HackMDMODULATION (2006)
Akseli Virtanen
Translated by Janna Jalkanen Greenhill
In one of his lectures Gilles Deleuze explains how we could best understand what a matter in a state of continuous mutation or variation means.(221) When we perceive a table, the physicist will have already explained that here we have atoms and electrons in movement, but it is difficult for us to perceive the table as movement-matter. How could we then best understand movement as matter? Deleuze answers, “by thinking of it as metal”. It might be wise to explain this a little.
In the lecture Deleuze invites Edmund Husserl and Gilbert Simondon to help him. (222) According to Husserl we can distinguish unchanging, comprehensible and eternal essences as well as things that we can sense and perceive: there are formal, intelligible essences like the circle as a geometrical essence, and then round things, sensible, formed, perceivable things like for instance a wheel or a table. Between these there is however an intermediary domain consisting of elements that are not fixed or formal and neither sensible or perceptible. Husserl calls them morphological essences that have a “floating” effect on the sensory life. Unlike the formal essences these are inexact or indeterminate essences: their indeterminacy is not haphazard nor a defect, for they are indeterminate by their essence. They belong to a space and time which is in itself indeterminate.
So there is an exact and definite time-space and an indeterminate and indefinite time- space, endless and spaceless time, to which Henri Bergson refers when he says that “time is exactly this indeterminateness” (223). Formless or indeterminate (Husserl uses the term vage) essences belong to the latter, for they cannot be reduced to their visible and spatial conditions. As Deleuze says, Husserl knew very well that “vage” is vagus: these are the heart of the vagrant, the rambling, stateless, formless, precarious, vagabond essences.
Husserl defines these vagabond essences as certain kinds of materialities or corporealities. They are something different than thingness, which is a quality of sensible, perceivable, formed things (a plate), or than essentiality which is a quality of formal, definite and fixed essences (a circle). According to Deleuze, Husserl defines corporeality in two ways. First, it cannot be distinguished from the events of transformation whose place it is: its first character is fusion, dissolution, propagation, event, passage to the limit which means mutation etc. The indeterminate time-space is thus the place of mutation.
Secondly, the corporeality is not inseparable only of the event of transformation (whose time-place it is), but also of those certain qualities which are susceptible to intensities in different degree (color, density, heat, hardness, durability, resistance etc.). (224NEW) So there is a compound of mutation, events-intensities, that constitutes the vagabond material essences and has to be separated from the “sedentary linkage” belonging to a definite time- space.
If a circle is a formal essence and a plate, a round table and the sun sensible formed things, and if the indeterminate essence is neither one of these, then what is it? Husserl answers that it is the roundness (die Rundheit), roundness as matter, roundness as flesh. What does this mean? It means that roundness is inseparable of the operations through which different materials undergo. Or as Deleuze says, “roundness is only the result of a process of rounding [arrondir], a passage towards its limit”. Roundness as a vagabond essence does not mean the tranquil and determined essence of the Euclidean circle, but the roundness as the limit of a polygon that is continuously increasing the number of its sides. This is precisely the indeterminate character of a stateless essence: it is roundness in the sense of Archimedes’ mutating definition (passage to the limit) and not of Euclides’ essential definition.
We have a tendency to think through formal essences and formed, sensible things, but then we are forgetting something: the intermediary space where everything happens. According to Deleuze this intermediary space or metastable state exists only as a “threshold- affect” and a “border-process” (becoming-round) via sensible things and technological agents (a millstone, a lathe, a drawing hand etc.). But the intermediary space is “in between” only in the sense that the nomad has a home in homelessness. I return to this idea shortly, but in any case, the intermediateness has independency and creates itself in between things and thoughts in the sense that it is the mutating identity between them. This is why we cannot understand the world of definite time-space, of formal essences and formed things, if we do not understand what is going on in the middle, in the indeterminate region of stateless essences, where everything happens.
One should notice that this is not a question of opposition, but of a two different worlds: in the world of roundness we move corporeally towards the limit, just like roundness is the materiality inseparable of the passage caused by the acts of rounding (roundness as the limit of multiplying the sides of the polygon). The circle has essential qualities that pass from the formal essence into the matter, in which the essence gets realized. But roundness is something different: it is something that assumes the movement of the hand and the continuous straightening of the angles, or as Deleuze puts it, “it is inseparable from events, it is inseparable from affects”.
Some of Gilbert Simondon’s concepts can be compared with Husserl’s.
Simondon aims at liberating matter from hylomorphism, that is, from a model of form-matter where the form (morphe) informs (in forma) the passive matter (hyle) like the casting mould informs the clay. The casting mould is like a form which is pressed into the clay- matter, imposing qualities to it. Deleuze calls this also “the legal model”. Simondon was not the first one to criticize the hylomorphic model but the way in which he criticized it was new: Simondon was interested in what happened between the mould and the clay-matter, in what happened in between them, in the intermediary space.
In the hylomorphic model, or the model of the law, the function of the mould is to form the clay, to bring it to a state of equilibrium, after which the mould will be removed. The form and matter are thought to be two things separately receiving their definition, like two ends of a chain whose linkage is no longer visible. But what takes place on the side of the matter when it is passing to the state of equilibrium? This is no longer a question of form and matter but a question of the pressure of the matter and its tendency to move towards certain equilibrium, which actually is not an equilibrium at all, but a series of equilibriums, a metastable form, the structure of heterogeneity, or an equilibrium not defined by stability. (224) The form-matter model does not take this into account for it assumes a homogeneous, stable, already given and workable matter. According to Simondon we cannot even talk about casting into a mould, since the mere thought of molding assumes already a more complicated procedure of modulation. Modulation is boundless molding or molding in a continuously variable way. A modulator is a mould that continuously changes its form, function and settings. If modulation is molding in a variable and endless way (indeterminate time-space), then molding is modulation in a fixed and finite way (determinate time-space). (225)
It is important to notice that modulation is not a synthesis that would preserve part of the qualities of the form and of the matter, just like Husserl’s indeterminate essence is not a synthesis between formal essences and sensible, formed things, but dissimulated by intermediary space. (226)
But how should we then think about this continuous mutation of matter or the materiality of mutation? Simondon agrees that it is defined by two things. Firstly, it contains singularities that are like implicit (indeterminate, inexact) forms which elude the coordinates of definite time and space and merge with the events of transformation: for example the changing spirals and undulations in the grain that guide the splitting of the wood. Secondly, it is defined by changing affect qualities. For example the wood, Simondon’s favourite example, can be more or less porous, more or less flexible and resilient. According to Simondon the artisan does not merely impose the form to the matter, but rather surrenders to the wood, feels and follows it (like a shepherd his flock) by combining different procedures with the materiality: instead of a matter subordinated to a form or the law, we are looking at a “materiality possessing its own nomos”. (227)
The other problem with hylomorphism is that while materiality is subordinated to the form-matter model and made a “legal” matter, form is at the same time subordinated to the model of work, i.e. to a certain social conception of work as forming of natural resources or as communication of form onto a ready matter. In the form-matter model, matter is always finished, it is homogenous and uniform matter; form is mere informing of the matter. A double liberation is at stake in modulation: both materiality and form are freed from the form-matter model, or, in Guattari’s terms, from the model of signifying semiology (from legal matter and the model of work).
Where Simondon’s favourite example is wood, Deleuze defines the movement- matter as metal. By this he means that metal and metallurgy, which as a process is explicitly modulatory, makes visible for intuition that which is normally hidden in other materialities. That is why Deleuze says “metallurgy is consciousness” and that “metal is the consciousness of the matter itself ”. We cannot think of metallurgy just through the hylomorphic model, for the metallic matter, which to begin with is very rarely in its pure native state, must go through several series of intermediary states before attaining its “form”. Once it has attained its final characteristics, it is still subject to several changes that form and add its qualities (tempering, decarbonation etc.). The formation does not take place in one visible moment and place (determined time-space), but in several operations which go on at the same time and follow each other: the formation cannot be distinguished from the mutation. Forging and tempering the metal in a way both precede and follow what could be called acquisition of the actual form. It is as if the procedures would communicate, beyond the thresholds that actually separate them from each other, directly in the continuous process of variation of matter itself. This was true for clay also, yet nothing forced us to realize it. Metal instead compels us to think of movement-matter, matter as variation and variation as matter. That is why Deleuze and Guattari can say that “metal is neither a thing nor an organism, but a body without organs”.(228NEW)
It is known that in ancient Sumer there were a dozen different types of copper, catalogued under different names according to the location and the purity of the oxide ore. There was no permanent, external order for the alloys and their variations; the only thing that was permanent was their unceasing variability. Deleuze calls this the continuous melody of copper. The smith and the musician are twins, for music and metallurgy share the same question of non-organic life: they bring to light “life proper to matter”.
[An Excerpt from Arbitrary Power. Towards a Critique of Biopolitical Economy (Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto, 2006.)]
FOOTNOTES
- Deleuze (1979), Anti-OEdipe et Mille plateaux, Cours à Vincennes 27.02.1979; see also Deleuze & Guattari (1988), A Thousand Plateaus, esp. chapter 12, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine”.
- Husserl (1976), Ideas, tr. by W.R. Gibson. N.Y.: Humanities Press, part 1, item 74 (see also Derrida’s commentary, p. 118-132); Husserl (1978), Origin ofGeometry, tr. by J.P. Leavey. New Hayes: Stoney Book; Simondon (1964), L’individu et sa genèse physio-biologique. Paris: PUF, p. 35-60. See also Deleuze (1966), Revue de Gilbert Simondon L’Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger, 156:115-118.
- Bergson (1962), La pensée et le mouvant. Paris: PUF, p. 13.
224(NEW) If the intensity is divided it necessarily changes its nature. For example the temperature is not the sum of the two lower temperatures, or the speed is not the sum of the two slower speeds.
- Deleuze (1966), “Revue de Gilbert Simondon L’Individu et sa genèse physio- biologique”, p. 44.
- Deleuze deals with the difference between the mould and modulation especially as he attempts to explain the transition from disciplinary societies to control societies. I will return to this in part III of this study.
- According to Deleuze, this is why Husserl can call himself a phenomenologist: Husserl places himself inside the conditions of unveiling the veiled, or, in other words, inside our conceptual thinking which functions through formal essences, and inside our sensory perceptions of formed things.
- Deleuze & Guattari (1988), A Thousand Plateaus, p. 408. See also chapter “Refrain: Oikos, Polis, Nomos” in the part I of this book.
228 (NEW) Deleuze & Guattari (1988), A Thousand Plateaus, p. 411.
See other notes by Akseli Virtanen:
