Difference in itself

Still, despite Deleuze's distancing from creative evolution, something substantial persists across his changing relation to both Bergson and biology.

Namely, his commitment to a notion of internal difference, or difference in itself. This commitment motivates Deleuze's initial adherence to Bergson's creative evolutionism no less than his later "break" with Bergson over the status of intensity as well as the correlated model of creative involution he develops together with Guattari. The initial impetus driving Deleuze's effort to rehabilitate the fraught notion of the elan vital and with it, the very career of Bergson as philosopher, was nothing other than the notion of internal difference. As he reconstructs it in his 1956 essay, "Bergson's Conception of Difference," and then again in his 1966 Bergsonism, the elan vital introduces an explosive force internal to the process of evolution (internal difference) that is capable of accounting for the positive power of time as a source of creative invention. With the progress of his own
philosophical career, Deleuze soon found reason to temper his initial adherence to Bergsonism--and specifically, to Bergson's
derivation of internal difference from qualitative difference--without in any way abandoning his own commitment to
internal difference.

As early as Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze traces qualitative difference or difference in kind (together with quantitative difference or difference in degree) to a fluid continuum of intensity, thereby eschewing Bergson's argument that qualitative difference is itself one of two tendencies being differentiated and thus, a tendency internal to difference that, as Deleuze puts it, "show[s] the way in which a thing varies qualitatively in time".

voir http://www.situation.ru/app/index.htm

Vital difference

It is precisely this realism and the biological basis of differentiation that Deleuze eschews in his effort to arrive at a (philosophical) principle of difference in itself.

The roots of such a principle--a principle that will underwrite both Deleuze's philosophical Aufhebung of biology in Difference and Repetition and D+G's marginalization of the organism in A Thousand Plateaus--can be found in Deleuze's interpretation of vital difference as internal difference in Bergsonism.

Introduced in the context of an effort to distinguish Bergsonian creative evolution from Darwinism, this interpretation foregrounds Bergson's stress on the indeterminacy of vital
difference in order to present the Elan vital as the ultimate and purely internal cause of differentiation above and beyond any resistance matter offers to life, and indeed in place of
such resistance. Before expressing itself as material differentiation, that is, the Elan vital differs from itself: it is difference in itself.

What this means is that vital difference is virtual and that expressed difference is the
actualization of virtual life.

from Mark Hansen
Princeton University

What is a chance for living beings ?

Jacques Monod, a French biologist says in his book "Chance and Necessity, Philosophical questions of the modern biology" (1970) that the living beings are distinguished from all other objects in this world by three characteristics (chapter I):

a) They have a plan which at the same time is expressed in their macroscopic structure and carried out through their performances (concept of Teleonomy).
b) An inner determinism (law, mechanism) is responsible for their outer complex structure (autonomous morpho-genesis as a teleonomical apparatus)
c) They are able to conserve, to transfer and to reproduce the Informations of their own structure without changes (reproductive invariability)

The conclusions out of this three characteristics of life as living beings in comparision to Hegel's philosophy are:

a) The teleonomical apparatus is fully logical, rational and fit for conserving and reproducing (chapter I). This could be written by Hegel! It is the Self-actualization of the Concept.
b) Evolution is the product of a contingent change in the inner mechanism (mutation) without any relation to the consequences for the teleonomical macroscopic functions or the plan (chapter VII). This I think is exactly the same as Hegel's statement that within Nature the inner is totally separated from the outer and there is no mediatioin between the two.
c) And therefore after the (CONTINGENT) incident of the changed inner (microscopic) mechanism there is only a rigid NECESSITY of Selection on the macroscopic level of the organism or better of the living concept. But this living concept is very CONSERVATIVE because of its complex regulation, and therefore only such mutations can be accepted which can strengthen the concept or even give it (very seldom) new possibilities (chapter VII). This could be written by Hegel who says that the living concept can only exist as an entire and full concept. Otherwise the macroscopic structure would become a monster, that is an object which would no longer be fit as a living concept.
d) According to the modern theory, Evolution is therefore not the principle or characteristic of Life because its cause lies within the imperfection of the mechanism of conservation (chapter VI) or as Hegel would say: Changes in Nature are based on CONTINGENCY and therefore a development occurs only as process of the Concept and this is not a question for the natural sciences but for the science of philosophy.

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métabole
hypertexte

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Autobiographical hypertext

- There is a sort of literary genre of hypertext which seems very widespread, which is that of autobiography or writing personal Web pages. Do you think this kind of autobiographical hypertext writing has some particular features which deserve attention? Do you think it changes somehow the way we can write about ourselves?

David Kolb - I think it has. It is not so much the hypertext as the fact that anyone can publish on the Web, that everyone has a printing press, as it were, and therefore can make their life available. What the hypertext then adds is the ability to add pictures, to quickly write, and change quickly if need be, and to produce fairly good visual effects without too much effort. Although not all Web pages with personal autobiography have such good effects. There is another thing involved: if you look at literary hypertext, even if published on CD-ROM or disk and therefore rather incomplete in themselves, you see that autobiography often shows up. Not necessarily that the story or the characters are autobiographical, but rather that the author inserts autobiographical segments which you may find your way to. In one hypertext story called Woe by Michael Joyce you suddenly find yourself reading something that says: "Well, I am writing this at 2 o’clock in the afternoon on a Macintosh computer. It is a very cold day and I’ve been writing since 9 in the morning... ". Suddenly you have the author, truly or not, bringing in an autobiographical element. It is very tempting. I have found myself when writing hypertext putting in a few self-reflections questioning the form of what I was writing. It is a move which seems very natural because you can always link off in different directions. I think the other attraction of the Web, and I’ve seen this when my students write autobiographical things, is the feeling that what you do is suddenly available to a very large audience. Perhaps not too many people will see it but it is available. It is not like a personal diary which you keep or even something which you make to show your parents or your fellow classmates; it is open and that takes on either solemnity or a sense of fun, depending how you do it, which can be quite stimulating.

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Web today under the spell of what?

Stephanie Strickland :

Of the nine system-processes that characterize both life and knowledge in the 21st century - I refer to feedback, hierarchy, bounds, network interaction, scale, cycles, symmetries, evolution, and equilibrium - it is this last that does not characterize the Internet and does not characterize Web-specific literary works.

If the last half of the 20th century fell under the spell of linguistics and genetics, I suggest that the spatial understanding of both, "genome as book," must give way to an understanding that is inherently dynamic, inextricably statistical, and informationally multimedial in its forms of analysis; an understanding that is less about structure and more about resonance, about the ongoing fitting of moving mind to moving world through moving medium.

My thesis is that Web-specific art and literature is where this understanding is being developed. I hope to demonstrate this with regard to works by several renowned Web artists, but to contextualize my discussion I need to explain scale and level. A sense of scale is key to understanding dynamics, the kind of scaling represented by conventional powers of ten, or some other repeated.

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Reading as away of life

Several essays provide information about the history and development of the book.

They remark that the paper-based book, like the alphabet, was once the latest technological rage and was met with resistance, like the computer, from the establishment because books are more than delivery systems for information.

They are a way of life developed over centuries. Our concepts of authors, readers, the canon of texts, and texts as intellectual property were not inevitable but were the cumulative results of part social and political choices....

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Even Gods must obey

Since little choice is possible, and since there is no escape for the body from the stern law of Necessity, no one loves this goddess and everybody ignores her cult.

Yet her compelling power—with or without cult—remains unsurpassed in all circumstances. And given that she must be obeyed unto the most minute detail, this counsel has been given so that man might be reconciled with his condition:

"If a man endeavours to ... persuade himself to accept of his own accord what needs must befall him, he will have a very reasonable and harmonious life."

[Arrian's discourses of Epictetus, Fragment 8].

A similar thought occurred to rebellious Prometheus 1 when he was chained in Caucasus:

"I must bear my allotted doom as lightly as I can, knowing that the might of Necessity permits no resistance."

[Prometheus 1. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 104]

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Enduring many things

"We men are in prison all that time which we choose to call life. For this soul of ours, being bound and fettered in a perishable body, has to endure many things, and be the slave of all the affections which visit humanity."

[Flavius Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana 7.26]

New life

Often the choice of a new life is determined by the habits of former lives.

So for example, Er saw Orpheus' soul select the life of a swan, being unwilling to be born of a woman, because women had been the cause of his death. In the same way the soul of Ajax 1 was unwilling to become a man and chose the life of a lion, not being able to forget the adjudication of the arms of Achilles. A similar hatred of the human race made the soul of Agamemnon to choose the life of an eagle. Odysseus, he says, drew the last lot and went looking for the life of an ordinary citizen who minds his own business, and at last found it in a corner disregarded by the others as they chose with higher ambitions in mind. When all had chosen their new lives, the MOERAE confirmed their fates and, having come to the Plain of Lethe and its River of Oblivion, they were asked to drink a measure, though some drank more than the measure, and the more they drank the more they forgot.

And after they had fallen asleep a sound of thunder was heard and the souls were wafted in different ways to their birth like shooting stars.

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World of the dead

Between the world of the living and that of the dead there are, it is said, great rivers and dread streams.

First, greatest and outermost is Oceanus, which winds about the earth and the sea with nine rings, but is also a subterranean river. The river Styx (river of Hate), which is a primordial figure too (daughter of Oceanus), is a branch of Oceanus and a tenth part of his water is allotted to her.

So Styx, which flows out from a rock, is the tenth ring, though some say that Styx itself corrals the souls in the Underworld with nine rings.



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Through the looking-glass

The most powerful machines are the ones that process information, that is, text.

The activities of all machines these days are based on which texts come out of computers. This electronic information is, potentially, so rich that it is not an inaccurate picture of what happens in the machine, but a real, essential part of the machine —one, moreover, that is more transparent and accessible than the messiness of matter and life.

Text is no longer a mirror in which you see your own reflection: the reflective sheet of paper is replaced by an embracing screen and (like Alice) you go through the looking-glass into a strange but believable world. In such a world the boundaries between what is ourselves and what is text are lost.

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