Inigo Wilkins
No doubt there are now more repetitions being performed by more technology than there ever has been. From brute mechanical devices to intelligent robots and smart materials; from communication and entertainment media to computers and nanotechnology; from radar and satellite systems to virtual reality and cloning; all these devices are designed and employed to replicate, reproduce and represent a certain section of reality or block of space-time. The result is a kind of information fractal, a reality riddled with wormholes in which audio-visual information channels stream continuously in every direction, dislocated sounds and images are everywhere repeated in different spaces and times, and written language and code run wild disseminating themselves onto billboards and into computers where they distribute themselves into the info-sphere – an immanent field, present to all its parts, folded in upon itself in a complex pattern of self-reduplications. By increasing the distance and speed a body can travel, by multiplying the number of perspectives, or by magnifying the otherwise invisible, technology extends perception, causing a proliferation of subjectivities and a distribution of cognition.
The media and film industry fuel fears that the self-replicating nature of technology is out of control; some examples are Disney's 'Fantasia', Ridley Scott's 'Bladerunner', and of course the 'Terminator' films. Hysterically over-inflated media-fed concerns that all-consuming nanobots would reduce the world to grey mush caused serious setbacks in nanotechnology research. The idea that technology will be our downfall, that new practices are dangerously indiscriminate, that the servomechanism will turn against its master, that the copy is inherently bad, are not fresh concerns, and can be found in many folk tales such as Gollum and Pinocchio.
Repetition and technology are far from being new conceptual phenomena themselves. They are, in fact, mutually pre-suppositional terms that are constitutive of and necessary to the world. Though the present is no less determined by these terms than any past has been, it must also be noted that we are reaching yet another critical threshold where massive structural transformations will emerge as a result of these differential forces.
We tend to think of technology as man-made machinery but it is vital to an understanding of its relationship with repetition that we consider technology as a continuum of practical application of knowledge that extends to the smallest organism. Technology is natural and nature is technological. Nature is not a machine, however, since a machine is always for something, where the universe has no unified aim but includes infinitely disparate intentions. The world is machinic, not mechanical. That is to say it is not a Newtonian universe with linear causality but a Riemannian multiplicity immanent to itself. That is to say, it is not embedded in any exterior space, and is composed of heterogeneous parts producing differential relations with variable interdependency.
Technology encompasses three domains, the tool (or external apparatus), the technique (or set of movements), and the environmental forces (or the set of interdependent components) that determine their combined use and effectiveness.[1] Evolution requires the repetition of technology and necessitates the technology of repetition. Environmental conditions (or repetitive stimuli) entail the need for specific techniques and tools that are developed through a process of repetitive refinement and adaptation.
The analogy of biological evolution has long been applied to technology, and is so commonplace today in adverts for the latest razor or family hatchback, that one would be forgiven for assuming that technological change is a natural process of amelioration and not in the least affected by political and economic forces, or the strategic planning of industrial super-organisms. Whether big business likes it or not, however, technology is a complex adaptive system, like biology and language, that is determined by its own dynamic processes, and that transforms in a way peculiar to itself.
Fleming and Sorenson draw on the findings of Kauffman to demonstrate that technological invention differs from biological evolution in that it proceeds more by revolutionary recombinations than by incremental adaptations leading to thresholds of transformation.[2] Language evolves at a much higher rate than biology or technology. Since the free recombination potential of words is accumulative and practically infinite, language functions, as Burroughs famously claimed, like a virus.
Viral self-replication – its enough to make your skin crawl; partly because culture is still troubled by a deep-rooted fear of the concept of repetition that is evident in the large percentage of mental disorders that exhibit symptoms of repetition: 75% of autistic patients suffer from echolalia (the repeating of others words), schizophrenia often leads to repetitive behaviour especially when under great stress, Tourette's syndrome involves compulsive repetition, psychopaths and rapists are serial, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder speaks for itself. Freud taught us that we are sick from repetition, but that also we can cure ourselves by it.
Unlike language and technology, repetition does not evolve. We may have a different relation to it, and it may have different practical applications, but repetition stays the same. This is because it is a primary logical function that exists only conceptually, or virtually, and does not pertain to nature. Nature is the principle of differentiation, and repeats nothing. The dominant cultural code that fears and denies repetition can be traced back to the privileging of identity that crystallised in the works of Plato. The birth of rationality demands that the positive originary principles of repetition and difference are subsumed by the mode of representation whose presuppositions are the same, the similar, the negative, and the analogous. The anti-essentialist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze overturns this rationalist hierarchy, replacing essences and forms with multiplicities and singularities.
While Cartesian logic dictates that the clear and distinct are the basis of identity, the mathematics of group theory[3], and Riemann's non-Euclidean geometry demonstrate that multiplicities are on the contrary, by nature obscure and distinct. As DeLanda explains, 'the singularities that define a multiplicity come in sets and these are not given all at once, but progressively specify the nature of a multiplicity as they unfold in recurrent sequences'.[4] Multiplicities are necessarily different from each other, but, moreover they produce difference wherever they go. Singularities, on the other hand, being neither particular nor general, but universal, are by nature repetitive – a smile, a bubble, a musical G. They are state-space attractors, maxima and minima, or topological coordinates which multiplicities tend towards but always differentiate.
Repetition, or singularities, may only occur within a multiplicity that is a set of relatively interdependent components that form an environment or milieu. As Deleuze states, 'Every milieu is vibratory, in other words, a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component . . .Every milieu is coded, a code being defined by periodic repetition; but each code is in a state of transcoding or transduction'[5] Deleuze makes a crucial distinction between metrical repetition which is always contained in a milieu, and rhythm which is the product of the interaction of milieus. Though a multiplicity is defined by the repetitious, or coded, emergence of singularities, each repetition produces new relations that cause the multiplicity, and other multiplicities, to transform rhythmically.
Man's most significant primitive technological innovation was the development of a system of language enabling the repetition of codes. But language must not be confused with codes, a code has an externally defined set of rules, whereas language, just as much as technology, is a complex adaptive system in a process of dynamic or rhythmic evolution that is not determined by the codes that it contains. The code is always a territorialization or reterritorialization, where language is this fundamental force of deterritorialization, a signifying series that endlessly proliferates and transforms. This is why simulating real human conversation has become one of the most intractable problems in AI. Since language is composed of many codes it should, in theory, be easy to program a computer to follow them, but human speech, like any language, is criss-crossed with counter-codes the authentic use of which demands the skills of a seasoned hacker. Moreover language is not merely a complex network of digital codes, but also includes para-linguistic signs and extra-codifiable information. That is what is called analogical language.
Technology as a complex adaptive system is in a rhizomatic relationship with thought and language, the reciprocality of which has many exemplars. It is obvious that thought has influenced technology, for example Russell's logic gates which went on to be standard in computer programming. Inversely, however, cultures have always had recourse to technology in order to explain the elusive nature of thought, perception and memory. The primitive techniques of the sharp stone as cutting tool, and the rope, or hide, as combining tool, are still relevant analogues of thought today more familiarly known as cut and paste. Among the many technologies that defined Greek thought were music, war, alchemy, geometry and the alphabet. Liebniz revolutionised philosophy when he modelled consciousness on the feedback mechanism. The industrial age saw the brain as a perfect machine, worked by massive cogs. The recently revived and erroneously berated radical late 19th century biologist Richard Semon took his inspiration from the phonograph.
Not long after Semon's phonographic analogy, the French philosopher Henri Bergson went a step further by claiming that perception is cinematographic. He maintained it is composed of a series of instants, or snapshots of reality, merged together in consciousness by the same imaginative faculty of the brain that sees movement in the series of still images on a cinema screen. Semon's work accords with the Bergsonian contention that perception is partial, interested, located, embodied and subtractive. Crucially consciousness is directed towards action rather than knowledge, it takes only a fraction of the data available, and constitutes a set of tendencies, or techniques, for reacting to stimuli. Perception is above all habitual. Habits are general tendencies, or tendencies to generalise. Bergson gives the scathing example of a cow recognising grass, not as a particular object, but as the thing it usually eats. It is much the same for humans, as we 'normally perceive only clichés'[6] and 'a cliché is a sensory-motor image of the thing'[7]
Of course, in some ways the computer is the ultimate analogue for thought, but though it is often alluded to as such, sometimes seriously, it is widely recognized that there are insurmountable differences between the brain and the computer. One major difference is that computers perform integral calculations based on discrete code or digital possibilities, where the brain is sensitive to continuous intensities or analogue potential. In the digital age the term virtual has come to denote 'non-real' objects that are manifest only in the codes of a pre-programmed software, but for Bergson the word had an altogether different meaning.
In Bergson's schema the virtual is opposed to the actual but is none the less real. The virtual is pure intensive potential. The actual occurs in the instant, or the point of time that consciousness runs along, but the instant cannot be understood without the preceding instant being present virtually in the actual moment. In fact the virtual object includes the whole of the past and the future of the actual object, and this is where Bergson is close to Leibniz. The virtual is the infinite potential of thought and matter to reorganise itself or recombine.
The virtual object does not imitate, represent, or reproduce the actual object; it is a topological map, a diagram composed of relations that are intensive not extensive. Above all it is not a code that would unlock the object, but rather a continuous feedback mechanism gauging the intensity of relations between non-localizable elements. This is why Deleuze cannot accept a determination of the digital by convention and the analogue by similitude and resemblance. This is borne out in the semiology of Pierce who defined 'icons by similitude and symbols by conventional rule, but acknowledged that conventional symbols are composed of icons (by virtue of phenomena of isomorphism) and that pure icons range far beyond qualitative similitude, and consist of "diagrams".'[8]
Although our ears may not be able to register the difference, the digital and the analogue may be distinguished through their modes of operation. Deleuze uses the example of a synthesizer to elucidate the functions that correspond to each:
'Analogical synthesizers are "modular": they establish an immediate connection between heterogeneous elements; they introduce a literally unlimited possibility of connection between these elements, on a field of presence or finite plane whose moments are all actual and sensible. Digital synthesizers, however, are "integral": their operation passes through a codification, through a homogenization and binarization of the data, which is produced on a separate plane, infinite in principle, and whose sound will only be produced as a result of a conversion-translation.'[9]
Deleuze's work draws on multiple disciplines and technologies enabling the creation of a great many philosophical concepts that are not given in logical codes. From structuralism to cybernetics, from systems theory to autopoietics, from post-Darwinian evolutionary theory to contemporary quantum mechanics – all these fields of research are involved in the study of the immanent organization of multiplicities without referring them to a global embedding space. This is why Deleuze is also interested in the cinema as an analogue of thought. Unlike the word, the cinematic image does not refer to a structure or meaning that it represents, and though it is composed of signs, this is not a digital code marked out in extension, but an analogue modulation of intensity, a 'signaletic material'.
'the movement-image is not analogical in the sense of resemblance: it does not resemble an object that it would represent…The movement-image is the modulation of the object itself…The similar and the digital, resemblance and code, at least have in common that they are moulds, one by perceptible form, the other by intelligible structure…modulation is completely different; it is a putting into variation of the mould, a transformation of the mould at each moment of the operation.'[10]
Deleuze's model of repetition is 'indistinguishable from pure matter understood as the fragmentation of the identical'[11] It is art that scrambles the codes, that makes possible the fracture of identity; that leaks on all sides; that makes visible and audible the analogue intensities of irreducible elements and makes sensible the insensible qualities of time and space.
'Art does not imitate, above all because it repeats, it repeats all the repetitions, by virtue of an internal power (an imitation is a copy but art reverses copies into simulacra)'[12]
Warhol is a classic example, but we could name many other artists who deal with this directly, and all do indirectly. The art I have produced is an experimental probe for investigating these ideas. It is a technological appliance, co-designed and constructed with my colleague Adam Hobbes, and is called an Immersive Mnemotechnical Apparatus for the Recording and Transmission of Actual Perception. IMARTAP sits at the axis of science and art yet more profoundly it is intimately connected to habitual experience and the interactivity of the participant in a contingent environment adds an unstructured element that overflows any strict determination and touches the whole social sphere allowing for a micro-analyses of processes such as the interaction of the senses with desire, memory and movement.
Designed in retaliation to the onslaught of fabricated and constructed realities that erroneously deem themselves virtual, IMARTAP gives actual reality back to those who have been robbed of it. Opposed to the pre-designed possibilities of the corporate virtual reality headset, IMARTAP is an instrument not for the enumaration of possibilities but for the multiplication of potential. It is the first real Apparatus for Virtual Immersive Teleportation (AVIT) enabling travel in space and time. It is unique among current technological innovations in actually satisfying the demand for a much-touted but rarely encountered interactivity. It heralds a coming breakthrough into active media where the participant has a direct effect on and is directly affected by its real environment. This is the next stage in the repetition of technology.
Footnotes
1 The spider's primary tool is its silk web, its technique's include dangling from well-chosen supports using the forces of gravity and the wind, and producing different consistencies of silk from its spinneret. The environmental forces that shape its use include the availability of supports for the web, the material qualities of silk such as elasticity, and the abundance or scarcity of prey in that locale.
2 www.people.hbs.edu/l fleming /RP2001.pdf
3 'Classifying geometrical objects by their degrees of symmetry represents a sharp departure from the traditional classification of geometrical figures by their essences' DeLanda, M. 'Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy' Continuum. 2002. p.17.
4 DeLanda, M. 'Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy' Continuum. 2002. p.16.
5 Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. 'A Thousand Plateaus'. Athlone Press 2003. p.313.
6 Deleuze, G. 'Cinema 2- The Time-Image'. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.20.
7 Deleuze, G. 'Cinema 2- The Time-Image'. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.20.
8 Deleuze, G. 'Francis Bacon' Continuum. 2005. p.81.
9 Deleuze, G. 'Francis Bacon' Continuum. 2005. p.81.
10 Deleuze, G. 'Cinema 2- The Time-Image'. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.27.
11 Deleuze, G. 'Difference and Repetition'. Columbia University Press. 1994. p.271.
12 Deleuze, G. 'Difference and Repetition'. Columbia University Press. 1994. p.293.
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