constituted through a process that is transversal relative to the totality of available forms of knowledge. Or, as Lacan puts it, the subject in so far as it constitutes a hole in knowledge.
 
Remarks:
 
a. That thought is the proper medium of the universal means that nothing exists as universal if it takes the form of the object or of objective legality. The universal is essentially 'anobjective'. It can be experienced only through the production (or reproduction) of a trajectory of thought, and this trajectory constitutes (or reconstitutes) a subjective disposition.
 
Here are two typical examples: the universality of a mathematical proposition can only be experienced by inventing or effectively reproducing its proof, the situated universality of a political statement can only be experienced through the militant practice that effectuates it.
 
b. That thought, as subject-thought, is constituted through a process means that the universal is in no way the result of a transcendental constitution, which would presuppose a constituting subject. On the contrary, the opening up of the possibility of a universal is the precondition for there being a subject-thought at the local level. The subject is invariably summoned as thought at a specific point of that procedure through which the universal is constituted. The universal is at once what determines its own points as subject-thoughts and the virtual recollection of those points. Thus the central dialectic at work in the universal is that of the local, as subject, and the global, as infinite procedure. This dialectic is constitutive of thought as such.
 
Consequently, the universality of the proposition "the series of prime numbers goes on forever" resides both in the way it summons us to repeat (or rediscover) in thought a unique proof for it, but also in the global procedure that, from the Greeks to the present day, mobilizes number theory along with its underlying axiomatic. To put it another way, the universality of the practical statement "a country's illegal immigrant workers must have their rights recognized by that country" resides in all sorts of militant effectuations through which political subjectivity is actively constituted, but also in the global process of a politics, in terms of what it prescribes concerning the State and its decisions, rules and laws.
 
c. That the process of the universal or truth - they are one and the same - is transversal relative to all available instances of knowledge means that the universal is always an incalculable emergence, rather than a describable structure. By the same token, I will say that a truth is intransitive to knowledge, and even that it is essentially unknown. This is another way of explaining what I mean when I characterize truth as unconscious.
 
I will call particular whatever can be discerned in knowledge by means of descriptive predicates. But I will call singular that which, although identifiable as a procedure at work in a situation, is nevertheless subtracted from every predicative description. Thus the cultural traits of this or that population are particular. But that which, traversing these traits and deactivating every registered description, universally summons a thought-subject, is singular. Whence thesis 2:
 
2. EVERY UNIVERSAL IS SINGULAR, OR IS A SINGULARITY
 
Remarks:
 
There is no possible universal sublation of particularity as such. It is commonly claimed nowadays that the only genuinely universal prescription consists in respecting particularities. In my opinion, this thesis is inconsistent. This is demonstrated by the fact that any attempt to put it into practice invariably runs up against particularities which the advocates of formal universality find intolerable. The truth is that in order to maintain that respect for particularity is a universal value, it is necessary to have first distinguished between good particularities and bad ones. In other words, it is necessary to have established a hierarchy in the list of descriptive predicates. It will be claimed, for example, that a cultural or religious particularity is bad if it does not include within itself respect for other particularities. But this is obviously to stipulate that the formal universal already be included in the particularity. Ultimately, the universality of respect for particularities is only the universality of universality. This definition is fatally tautological. It is the necessary counterpart of a protocol - usually a violent one - that wants to eradicate genuinely particular particularities (i.e. immanent particularities) because it freezes the predicates of the latter into self-sufficient identitarian combinations.
 
Thus it is necessary to maintain that every universal presents itself not as a regularization of the particular or of differences, but as a singularity that is subtracted from identitarian predicates; although obviously it proceeds via those predicates. The subtraction of particularities must be opposed to their supposition. But if a singularity can lay claim to the universal by subtraction, it is because the play of identitarian predicates, or the logic of those forms of knowledge that describe particularity, precludes any possibility of foreseeing or conceiving it.
 
Consequently, a universal singularity is not of the order of being, but of the order of a sudden emergence. Whence thesis 3:
 
3. EVERY UNIVERSAL ORIGINATES IN AN EVENT, AND THE EVENT IS INTRANSITIVE TO THE PARTICULARITY OF THE SITUATION
 
The correlation between universal and event is fundamental. Basically, it is clear that the question of political universalism depends entirely on the regime of fidelity or infidelity maintained, not to this or that doctrine, but to the French Revolution, or the Paris commune, or October 1917, or the struggles for national liberation, or May 1968. A contrario, the negation of political universalism, the negation of the very theme of emancipation, requires more than mere reactionary propaganda. It requires what could be called an "evental revisionism". Thus, for example, Furet's attempt to show that the French Revolution was entirely futile; or the innumerable attempts to reduce May 1968 to a student stampede toward sexual liberation. Evental revisionism targets the connection between universality and singularity. Nothing took place but the place, predicative descriptions are sufficient, and whatever is universally valuable is strictly objective. In fine, this amounts to the claim that whatever is universally valuable resides in the mechanisms and power of capital, along with its statist guarantees.
 
In that case, the fate of the human animal is sealed by the relation between predicative particularities and legislative generalities.
 
For an event to initiate a singular procedure of universalization, and to constitute its subject through that procedure, is contrary to the positivist coupling of particularity and generality.
 
In this regard, the case of sexual difference is significant. The predicative particularities identifying the positions "man" and "woman" within a given society can be conceived in an abstract fashion. A general principle can be posited whereby the rights, status, characteristics and hierarchies associated with these positions should be subject to egalitarian regulation by the law. This is all well and good, but it does not provide a ground for any sort of universality as far as the predicative distribution of gender roles is concerned. For this to be the case, there has to be the suddenly emerging singularity of an encounter or declaration; one that crystallizes a subject whose manifestation is precisely its subtractive experience of sexual difference. Such a subject comes about through an amorous encounter in which there occurs a disjunctive synthesis of sexuated positions. Thus the amorous scene is the only genuine scene in which a universal singularity pertaining to the Two of the sexes - and ultimately pertaining to difference as such - is proclaimed. This is where an undivided subjective experience of absolute difference takes place. We all know that, where the interplay between the sexes is concerned, people are invariably fascinated by love stories; and this fascination is directly proportional to the various specific obstacles through which social formations try to thwart love. In this instance, it is perfectly clear that the attraction exerted by the universal lies precisely in the fact that it subtracts itself (or tries to subtract itself) as an asocial singularity from the predicates of knowledge.
 
Thus it is necessary to maintain that the universal emerges as a singularity and that all we have to begin with is a precarious supplement whose sole strength resides in there being no available predicate capable of subjecting it to knowledge.
 
The question then is: what material instance, what unclassifiable effect of presence, provides the basis for the subjectivating procedure whose global motif is a universal?
 
4. A UNIVERSAL INITIALLY PRESENTS ITSELF AS A DECISION ABOUT AN UNDECIDABLE This point requires careful elucidation.
 
I call "encyclopedia" the general system of predicative knowledge internal to a situation: i.e. what everyone knows about politics, sexual difference, culture, art, technology, etc. There are certain things, statements, configurations or discursive fragments whose valence is not decidable in terms of the encyclopedia. Their valence is uncertain, floating, anonymous: they exist at the margins of the encyclopedia. They comprise everything whose status remains constitutively uncertain; everything that elicits a 'maybe, maybe not'; everything whose status can be endlessly debated according to the rule of non-decision, which is itself encyclopedic; everything about which knowledge enjoins us not to decide. Nowadays, for instance, knowledge enjoins us not to decide about God: it is quite acceptable to maintain that perhaps 'something' exists, or perhaps it does not. We live in a society in which no valence can be ascribed to God's existence; a society that lays claim to a vague spirituality. Similarly, knowledge enjoins us not to decide about the possible existence of "another polities": it is talked about, but nothing comes of it. Another example: are those workers who do not have proper papers but who are working here, in France (or the United Kingdom, or the United States ...) part of this country? Do they belong here? Yes, probably, since they live and work here. No, since they don't have the necessary papers to show that they are French (or British, or American ...), or living here legally. The expression "illegal immigrant" designates the uncertainty of valence, or the non-valence of valence: it designates people who are living here, but don't really belong here, and hence people who can be thrown out of the country, people who can be exposed to the non-valence of the valence of their presence here as workers.
 
Basically, an event is what decides about a zone of encyclopedic indiscern-ibility. More precisely, there is an implicative form of the type: E --> d(), which reads as: every real subjectivation brought about by an event, which disappears in its appearance, implies that , which is undecidable within the situation, has been decided. This was the case, for example, when illegal immigrant workers occupied the church of St. Bernard in Paris: they publicly declared the existence and valence of what had been without valence, thereby deciding that those who are here belong here and enjoining people to drop the expression "illegal immigrant".
 
I will call the evental statement. By virtue of the logical rule of detachment, we see that the abolition of the event, whose entire being consists in disappearing, leaves behind the evental statement , which is implied by the event, as something that is at once:
 
- a real of the situation (since it was already there);
 
- but something whose valence undergoes radical change, since it was undecidable but has been decided. It is something that had no valence but now does.
 
Consequently, I will say that the inaugural materiality for any universal singularity is the evental statement. It fixes the present for the subject-thought out of which the universal is woven.
 
Such is the case in an amorous encounter, whose subjective present is fixed in one form or another by the statement "I love you", even as the circumstance of the encounter is erased. Thus an undecidable disjunctive synthesis is decided and the inauguration of its subject is tied to the consequences of the evental statement.
 
Note that every evental statement has a declarative structure, regardless of whether the statement takes the form of a proposition, a work, a configuration or an axiom. The evental statement is implied by the event's appearing-disappearing and declares that an undecidable has been decided or that what was without valence now has a valence. The constituted subject follows in the wake of this declaration, which opens up a possible space for the universal.
 
Accordingly, all that is required in order for the universal to unfold is to draw all the consequences, within the situation, of the evental statement.
 
5. THE UNIVERSAL HAS AN IMPLICATIVE STRUCTURE
 
One common objection to the idea of universality is that everything that exists or is represented relates back to particular conditions and interpretations governed by disparate forces or interests. Thus, for instance, some maintain it is impossible to attain a universal grasp of difference because of the abyss between the way the latter is grasped, depending on whether one occupies the position of "man" or the position of 'woman'. Still others insist that there is no common denominator underlying what various cultural groups choose to call "artistic activity"; or that not even a mathematical proposition is intrinsically universal, since its validity is entirely dependent upon the axioms that support it.
 
What this hermeneutic perspectivalism overlooks is that every universal singularity is presented as the network of consequences entailed by an evental decision. What is universal always takes the form --> , where e is the evental statement and is a consequence, or a fidelity. It goes without saying that if someone refuses the decision about , or insists, in reactive fashion, on reducing e to its undecidable status, or maintains that what has taken on a valence should remain without valence, then the implicative form in no way enjoins them to accept the validity of the consequence, titi. Nevertheless, even they will have to admit the universality of the form of implication as such. In other words, even they will have to admit that if the event is subjectivated on the basis of its statement, whatever consequences come to be invented as a result will be necessary.
 
On this point, Plato's apologia in the Meno remains irrefutable. If a slave knows nothing about the evental foundation of geometry, he remains incapable of validating the construction of the square of the surface that doubles a given square. But if one provides him with the basic data and he agrees to subjectivate it he will also subjectivate the construction under consideration. Thus the implication that inscribes this construction in the present inaugurated by geometry's Greek emergence is universally valid.
 
Someone might object: "You're making things too easy for yourself by invoking the authority of mathematical inference." But they would be wrong. Every universalizing procedure is implicative. It verifies the consequences that follow from the evental statement to which the vanished event is indexed. If the protocol of subjectivation is initiated under the aegis of this statement, it becomes capable of inventing and establishing a set of universally recognizable consequences.
 
The reactive denial that the event took place, as expressed in the maxim "nothing took place but the place", is probably the only way of undermining a universal singularity. It refuses to recognize its consequences and cancels whatever present is proper to the evental procedure.
 
Yet even this refusal cannot cancel the universality of implication as such. Take the French Revolution: if, from 1792 on, this constitutes a radical event, as indicated by the immanent declaration which states that revolution as such is now a political category, then it is true that the citizen can only be constituted in accordance with the dialectic of Virtue and Terror. This implication is both undeniable and universally transmissible - in the writings of Saint-Just, for instance. But obviously, if one thinks there was no Revolution, then Virtue as a subjective disposition does not exist either and all that remains is the Terror as an outburst of insanity inviting moral condemnation. Yet even if politics disappears, the universality of the implication that puts it into effect remains.
 
There is no need to invoke a conflict of interpretations here. This is the nub of my sixth thesis:
 
6. THE UNIVERSAL IS UNIVOCAL
 
In so far as subjectivation occurs through the consequences of the event, there is a univocal logic proper to the fidelity that constitutes a universal singularity.
 
Here we have to go back to the evental statement. Recall that the statement circulates within a situation as something undecidable. There is agreement both about its existence and its undecidability. From an ontological point of view, it is one of the multiplicities of which the situation is composed. From a logical point of view, its valence is intermediary or undecided. What occurs through the event does not have to do with the being that is at stake in the event, nor with the meaning of the evental statement. It pertains exclusively to the fact that, whereas previously the evental statement had been undecid-able, henceforth it will have been decided, or decided as true. Whereas previously the evental statement had been devoid of significance, it now possesses an exceptional valence. This is what happened with the illegal immigrant workers, who demonstrated their existence at the St. Bernard church.
 
In other words, what affects the statement, in so far as the latter is bound up in an implicative manner with the evental disappearance, is of the order of the act, rather than of being or meaning. It is precisely the register of the act that is univocal. It just so happened that the statement was decided, and this decision remains subtracted from all interpretation. It relates to the yes or the no, not to the equivocal plurality of meaning.
 
What we are talking about here is a logical act, or even, as one might say echoing Rimbaud, a logical revolt. The event decides in favour of the truth or eminent valence of that which the previous logic had confined to the realm of the undecidable or of non-valence. But for this to be possible, the univocal act that modifies the valence of one of the components of the situation must gradually begin to transform the logic of the situation in its entirety. Although the being-multiple of the situation remains unaltered, the logic of its appearance - the system that evaluates and connects all the multiplicities belonging to the situation - can undergo a profound transformation. It is the trajectory of this mutation that composes the encyclopedia's universalizing diagonal.
 
The thesis of the equivocity of the universal refers the universal singularity back to those generalities whose law holds sway over particularities. It fails to grasp the logical act that universally and univocally inaugurates a transformation in the entire structure of appearance.
 
For every universal singularity can be defined as follows: it is the act to which a subject-thought becomes bound in such a way as to render that act capable of initiating a procedure which effects a radical modification of the logic of the situation, and hence of what appears in so far as it appears. Obviously, this modification can never be fully accomplished. For the initial univocal act, which is always localized, inaugurates a fidelity, i.e. an invention of consequences, that will prove to be as infinite as the situation itself. Whence thesis 7:
 
7. EVERY UNIVERSAL SINGULARITY REMAINS INCOMPLETABLE OR OPEN
 
All this thesis requires by way of commentary concerns the manner in which the subject, the localization of a universal singularity, is bound up with the infinite, the ontological law of being-multiple. On this particular issue, it is possible to show that there is an essential complicity between the philosophies of finitude, on the one hand, and relativism, or the negation of the universal and the discrediting of the notion of truth, on the other. Let me put it in terms of a single maxim: The latent violence, the presumptuous arrogance inherent in the currently prevalent conception of human rights derives from the fact that these are actually the rights of finitude and ultimately - as the insistent theme of democratic euthanasia indicates - the rights of death. By way of contrast, the evental conception of universal singularities, as Jean-Francois Lyotard remarked in The Differend, requires that human rights be thought of as the rights of the infinite.
 
8. UNIVERSALITY IS NOTHING OTHER THAN THE FAITHFUL CONSTRUCTION OF AN INFINITE GENERIC MULTIPLE
 
What do I mean by generic multiplicity? Quite simply, a subset of the situation that is not determined by any of the predicates of encyclopedic knowledge; that is to say, a multiple such that to belong to it, to be one of its elements, cannot be the result of having an identity, of possessing any particular property. If the universal is for everyone, this is in the precise sense that to be inscribed within it is not a matter of possessing any particular determination. This is the case with political gatherings, whose universality follows from their indifference to social, national, sexual or generational origin; with the amorous couple, which is universal because it produces an undivided truth about the difference between sexuated positions; with scientific theory, which is universal to the extent that it removes every trace of its provenance in its elaboration; or with artistic configurations whose subjects are works, and in which, as Mallarme remarked, the particularity of the author has been abolished, so much so that in exemplary inaugural configurations, such as The Iliad and The Odyssey, the proper name that underlies them - Homer - ultimately refers back to nothing but the void of any and every subject.
 
Thus the universal arises according to the chance of an aleatory supplement. It leaves behind it a simple detached statement as a trace of the dis-appearance of the event that founds it. It initiates its procedure in the univocal act through which the valence of what was devoid of valence comes to be decided. It binds to this act a subject-thought that will invent consequences for it. It faithfully constructs an infinite generic multiplicity, which, by its very opening, is what Thucydides declared his written history of the Peloponnesian war - unlike the latter's historical particularity - would be: , "something for all time"."

Latest revision as of 06:12, 21 June 2008

Hi everyone, my name is Chris, I'm ass't professor in the Critical and Visual Studies Program at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Currently, I'm about halfway through writing a book called 'Networkologies: Philosophy, Politics, and Art in a Hyperconnected Age.' While there've been a lot of books on networks recently, there hasn't been a true philosophy of complex networks, at least, not like what I'm working on - one part Whiteheadian metaphysics, one part Deleuzian rhizomatics, and one part soft-computing, distributed representation, parallel processing, non-euclidean geometries, etc. Grew up in New York City, studied in upstate New York, Berkeley, Prague, NYU. Live in Brooklyn with a cranky roomate and very naughty puppy. Have a penchant for ice-cream, anything green, and Futurama.

Interests- Semiotics, visual/film/media studies, psychoanalysis/object-relations theories, networks, and things I'm not supposed to be interested in. Recently gave a talk called 'Saussure on Soft-Serve: Or, Why Semiotics Needs to Rethink the Binary Opposition.'

Expertise- Probably very different than most in the group. If you need an expert in poststructuralist theory of almost any sort, history of western philosophy, or various modes of cultural critique, well, I'm your guy. Really good at explaining complex theory/math/sci to students scared of the stuff. Can play multiple musical instruments, speak a bit of german. Pretty good at recursivity in general. A philosopher is a machine for turning coffee/beer into theories, right?

Hope to get out of CSS- Well, I've read just about everything I can get my hands on regarding complex networks (so long as its not ALL math), but one of the disadvantages of doing real interdisciplinary work is that you go totally beyond your training. So, I want to solidify what I know, and then gain a real facility with the materials at a whole new level. Also, I can't wait to hear what a whole bunch of truly interdisciplinary folks from other fields do with these ideas when put in a room together. Synnergistic thinking is a wonderful thing.

Contact Info: chris962x [-a-t-] gmail.com


For the 'Theory Group,' the following texts can be found at the page Theory Group Texts:

1) The Machinic Phylum, by Manuel Delanda

2) The Space of Flows, by Gilles Deleuze

3) How to Make Yourself a Body Without Organs, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

4) The Event in Deleuze, by Alain Badiou

5) an intro to Lacan's theory of 'mathemes' and the 'Four Discourses'

6) Eight Theses on the Universal (on the ethics of the event), by Alain Badiou

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