2003-06-28

D&G- How it ends


p514
"""
Every abstract machine is linked to other abstract machines, not only because
they are inseparably political, economic, scientific, artistic, ecological,
cosmic--perceptive, affective, acting, thinking, physical, and semiotic--but
because their various types are as intertwined as their operations are
convergent. Mechanosphere.
"""

Mechanosphere?



Something that worries me a little...
We rely on certain people to have philosophical ideas, ideas about how the
universe works. These concepts aren't immediately apparent to others, they go
above the complexity exchange limit, we have the "coming down from the
mountain" thing. Perhaps these concepts feel natural to D&G, perhaps they're
apparent from the way the universe looks to them, but they're not to most
people. So the logic isn't open to scrutiny. There was a breakpoint when
literate culture emerged that arguments were not longer inevitably won by the
most articulate person -- the thought processes could be put down on paper,
examined, collaborated on, agreed on and finally presented. Science is subject
to this (maybe even emergent from it). But these philosophical ideas -- they're
so much more fundamental than how the universe works: they're how the universe
works + how we work + the combination of those two + the combination of all of
that before + to infinity (like the smells of the two ingredients in my soup
combining and recombining). To analyse that, paper isn't sufficient. Perception
itself needs a literate breakpoint. We need to add an extra dimension to
collaborate on what it means for humanity to perceive something, otherwise
we're just taking people's words for something. All that D&G are saying is
complex slices across the words we have, it could be simple in another way.
That's another reason it's so tough. Furthermore, how universal is this? Is it
a Western view? Or are they saying that it applies just as much to other
coherences? What do other coherences have in place of D&G? Massively different
again? What is the overarching philosophy?