A Brief Musical Interlude

Here at FPiPE we don't just translate Deleuze into Plain English.  Given a sufficient number of dangling clauses, scare quotes, and unclear pronoun references, any obscure yet interesting French philosopher can merit the FPiPE treatment.  While she's certainly not as opaque as Deleuze, Isabelle Stengers checks all the boxes.  

I must have first come across Stengers years ago when she co-wrote Order Out of Chaos with Nobel prize winning chemist Ilya Prigogine.  I read that in college though, so my memory of it is pretty hazy.  My more recent encounter was with her Thinking With Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts (with a hat tip to Steve Shaviro whose Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics made me interested enough in Stengers to want to read her Whitehead tome).  Her take on Whitehead really helped illuminate the trajectory of his thought as he moved from math and science into philosophy, and it also touched on the way a number of his ideas influenced Deleuze (who was a big Whitehead fan himself).  Unfortunately, her book is so enormous that FPiPEing it would take us much too far afield.  Especially since most of it is about Whitehead's magnum opus Process and Reality, a book which, while written in SWE, could easily have a whole blog devoted to translating it into Plain English.  So instead, I'm going to tackle an undetermined number of her essays/speeches collected in a shorter book: Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science.  This preface is also probably the time to thank one of our sponsors -- the Claridge-Chang Lab has been a major supporter of fly philosophy for decades now.  May their drosophila breed ever faster!

So, what is the Plain English take away from of her first essay: Toward a Public Intelligence of the Sciences?  In short, that scientists' arrogant belief that they own the unquestionable authority over a special type of knowledge is getting them, and all the rest of us, in trouble.  She comes down pretty hard on scientists, though this makes sense given that she's trying to convince them to change their practices (knowing that attempting to get their corporate sponsors or political manipulators to change theirs is an exercise in futility).  In other words, I don't interpret her as primarily being interested in a question of blame; her point is more pragmatic -- who do we need to convince of what to change the way science is used in our society?  Her solution is equally pragmatic -- scientists need to be trained to be more open to intelligent questions about why they choose certain directions of research, about how they know what they know, and about what the usefulness of that knowledge might be in real world situations.  Instead of circling the wagons and claiming that Science is Right, then denouncing anyone who questions their conclusions as Irrational, scientists need to focus less on Proof, and more on what they really do have to offer: particular empirical findings relevant to important questions.

The problem here is not that scientists are in error.  The problem is arrogance.  This is why I called the problem and solution "pragmatic", to distinguish it from "metaphysical".  Stengers is not a relativist in the sense of denying that science gets at truth, or objective knowledge, or cold hard facts.  She's a pragmatist, in the sense William James made popular -- the truth is whatever works.  This little formula may sound simplistic, but there's a wealth of thought behind it.  I'm not going to dig into a defense of it now, but I would suggest that if you are tempted to dismiss it out of hand, you should consider that, as Robert Nozick once said in another context, "Someone who proposes a non-strange answer shows he didn't understand this question".  What really matters for understanding the current essay is just the idea that any truth will be situated in the context of what someone is trying to accomplish by believing it to be true.  In short, knowledge always has a context.  

For example, we can ask: what is the context of the science surrounding GMOs?  And we can answer that scientists have made modifications to the genomes of crops, grown them in their laboratory, measured the resulting yield increases and nutritional differences, and fed the results to rats.  And the rats survive.  These are all wonderful things to know.  This knowledge is true and objective and factual, and whatever other adjectives you'd like to use to convince yourself of its reality.  Scientists are not making this stuff up.  

Stengers, though, wants us to ask: what was the question?  Do these experiments prove the GMOs are "safe"?  Safe for who?  Safe defined how?  She would like us to step back and ask what we were trying to do with this science.  In this case, the obvious context is that we were trying to invent safe GMOs in order to feed 11.2 billion people.  Our knowledge of GMOs is situated in the context of the question of the best way to feed these people.  Notice that "best" here is not actually amendable to scientific definition, nor should scientists expect that their take on the best solution to this problem should get special attention just because it's, you know, science-y.  Yet what scientists really do deserve credit for is inventing more productive crops that do not kill rats.  That might be a really important part of the best solution (full disclosure: I personally think that it is).  Scientists might also be able to contribute other important things as we continue to investigate the question of the best way to feed that many monkeys.  But science alone is not going to dictate what we decide to take into account in answering the question.  What about the effects of agricultural monoculture at a global scale?  What about the way in which the intersection of intellectual property and GMOs could make some people dependent on those who created the GMOs?  As in literally, "their life depends on it".   Science may be able to help us answer these questions, but science cannot tell us whether they are important to ask or not.

You might think that a scientist confronted with these observations would be able to quickly respond, "sure, sure, science doesn't tell you the best way to handle food production, but that's because science only deals with facts, and what you're asking for is a value judgement.  You should never confuse facts and values, is and ought".  This is the scientific and philosophic version of the famous, "it's above my pay grade".  The idea is that scientists will remain the owners of all the facts but will then let the public make their value judgements.  Caveat: so long as the public "understands" the true facts as produced by scientists.  Because sometimes (say the scientists) they don't, and then the scientists need to tell them what the facts are, and make sure they understand that all they have is an uninformed opinion, a politics, a value judgement.  In a democracy, we may have to listen to that sort of thing, but we can't let irrational and uninformed opinion hold sway in place of the facts, now we can we?

This response that I'm putting into the mouths of scientists is pretty understandable to me.  In fact, when I was a science student, I can remember having the same type of response.  The division between facts and opinions seems clear as day, right?  Isn't that what science is all about, letting the facts "speak for themselves"?  Unfortunately, this response totally misses the point.  Because facts don't just lie around like stones, and they certainly don't speak -- humans have to manufacture them.  This sounds weird and postmodern at first, but is actually completely common sensical.  I think the confusion is caused by a missing modifier.  Science is not about going out and finding the facts like you were picking up seashells.  It's about finding important and relevant facts.  What the guys at CERN had for lunch before smashing up the Higgs Boson is a fact.  But we don't think it's relevant to particle theory.  Notice that the lack of relevance is emphatically not an a priori fact.  It's a judgement.  It's an opinion.  It's not "just" an opinion though. It's not an "arbitrary" opinion.  It's based on what you were trying to do by classifying certain things as facts to begin with -- in this case, to reliably predict a bunch of numbers coming out of the measurement devices in the collider.  The irrelevance of ham sandwiches to Higgs bosons had to become a fact.  Which means that the distinction between fact and opinion is ultimately pragmatic.  It cannot be made with talking about what you were trying to accomplish in making it.

Each new situation we investigate is going to begin with a similar process of deciding what the facts are given the question we're interested in.  And as we tighten the definition of the situation (moving from, say, I want to know how Nature works, to, say, I want to know when the next eclipse will happen) we will also simultaneously tighten what counts as a fact given the question.  Nothing terribly controversial here.  This is just stepping back and thinking about what's actually happening a little.  I think Stengers top level point is that as science has become bigger, more powerful, and more and institutionalized, scientists have forgotten about the pragmatic backdrop of how new knowledge is always produced.  Forgetting this turns them into easy marks for businesses, politicians, or institutions to exploit.  Plenty of these people are just waiting for an opportunity to separate a fool from his science.

This was really just sort of a long winded introduction.  I'll come back next time with a more detailed look at each of the sections of the first essay.  The concept of FPiPE is to stick close to the text, which I haven't done at all here.

Manufacturing Space

Embryology, morphology more generally, is the process by which the body defines a space for itself.  The metaphor makes it easier to see that the space doesn't pre-exist the things that come to fill it, but is built and extended piecemeal by those things as one thing transforms into another.  As the arm grows into the hand, the space that each new articulation will fill is laid out by unfinished developments in the previous articulation.  The embryo cannot avail itself of any global space or absolute positioning system outside itself.

In a lot of other places Deleuze contrasts two types of spaces.  Sedentary versus nomadic.  Striated versus smooth.  Extensive versus intensive.  Open versus closed.  Here in pp. 20-22 of the introduction to D&R, he draws a contrast between two the types of repetition (roughly speaking, object versus process) as they constitute geometric space, a temporal space, and a linguistic space.  In the case of each space we see the same distinction -- a homogenous pre-defined space that acts like an inert container for the things in it, versus a fragmented heterogenous space that defines itself through the things in it.  

To fill a space, to be distributed within it, is very different from distributing the space

As the examples he gives here demonstrate, it's not that it's impossible to define a space by some sort of identical repeating element like a square or a hexagon or the tick of a metronome.  It's simply that there had to have been some process that led to the production of this element and its tiling to infinity.  This process has to be repeated each time a new unit is generated, a fact that's hidden by the way all the units look the same and are thought to have fallen from some all purpose a priori sky.  For some reason this reminds me of cymatics.

This connection between the space and the units we use to divide it gets developed a little in the part of the first chapter devoted to "univocity" ("a single voice which raises the clamour of Being").  

There is a hierarchy which measures beings according to their limits, and according to their degree of proximity or distance from a principle. But there is also a hierarchy which considers things and beings from the point of view of power: it is not a question of considering absolute degrees of power, but only of knowing whether a being eventually 'leaps over' or transcends its limits in going to the limit of what it can do, whatever its degree. 'To the limit', it will be argued, still presupposes a limit. Here, limit [peras] no longer refers to what maintains the thing under a law, nor to what delimits or separates it from other things. On the contrary, it refers to that on the basis of which it is deployed and deploys all its power; hubris ceases to be simply condemnable and the smallest becomes equivalent to the largest once it is not separated from what it can do.  

Defining something by its power is a theme that often appears with Deleuze.  I believe that it's an idea he borrowed from Spinoza, who defines a body by everything it can do. It's also an idea that fits well with the anti-essentialism of pragmatist philosophy -- a thing is nothing more than the sum total of all the effects it has and all the things that can affect it.  And don't forget the echo of Nietzsche's "will to power" in here as well.  "Power" is somehow defined as the intensive measure of "ability to do".  Maybe a bit like temperature is defined/measured by the ability to heat other things up, though to be honest I've never been completely clear how this definition works.  

This starts to make a little better sense in the context of the egg.  Consider how an arm develops.  At first nothing more than a incipient bud at some point defined by a certain concentration of chemicals that serves as a sign, it later begins to grow and become a space of its own, until it reaches some point where it again differentiates into upper arm and forearm and later wrist, hand, and fingers.  Each of the limits that defined these articulations is really a sort of phase transition in a complex chemical soup.  At each step, the next organ or articulation begins as an intensity arising on the space laid out by the prior differentiation, but it then develops into a space in its own right.  The dynamics of the new space run as far as they can before that space in turn breaks apart into others.  Since there's no picture of the arm made available to the egg in advance, the process of defining the space and the process by which the parts grow to fill it and transform into one another are really the same process.

This seems like a small step towards an insight into what Deleuze means by power.  A heterogenous and open space that can't be defined in advance also can't be filled or covered with identical pre-formed units.  In fact, the absolute distinction between a neutral space container and the things that fill it is going to be lost.  Defining things by their power -- that is, by how far they can go before they become something else -- seems to be the necessary correlate of dealing with an open space.  

Double Wassup!

One thing that I was trying to get to in the last post was using my reading of sign=trigger to help understand the perpetually difficult idea of the Eternal Return.  This question really goes beyond the introduction, but it becomes important in Chapter 1: Difference in Itself.  In other words, I'm going to go way off track here.

Accordingly, some background is required.  Chapter 1 asks if there's a way to think of the concept of difference in itself and fundamentally.  This means thinking of difference as prior to identity.  If we just see difference as the difference between identities, as always a kind of comparison of identities, we are never going to be able to have a concept of difference in itself.  There are two reasons for this.  First, our concept of difference will just end up being whatever is left over or not matching in the comparison of two identities.  Difference won't be defined autonomously, but just negatively, as not-identity.  Second, who's going to do the comparing?  Difference is only going to be defined by reference to a third party who subtracts the two identities.  Identity is seen as self-sufficient and directly apprehended, but difference is going to require mediation by a third party.  

How could we flip this around?  At first it seems kind simple.  We'll just make the identities the result of a comparison of differences, into differences of differences.  For some reason I think of this in terms of network diagrams.  We are given a bunch of nodes, which are represented as points, and we connect them with links, which we draw in as lines.  What if you replace all the lines with points, making the old links the new nodes?  It seems straightforward, but when you actually try to draw it you run into some weird problems with recursion every time you see multiple links coming off of a single node (in the original diagram).

Maybe this is related to the way that thinking of a world without identities seems to always slip away from you in an infinite regress.  Consider my favorite example -- the vortex.  The water spiraling down the drain in your bathtub is composed of water molecules organizing themselves under the influence of gravity.  "It" is really composed of nothing more than the differences in speeds of the molecules involved.  It has what you intuitively call an identity, but it's a funny dynamic sort of identity.  People throw around epiphenomenalism and other terms to try to discuss the reality of this identity, but it always seems simplest to me to just call it a process and let it go at that.  There is one problem with that strategy though, because some clever sophist might say, "sure, the vortex is a process, but a process has to act on some thing".  If you go on to point out that one could also see the water molecule as a process (though obviously operating at a different time scale) they'll hit you with atoms, and the quarks, and then strings ... they won't be satisfied till they hit something that sounds like a fundamental thing, like a metaphysical marble, that can give them the ready-to-go identity to ground the whole chain.  I note in passing that these people have usually never studied quantum mechanics.  At any rate, you can see that a view of the world that truly never appealed to a concept of identity would have to be difference all the way down.  Every thing in it would have to be defined in terms of everything in it (hence the title of the last post).  Vortices made of swirling vortices ad infinitum.  Or concentrations of certain chemicals regulating genes that end up changing the concentration gradient of other chemicals, that ...

The egg is a space of unfolding differentiation that is exactly a world of vortices stacked upon vortices.  The organs it forms are nothing more than differences of differences of ... This is not what they look like when their development reaches the asymptotes that we're used to seeing, but if you watch the process unfold, you can see how the organs arise as differences in intensity (concentration being an intensive property) that come to occupy the body-without-organs.  We tend to treat them as things just because of the timescale of their change relative to the timescale of our thoughts. I would actually propose this as a definition: a thing is a process as seen from the vantage point of another process with a much much faster characteristic time scale.  Conversely, we might define something as a hallucination or an illusion (a not-thing) as a process viewed from a vantage point with a much much slower time scale.  This, to me, is the basic insight geology has to offer; all that is solid melts.

But I digress.  Because the question I'm after is actually how we recuperate the idea of identity once we understand the whole world as nothing but difference all the way down.  This world of Heraclition flux is exciting but risks verging on complete chaos.  Our goal, however, wasn't to dismiss identity as some sort of illusion.  We were merely trying to found identity on something that seemed more direct and more empirical, and see how it was constructed.  Now we seem to be in danger of losing the concept entirely.

I don't foresee this line of thought fully yet, but this has to be why repetition is part of the title, and the Eternal Return starts appearing as the culmination of metaphysics (and also the point where metaphysics becomes real action).  Instead of identity appearing at the beginning of the story, it now appears only at the very end.  The only thing that has one unified identity in the egg world is the egg itself, the totality.  You only reach the One when you pack in the full multitude of Everything.  Just like with the Eternal Return, you only reach this exact moment, the moment that will "repeat", when you pack in all the infinite possible variations that went into it.  This is when you "become who you are".  The idea goes way down and I believe is Deleuze's spin on the oldest proposition in the philosophical playbook: "ALL IS ONE" -- he's suggesting we read that as "ONE IS ALL", the only ONE is ALL.  

And thus, finally, after many labors, I come to my point.  Which was to use the metaphor of embryology and the idea of sign=trigger to try and illuminate passages like this:

That which is or returns has no prior constituted identity: things are reduced to the difference which fragments them, and to all the differences which are implicated in it and through which they pass. In this sense, the simulacrum and the symbol are one; in other words, the simulacrum is the SIGN in so far as the SIGN interiorises the conditions of its own repetition. The simulacrum seizes upon a constituent disparity in the thing from which it strips the rank of model.

The simulacrum (which is the crowning moment for Deleuze, the moment of the Eternal Return) is when the sign becomes a sign of itself.  When something becomes the trigger of itself in a feedback loop.  But that trigger has to pass through the whole environment that it (partly) triggers to manage this.  Is there any better description of that than an egg?

Every-thing is Everything

Last week's episode ended with the dramatic unveiling of embryogenesis.  I was more or less claiming that this is a key metaphor for understanding the two types of repetition Deleuze is uncovering towards the end of the introduction as well as thinking about the relationship between repetition and difference (qua cellular differentiation).  You may have thought that this was a perfectly nice neat package that explained pretty much everything, but under the surface I could already see trouble brewing.  Because, while I'm trying to finish writing about the introduction here, I've actually read all the way up to the end of chapter 1.  Which made me acutely aware that I really still didn't understand the bit about signs and signaling which immediately follows the passage I claim refers to embryogenesis:

For it is not the elements of symmetry present which matter for artistic or natural causality, but those which are missing and are not in the cause; what matters is the possibility of the cause having less symmetry than the effect. Moreover, causality would remain eternally conjectural, a simple logical category, if that possibility were not at some moment or other effectively fulfilled. For this reason, the logical relation of causality is inseparable from a physical process of SIGNALING, without which it would not be translated into action. By 'SIGNAL' we mean a system with orders of disparate size, endowed with elements of dissymmetry; by 'SIGN' we mean what happens within such a system, what flashes across the intervals when a communication takes place between disparates. The SIGN is indeed an effect, but an effect with two aspects: in one of these it expresses, qua SIGN, the productive dissymmetry; in the other it tends to cancel it. The SIGN is not entirely of the order of the symbol; nevertheless, it makes way for it by implying an internal difference (while leaving the conditions of its reproduction still external).

Hence yesterday's post pulled out every reference to signs, signaling, and signifying in the introduction and chapter 1.  Since I've given such a specific reading of the discussion of causality and the example of repeated decorative motifs, I feel like I need to be able to map what he says about signs onto that metaphor.  So here goes an attempt at that.

A sign is like a trigger.  A trigger is not the same thing as a cause, but is intimately related to it.  If we're talking about firing a gun, the distinction between "trigger" and "cause" can seem like a completely boring and semantic one.  Okay, sure, the trigger doesn't itself shoot the bullet out of the muzzle; it's just at the end of a long chain of things that "caused the shot to be fired".  The distinction is more interesting though when we're talking about complex or chaotic systems where you don't have a nice linear chain of causes to explain things.  Consider, for example, the famous Californian butterfly whose flapping wings "cause" a hurricane in Indonesia.  The butterfly may be a trigger, but it doesn't really make sense to call it a cause of the hurricane in this case.  The hurricane really has a dynamic of its own that's ready to go; in some sense you have to say that it is the cause of itself (given the feedback loop that characterizes it).  But this particular hurricane appearing in this particular place can still have a particular trigger.

This idea of a trigger fits nicely with the story of embryogenesis.  The symmetry breaking stimulus that began the cascade of differentiation that led to a symmetrical left and right hand is a trigger.  It didn't cause the hands to form.  Yet it was a sort of necessary intervention that kicks off their mechanism of formation.  I think we can unravel all of the references to signs with this equation of SIGN = SYMMETRY BREAKING STIMULUS (more broadly, I suppose this latter could be "differentiating stimulus", but our way into this problem is through symmetrical repetition).   For example, it now makes perfect sense to say that the sign expresses a "productive dissymmetry" which it then tends to "cancel" -- there will be a difference between left and right, but they will be the same; and both the difference, as well as the similarity, are expressed by the combination of stimulus and mechanism.

And now, looking back at the quotes from pages 8 and 18, we see how signification is opposed to representation.  Whatever trigger causes the beginning of left/right symmetry or the arm to branch into a wrist and 5 fingers is not a representation of the hand.  There's no picture of the hand, no code for the hand.  There's just a stimulus that, combined with the existing mechanism and under the "normal" conditions, produces a hand.  What's being repeated in development is the process that produces a hand, but so long as the connection is stable, we can usefully point to that process by the initial stimulus that reliably triggers it.  That pointing -- not representing -- is signification.  Suddenly you can see why Deleuze reaches for the word "mask".  We want to talk about the process of digital (as in possessing digits) differentiation.  We can refer to it by the trigger that sets it off, but that in some sense is completely beside the point and tends to hide that we're talking about a process.  On the other hand, it's just as misleading to call it the "hand process".  The hand is not the point or culmination of the process in any deep sense.  It's just one possible output of the process. Just a few tweaks here or there and it produces a paw or a set of talons or a flipper.  Referring to the whole process by pointing to its starting or ending point just masks what is going on.  In fact, the more you think about it, the more you find that "starting" and "ending" points are just some arbitrary limits we use to slice up an unbroken flux.  Behind those masks are other masks, ad infinitum ...

But wait, there's more!  Let's put trigger in for sign in this passage:

SIGNS involve heterogeneity in at least three ways: first, in the object which bears or emits them, and is necessarily on a different level, as though there were two orders of size or disparate realities between which the SIGN flashes; secondly, in themselves, since a SIGN envelops another 'object' within the limits of the object which bears it, and incarnates a natural or spiritual power (an Idea); finally, in the response they elicit, since the movement of the response does not 'resemble' that of the SIGN.

The fact that the trigger is not a cause accounts for the first heterogeneity; it's just a tiny difference that sets off a whole huge system.  I think I've even seen this disparate size idea phrased in terms of the energy released by the two pieces -- a sign can use a very small amount of energy to create a massive energy release in the system it triggers (not unlike a word resulting in a brawl) which in a different context might even be part of the definition of what makes it a sign rather than a cause.  The second heterogeneity also makes sense now, since we are using the "sign stimulus" to signify the "hand process".  These are of completely different orders though, since one is a thing and one a process, which is why 'object' appears in quotes in this case.  An Idea is not an object, but exactly a natural or spiritual process of differentiation (what's the difference?) that is kicked off somewhere specific.  An object becomes a sign precisely when it manages to signify this process to some"one"/thing.  So this second heterogeneity is between the actual and the virtual, the concrete assemblages and abstract machines, etc ... all the dualities that constantly appear in Deleuze's philosophy.  Substituting "trigger" also explains the final heterogeneity.  The hand as product looks nothing like the stimulus that triggered it or the process that produced it.  There's no resemblance.

There's more to go here.  We've got signs and learning, signs and problems, and signs and the simulacrum and the Eternal Return still to come.  And that's just to get up to the end of Chapter 1.  But for now, I think we've cracked the nut/seed/egg.

Searching for Signs

8

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are among those who bring to philosophy new means of expression. In relation to them we speak readily of an overcoming of philosophy. Furthermore, in all their work, movement is at issue. Their objection to Hegel is that he does not go beyond false movement - in other words, the abstract logical movement of 'mediation'. They want to put metaphysics in motion, in action. They want to make it act, and make it carry out immediate acts. It is not enough, therefore, for them to propose a new representation of movement; representation is already mediation. Rather, it is a question of producing within the work a movement capable of affecting the mind outside of all representation; it is a question of making movement itself a work, without interposition; of substituting direct SIGNS for mediate representations; of inventing vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the mind. This is the idea of a man of the theatre, the idea of a director before his time

10

When we say, on the contrary, that movement is repetition and that this is our true theatre, we are not speaking of the effort of the actor who 'repeats' because he has not yet learned the part. We have in mind the theatrical space, the emptiness of that space, and the manner in which it is filled and determined by the SIGNS and masks through which the actor plays a role which plays other roles; we think of how repetition is woven from one distinctive point to another, including the differences within itself.

18

The mask, the costume, the covered is everywhere the truth of the uncovered. The mask is the true subject of repetition. Because repetition differs in kind from representation, the repeated cannot be represented: rather, it must always be SIGNIFIED, masked by what SIGNIFIES it, itself masking what it SIGNIFIES.

20

For it is not the elements of symmetry present which matter for artistic or natural causality, but those which are missing and are not in the cause; what matters is the possibility of the cause having less symmetry than the effect. Moreover, causality would remain eternally conjectural, a simple logical category, if that possibility were not at some moment or other effectively fulfilled. For this reason, the logical relation of causality is inseparable from a physical process of SIGNALING, without which it would not be translated into action. By 'SIGNAL' we mean a system with orders of disparate size, endowed with elements of dissymmetry; by 'SIGN' we mean what happens within such a system, what flashes across the intervals when a communication takes place between disparates. The SIGN is indeed an effect, but an effect with two aspects: in one of these it expresses, qua SIGN, the productive dissymmetry; in the other it tends to cancel it. The SIGN is not entirely of the order of the symbol; nevertheless, it makes way for it by implying an internal difference (while leaving the conditions of its reproduction still external).

22-23

Learning takes place not in the relation between a representation and an action (reproduction of the Same) but in the relation between a SIGN and a response (encounter with the Other). SIGNS involve heterogeneity in at least three ways: first, in the object which bears or emits them, and is necessarily on a different level, as though there were two orders of size or disparate realities between which the SIGN flashes; secondly, in themselves, since a SIGNenvelops another 'object' within the limits of the object which bears it, and incarnates a natural or spiritual power (an Idea); finally, in the response they elicit, since the movement of the response does not 'resemble' that of the SIGN. The movement of the swimmer does not resemble that of the wave, in particular, the movements of the swimming instructor which we reproduce on the sand bear no relation to the movements of the wave, which we learn to deal with only by grasping the former in practice as SIGNS. That is why it is so difficult to say how someone learns: there is an innate or acquired practical familiarity with SIGNS, which means that there is something amorous - but also something fatal - about all education. We learn nothing from those who say: 'Do as I do'. Our only teachers are those who tell us to 'do with me', and are able to emit SIGNS to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce. In other words, there is no ideo-motivity, only sensory-motivity. When a body combines some of its own distinctive points with those of a wave, it espouses the principle of a repetition which is no longer that of the Same, but involves the Other - involves difference, from one wave and one gesture to another, and carries that difference through the repetitive space thereby constituted. To learn is indeed to constitute this space of an encounter with SIGNS, in which the distinctive points renew themselves in each other, and repetition takes shape while disguising itself. Apprenticeship always gives rise to images of death, on the edges of the space it creates and with the help of the heterogeneity it engenders. SIGNS are deadly when they are lost in the distance, but also when they strike us with full force. Oedipus receives a SIGN once from too far away, once from too close, and between the two a terrible repetition of the crime is woven. Zarathustra receives his 'SIGN' either from too near or from too far, and only at the end does he foresee the correct distance which will turn that which in eternal return makes him ill into a liberatory and redemptive repetition. SIGNS are the true elements of theatre. They testify to the spiritual and natural powers which act beneath the words, gestures, characters and objects represented. They signify repetition as real movement, in opposition to representation which is a false movement of the abstract.

24

It is true that we have strictly defined repetition as difference without concept. However, we would be wrong to reduce it to a difference which falls back into exteriority, because the concept embodies the form of the Same, without seeing that it can be internal to the Idea and possess in itself all the resources of SIGNS, symbols and alterity which go beyond the concept as such.

56-57

Empiricism truly becomes transcendental, and aesthetics an apodictic discipline, only when we apprehend directly in the sensible that which can only be sensed, the very being of the sensible: difference, potential difference and difference in intensity as the reason behind qualitative diversity. It is in difference that movement is produced as an 'effect', that phenomena flash their meaning like SIGNS. The intense world of differences, in which we find the reason behind qualities and the being of the sensible, is precisely the object of a superior empiricism.63-64

Neither the problem nor the question is a subjective determination marking a moment of insufficiency in knowledge. Problematic structure is part of objects themselves, allowing them to be grasped as SIGNS, just as the questioning or problematising instance is a part of knowledge allowing its positivity and its specificity to be grasped in the act of learning.

67

That which is or returns has no prior constituted identity: things are reduced to the difference which fragments them, and to all the differences which are implicated in it and through which they pass. In this sense, the simulacrum and the symbol are one; in other words, the simulacrum is the SIGN in so far as the SIGN interiorises the conditions of its own repetition. The simulacrum seizes upon a constituent disparity in the thing from which it strips the rank of model.