Who Steers the Steersman?

Why study technnology?  Of course, there are many utilitarian perspectives from which it's easy to answer this question. Philosophy, however, is not one of them.  So just what is it that Simondon thinks we should do with his theory of technical objects?  In this second part of the book, he builds towards a theory of why need to study technology for both philosophical and cultural reasons.

He begins with a fairly commonplace observation.  Kids just use technology without understanding it.  When exposed to it early on, they develop a knack or know how, a hands on expertise with no theoretical underpinning.  Simondon calls this the minority mode of technical knowledge.  This is not a value judgement, but simply a reminder that we usually acquire it as yutes.  By contrast, adults develop a rational, theoretical and abstract knowledge of technology.  This is the majority mode, which Simondon also calls encyclopedic (after the Encyclopédie).  In this mode, we experience technology as a sort of functional or logical diagram.  We understand its general principles without necessarily knowing how to operate it.  The two modes are related as the craftsman is related to the engineer, as know-how is to know-that.  

In Simondon's eyes, neither mode alone adequately conceives the relationship between humans and technology.  His ultimate conclusion is that both are necessary, and that they should be integrated in precisely the way his analogy suggests; we must inevitably pass through childhood in order to become adults.  No one but Athena springs into the world fully formed, and an adults' encyclopedic knowledge is incomplete without an understanding of its development and an acknowledgement of its path dependency.  Nevertheless, the way he reaches this conclusion does imply a certain centrality of the majority mode of knowledge.  And since the most interesting idea in Part 2 Chapter 1 is Simondon's conception of cybernetics as a new variety of encyclopedism, I want to spend some time exploring his idea of how majoritarian knowledge works.

Simondon's reference point for majority knowledge is Diderot and d'Alembert's Enlightenment era classic: the Encyclopédie.  While I vaguely thought this was mainly a philosophical work, it turns out it contained an enormous number of engravings that diagrammed in detail how various machines work (as might have been obvious from reading the subtitle: "a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts").  Simondon uses the example of the Encyclopédie to concretely illustrate how the Enlightenment ushers us into a new era of majoritarian knowledge.  Until its publication, knowledge of how these various machines worked was the exclusive property of the medieval guilds, that is, of the people who were trained through experience to use these machines every day.  Which makes it easier to understand why the book was briefly banned.  So the Encyclopédie was an early example of what we would now call the democratization of knowledge.  It was universal in two senses.  First, it described all these machines on the basis of scientific principles that they all shared.  This perspective in itself eliminates each guild's claim that only they know how their mill or saw or whathaveyou works.  As a result, the Encyclopedia illuminated a general technical reality that integrated previously unrelated esoteric knowledges.   Second, the book was aimed at everyone.  Of course, these days we would immediately jump in to say, well, every rich, educated, white male of a certain social status.   And while there's undoubtedly merit in this objection, (and indeed, Simondon will next discuss just how incomplete this 'universalization' was) it is nevertheless true that the Encyclopedia aspired to make knowledge of the technical world much more broadly available than ever before.  So the Encyclopédie was universalizing both in terms of the object it addressed (general technical knowledge) and the subject to whom it was addressed ('rational man').

Majority knowledge always aspires to this sort of universality.  It attempts to include everything and be for everybody (in principle we can all become adults).  It liberates knowledge from the prison of specialization, making it the property of every adult, and in this sense it is always democratic and revolutionary.   At the same time it also constructs the very notion of 'adult' and defines the unity of 'what can be known'.  The Encyclopédie is not just universalizing but totalizing and comprehensive in scope.  In this context, Simondon points out that while majority and minority knowledge are opposed in most respects, they do share a common goal — roughly speaking, to produce a competent adult as master of some technical reality.  In the case of the minority knowledge of the craftsman, this process culminates in the initiation rites that induct people into guilds or specialized societies.  Through a period of practice, the apprentice becomes an adult by proving that he can master the material of his trade.  In a sense, he's learning to domesticate or tame his technical reality, to dominate it, as if he were casting a magic spell over it.  But by the same token this domination also defines what it means to be an adult craftsman.  It represents a coming of age ritual or rite of passage, a test to prove one's manhood, but also something that demands a sacred respect for the material itself.  I can think of no better contemporary example than the power and arrogance conferred by surviving the hazing ritual of med school.  While it's less obvious, and at first even seems to move in the opposite direction, the same type of process is actually at work in majority knowledge at a more abstract level.  Through reading the encyclopedia we come to tame technical reality as a whole, and in general.  And this sort of universal rational knowledge is precisely what it means to be an educated 'Enlightened' adult.  In short, both the universal object of technology and the universal subject who masters it have to be constructed through an encyclopedic revolution that defines "everything" and "everyone".  But through this construction, we gain an almost magical power over the technical reality we tame.  "He fixes radios by thinking!"

The fact that both subject and object of encyclopedic knowledge must be constructed in the process of writing the encyclopedia explains why we've seen several of these revolutions, each of which builds on the partial success of the previous ones.  Every construction is incomplete.  Simondon discusses three examples of encyclopedic movements — the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Cybernetic.  Each one liberates knowledge from a type of specialization and thus includes more of the world as something that every human can understand.  It's in this sense that Simondon refers to each of these as a humanist movement that reduces alienation.  The Renaissance liberated us from the dogmatic reliance on the church's interpretation of ancient philosophers.  Direct knowledge of Greek texts was 'reborn' as the birthright of all mankind.  As we've seen, the Enlightenment represented the maturing of an objective scientific and technical view of the world that liberated us from the social specialization of knowledge and the 'irrational' power of king and clergy.  Finally, we come to the contemporary, or cybernetic revolution.  Since this is exactly the revolution Simondon hopes to conceptualize with his theory of technics, he can only describe it as a work in progress.  But since it is analogous to the other encyclopedic revolutions, we can say something about how it should proceed.  Remarkably, given that Simondon is writing in 1958, I think we can still usefully describe ourselves as in the midst of the cybernetic revolution as he construes it.

So what is cybernetics anyhow?  We've mostly lost this word, which Nobert Weiner coined to refer to the feedback loop involved in steering a ship.  And to recover its roots as an academic discipline would take us well beyond the scope of a single blog post (one of my old professors, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, wrote an interesting book about the history of the first wave of cybernetics). I think the only crucial point to understand is that cybernetics was conceived by its founders as the study of "teleological mechanisms" that operate via feedback.  Like, say, the thermostat.  Despite the fact that it is a simple material device, it makes some sense to claim that the thermostat has a goal of maintaining the room at a fixed temperature.  It achieves this goal of homeostasis through a negative feedback control loop.  As far as I can tell, early cybernetics basically amounted to the applying information theory's equation of information with negative entropy to the problem of constructing negative feedback control.  It's information processing that allows any system to maintain itself in an ordered internal equilibrium or homeostasis in the face of the environment's tendency towards disorder.  At least, this is what I gleaned from the first half of Wiener's famous book, The Human Use of Human Beings (and Dupuy's discusssion).  

Simondon's conception of cybernetics takes the same idea in a much more radical direction, and explains why I left off reading Wiener in the middle.  Wiener's conception of cybernetics is completely conservative.  The whole issue is framed as a question of how things stay the same.  Which means that its not so much a study of how teleological mechanisms actually come to exist as it is a study of how what are really goal-less mechanisms come to look like they have a teleology.  [A related modern idea would be Daniel Dennett's intentional stance and his related attempt to explain consciousness away.]  Wiener wants to know how an already constituted unit maintains its identity.  Such a unit doesn't "really" have goals, other that self-preservation, which is more a condition of existence than a goal, per se.  By contrast, Simondon is interested in how there got to be a unit in the first place.  Which is is why he constantly speaks of "recurrent causality", and not feedback.  We can use these terms as synonyms only if we understand that in Simondon's theory it's feedback that actually creates the stable identity we're interested in studying.  His 'steersman' is not a homonculus in charge of manipulating a wheel to hold an already given external boat on pre-determined course.  Instead, he steers the boat, that is himself, into existence.  This was exactly the kernel of the theory articulated in Part 1 -- recurrent causality creates the concrete technical object.  

But how is this more radical understanding of what cybernetics has to offer related to Simondon's idea that it represents a major new encyclopedic revolution?  What object does cybernetics unify?  What new subjectivity does it construct?  And what exactly does it liberate us from?  For Simondon, cybernetics is the general study of how teleological mechanisms comes to exist at all.  It aims to be a 'science of finality', a study of how goals get established and accomplished in any system.  So cybernetics is encyclopedic in the sense that it attempts to unify all self-regulating systems as a single object of study.  Simondon's theory of the technical object and its evolution is the first step in such a universal study.  These objects become more self-regulating by becoming more concrete, and this process proceeds through element-individual-ensemble cycles that explicitly include human invention as part of the cycle (as necessary for concretizing an individual).  Once we have studied the creation of finality as a technical subject, we should be able to apply this understanding to organisms as well, thus creating a new universal science.

Adopting this type of techno-logical viewpoint is meant to liberate us from our contemporary sense that technology is spinning out of our control.  Already in 1958, Simondon feels the Enlightenment's "march of progress" has become a sort of frog march towards an unknown and scary new destination.  And our sense of dread has only grown in the intervening 65 years.  We can only address this apocalyptic fear by understanding how technical objects actually come by the goals they have.  This is the only way to tame our complex and overwhelming new technical reality.  Cybernetics promises to help us study the recurrent causal connections that lead to goal seeking behavior in any system, and hence to demystify the whole notion of teleology by including it as part of the technical realm.  The Renaissance freed us from dogmatic thought (secret theoretical knowledge possessed by the clergy).  The Enlightenment freed us from 'irrational' expertise (secret practical knowledge possessed only by guild initiates).  The Cybernetic revolution is meant to free us from the idea that our machines, and the machine of society itself, are beyond the individual's comprehension, and thus somehow foreign or alien to our human world (secret cabal knowledge, perhaps possessed only by ChatGPT).  In short, through cybernetics we come to see that finality is just an aspect of how certain systems operate.

Including ourselves.  Because we too are "teleological mechanisms".  Simondon's cybernetic revolution promises to reach a point of self-reflexivity that makes it qualitatively different than the previous universalizing revolutions.  By studying teleological mechanisms in general, we study ourselves.  But by studying ourselves, we change ourselves.  This is the important distinction between Simondon's understanding of cybernetics and that of first wave thinkers like Wiener.  If we accept as intuitive axiom a simple analogy between self-regulating machines and living organisms, we accept the fixed identity of the self-regulating unit as an already given object.  But if we develop cybernetics as a purely objective scientific discipline, we limit its universality and drain it of its true revolutionary potential.  Wiener would like to think he can apply cybernetic ideas to humans as well.  But by starting with the premise that both are equilibrium and identity maintaining systems, he prejudges the question and limits his new science to systems whose sole goal is self-preservation.  This allows us to situate his subjective point of view at some stable remove outside the investigation, and not apply it directly to himself. 

The old universality of the Enlightenment position simply isn't tenable anymore.  Not because machines have finally become autonomous and indistinguishable from humans in their functional capacities, but precisely because these two distinct sides have become coupled.  The causal construction of teleology has changed in the past century.  Previously we took human teleology for granted as the bedrock of our technical world.  We built these machines for us.  They served our purposes, and any goal they appeared to have was borrowed from humanity.  In short, as we saw last time, the "technical individual" was a human.  Gradually, the machines developed analogous capacities that appear to replace the human and displace the individual to the level of elements or ensembles.  Wiener's cybernetics, just like the modern computational AI it influenced, would like to analyze this situation abstractly, by considering the human and the machine as simply different instantiations of a single teleo-logical mechanism.  But this simply isn't the concrete reality of the technical situation.  As we saw, while there may be an abstract analogy between man and machine, in concrete causal terms the mechanisms are quite different.  And what 's more, the two types of causal mechanisms are now coupled in a recurrent feedback system that influences the evolution of, and blurs the boundaries of, both of them.  This is the situation Simondon thinks cybernetics is called to investigate.  It would constitute a qualitatively new revolution because it would inevitably alter the identity of the individual investigator, who in turn would alter her technology, who in turn ...  The result is a universal encyclopedia that's filled with turtles on every page.  It implies a majority knowledge where we never stop growing up, and where our path to adulthood will depend on the trajectory of our upbringing.  This may not, in the end, even be a science so much as a philosophy or a mode of living.

I've tried my best to convey what I see as the profundity of Simondon's very different conception of cybernetics.  It's always difficult to adequately describe these feedback loops that put the identity of every term into flux.  But to emphasize that such dissolutions can be creative, I want to give Simondon the last word on the importance of a 'technics of finality':

However, it is wrong to say that the technics of finalized organization are useful only because of their practical results; they are useful in the sense that they bring finality from the magical level to the technical level. Whereas the evocation of a superior end, and of the order that realizes this end, is considered to be the final term in the search for its justification (because life is conflated with finality, in an age when technical schemas are mere schemas of causality), the introduction of technological schemas of finality in thought plays a cathartic role. That of which there is a technics cannot act as an ultimate justification. Both individual life and social life contain many aspects of finalized processes, but perhaps finality is not the most profound aspect of individual or social life, any more so than the different modalities of finalized actions, such as adaptation to a milieu.
One could undoubtedly say that it is not a veritable finality that animates the processes of recurrent causality with negative reaction; at the very least this techni­cal production of teleological mechanisms enables the most inferior, most primitive aspect of finality to leave the magical domain behind: the subordination of a means to an end, hence the superiority of an end with respect to its means. By becom­ing a technical matter, such organization is henceforth only one of the aspects of social or individual life, and its prestige can no longer mask the possibilities for the development, advent, and emergence of new forms, which cannot be justified by finality, since they produce their own end as the last term of evolution; evolution maladapts as much as it adapts. The realization of adaptations is but one of life's aspects; homeostases are partial functions; technology, in incorporating them and allowing them not only to be thought, but to be brought into existence rationally, leaves the open processes of social and individual life fully exposed. In this sense, technology reduces alienation. (METO, 121).  

What is a Machine?

This is the question that animates the first section of Gilbert Simondon's On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects.  Simondon's answer to this question is complex and original, especially considering that he laid his theory out in 1958.  In fact, anyone critically pondering the current breathlessness around generative AI could benefit from considering his 75 year old critique of early cybernetics' facile identification of man with autonomous machine.  His ideas are so clarifying because he refuses the habitual way we have of looking at the machine; it is poorly understood if we reduce it to a functional black-box (either as a physical or algorithmic input/output table) that fulfills some human appointed task.  Instead, Simondon claims that to understand the machine, we have to look at it in itself, and not just as an intermediary that serves another purpose.  We have to look inside and see how it actually works.  And he backs up this striking change in perspective with a wealth of technical examples detailed enough to have sent me scrambling to wikipedia to keep up.   For instance we learn in detail about the diode (and triode to pentode), the Guimbault turbine, and the audiometer, to cite a few examples, as well as why it's called an internal combustion engine (in retrospect kinda obvious, but not something I ever considered -- in a steam engine, the combustion happens outside the chamber).  Simondon discusses such details at length primarily in order to show us the actual causal interactions of energy and information that make each machine work.  But the examples also enable him to examine how these interactions change over time as technology evolves.  In fact, the history of development of the machine plays an integral role in Simondon's theory of the precise way in which technical objects exist as such.

This probably all sounds pretty abstract.  And you can see a confusion in the last sentence between "machine" and "technical object".  So let me start by giving a rough and ready definition of Simondon's machine, and clarify some of his terminology.  For Simondon, the machine is a specific type of technical object, which he calls the technical individual.  There are also technical elements, which compose parts of the machine, and technical ensembles consisting of several machines.  Each of these technical objects is both a material thing and a functional thing.  But what makes them "technical" is essentially the intersection of these two worlds.  Roughly speaking, a technical object is a material object that has some human thought baked into it.  It's this "designedness" that distinguishes it from a natural object (or perhaps more accurately that gives it a technical mode of existence, alongside its natural mode).  Conversely, a technical object is not just a thought, just an abstract idea or diagrammatic function, but an idea that has been made concrete, or been materialized in a particular way.  

In a sense, this is kinda obvious.  At least at this moment in history, how would we talk about the products of technology without talking about humanity?  But Simondon's point is not simply that humans fabricate technical objects, which then exist somewhere between the ideal and the natural world.  He sees the development of technical objects as having an evolution from the abstract realm of thought towards the concrete realm of the natural world.  That is, their mode of existence also implies a trajectory of technical progress.  However, this definition of progress shouldn't be confused with our everyday notion of better, faster, stronger, and cheaper.  The two concepts may often overlap, but Simondon's definition considers progress from the point of view of the machine itself, irrespective of whether today's machine fulfills its human appointed task in a way we value more highly than yesterday's.  "Progress" is concretization.  

How exactly does this work though?  To really understand him, it's important to study Simondon's examples in detail.  Unfortunately, the details would take us to far afield.  So instead, let me describe the process generally, but with reference to a single example.  Consider an engine.  The abstract idea of an engine is pretty straightforward.  You heat something and it expands and pushes on something.  Then you let it cool and it contracts and pulls. After that you repeat the cycle.  An abstract engine has various functional parts we can represent in a diagram.  We need a chamber with a moving piston.  We need a source of heat and a cooling reservoir held at different temperatures.  But as the Feynman Lecture admirably demonstrates with its example of the rubber band engine, we have a lot of leeway in choosing what material structures will fill these roles.  This indeterminacy is obviously what makes the physicists black-box functional diagram of the engine "abstract".  The ideal engine doesn't have any friction, it's reversible, and it's constructed of ideal materials that don't deform under pressure or store heat in themselves, or ... do anything other than what they're supposed to do.  It's a spherical cow.  In this abstract engine, each part has only one role, and it plays that role perfectly, without any unintended side effects or consequences for how the other parts complete their task.  Obviously, no concrete engine fulfills these criteria.  But when we start building engines, we start off trying to build them to match the abstract idea we have of them.  We make each material piece of the concrete machine correspond as closely as possible to a single function in the abstract machine.  And we try to isolate the operation of these pieces so that they only interact with one another in the simple ways specified in the abstract machine (eg. the piston should move, but not heat up, or if it heats up it should not transfer this heat to the chamber).  However, as we build more sophisticated engines from different materials and made to serve different applications, we start to have to take into account the various "side effects" due to any particular materialization of our design.  These side effects are really just the inescapable consequences of the full laws of physics being applied to the concrete materials of our machine.  None of our actual parts can really be nothing but the Platonic From of their functional role.  Because they are material structures, they always end up containing something more than they were designed for.  They are subject to gravity and friction, have some chemical composition and structural integrity that does not bear infinite cycles of heating and cooling, etc ...  

Of course, we can try to improve our concretization of each part so that it more closely matches our abstract diagram.  But Simondon observes that this is not actually how technical objects progress (ie. become more concrete).  Changing the particular way an abstract part is materialized leaves the technical object at the same level of overall concreteness.  The only way the object can become more concrete is through creatively using, rather than minimizing, these side effects.  In other words, progress happens when the pieces of the machine begin to leave behind the single abstract function they originally played in the designer's notebook and to have their concrete properties directly incorporated into the design in a positive and productive way.  In other words, a more concrete machine synthesizes functions held distinct at the level of the abstract machine.  Each piece of the concrete machine is designed to play more than one abstract functional role, and conversely, any given function will be carried out by several pieces at once.  In this way, the margin of indeterminacy that applied to the materialization of each abstract functional role is reduced; if if neither of two functions can occur without this particular material part, then the part is rendered more concrete, more necessary to the machine's functioning, and less abstract.  The example Simondon gives in the case of the engine is the way the cooling fins on the chamber also come to serve as structural reinforcement of its capacity to contain the explosion happening inside it (in the case of an internal combustion engine).  

At the limit of this process of concretization, the technical object converges with the natural object.  Every piece becomes so tightly related to all the others that all the possible interactions between pieces become necessary for it to function.  No material piece can be considered in isolation, unless it be the entirety of the machine.  The technical individual (aka the machine) comes together as an insoluble individualized unit precisely when the causal interactions between all its pieces form a self-stabilizing feedback loop.  Each part becomes so co-adapted to the others that none would function in isolation.  But at the same time, the effect of their mutual functioning guarantees their mutual conditions of functioning, like a snail that secretes its own environment.  In short: the technical individual arises in the manner of a vortex.  It stands up tile a tipi.  At that point, all the causal effects described by all the various sciences that apply to the functioning of the machine have been designed into it from the beginning, so that the abstract functional diagram of the machine also converges with our full scientific understanding of its materialization.  While this is clearly a limit case we never reach with our technology, Simondon claims that machines naturally progresses in the direction of greater concreteness when they can.  

Progress, even in Simondon's technical sense, is not inevitable.  Under what conditions does the technical object become more concrete?  That is, how do machines evolve?  It's really to fully answer this question that Simondon builds his whole tripartite theory of the technical object (element, individual, ensemble).  First, he discusses technical evolution at the level of the individual (the machine).  His idea is that a machine placed in a relatively static environment won't evolve or progress in his sense of the term.  Such a machine might change, in fact, in human terms it might even improve dramatically, but it will not exhibit the type of creative evolution powered by a structural synthesis of functions that defines Simondon's idea of progress.  In a static and controlled environment, the machine will only become over-adapated to its conditions (he calls this hypertelic -- though he may be using this word in its root sense of hyper-telos).  The functioning of each part might be improved, but there won't be a discontinuous and creative jump to a new functional synthesis.  In order to create such a jump in concreteness, the machine must confront an inherently dynamic environment, one defined by the fact that it reacts back upon the machine.  This can only come about when the machine's human defined task collides with the continuous variability of the world in which it is supposed to carry this task out.  Such unstable conditions prevent the specialized, over-adapted machine from functioning and require that any successful machine create a sort of buffer around itself that is stable enough to allow it to function.  In other words, the functioning of the machine will create the environment in which it is able to function.  

Here we're clearly looking at the same vortical structure we discussed earlier from a slightly different angle.  Simondon refers to what I've called a buffer as an "associated milieu" that surrounds the machine.  Each true technical individual requires such a milieu to function, and conversely, each associated milieu supports only a single technical individual.  The symbiosis between machine and milieu becomes a tight, self-regulating feedback loop that allows the machine to persist in the unstable environment at the intersection of human purpose and real world variability.  And it's the existence of this milieu that allows the various functional parts of the machine to interact in the global and synergistic way we talked about earlier.  So technical progress depends on the stabilization of an unstable environment through the actions of something operating immanently within that environment.  Simondon connects the idea of the associated milieu to the "ground" in gestalt theory, as well as to the Freudian unconscious (and the Deleuzian virtual, we might add).  But his discussion of this is very compressed and tangential to his main point about technical evolution.  So, despite the fact that the existence of this milieu, and its distinction from the machine itself, bring up a host of interesting philosophical questions related to the BwO, I'm going to skip over them now. 

So, technical elements evolve by interacting with a variable material world until they come together in a moment of concrescence to form a technical individual.  Is that the end of the story then?  Do these individuals go on to produce other individuals like themselves, with perhaps some variation?  Have we turned Darwin loose among the machines?  Simondon's answer is no -- individual machines do not reproduce themselves.  In his view it takes an entire ensemble of machines to produce the elements needed to construct an individual.  On the one hand, this seems like common sense.  My computer does not spontaneously produce another version of itself (Apple shareholders would be very disappointed if it did).  In fact, while I can design a new computer with this one, actually materializing it requires a globe-spanning supply chain of truly enormous complexity that produces everything from its silicon to the metal in its usb dongles.  On the other hand, it seems like this might be a matter of semantics.  I mean, couldn't we just call the collection of machines a machine itself?  Maybe that mega-machine doesn't exactly reproduce itself, but its sure seems to grow at least, metastasizing like capital itself.  Perhaps the ensemble is a kind of evolving, quasi-organic individual in its own right?

Simondon, however, is having none of this vague thinking by analogy.  One of the great contributions of his theory is his insistence that we need to examine the actual causal connections that allow a machine to function.  This is, after all, how he came to his definition of the machine to begin with; it is defined by a set of reciprocal causal relations between elements and between the individual machine and its associated environment that lead to a homeostatic feedback loop.  In other words, the pieces of an individual technical object are functionally inseparable.  If we were to cut into those connections, the integrity of the machine would fall apart (or at least change qualitatively).  This is not true of an ensemble.  An ensemble contains several individuals that are maintained as distinct.   It limits the casual interactions between them in just such a way that an associated milieu that would weld them into a single machine does not develop amongst them.  The example Simondon gives is the scientific laboratory -- we try to make everything in it a separate and isolated variable that doesn't couple to any of the other parts.  Likewise, in the opposite direction, a technical element is, by itself, inert.  It is stable in the way a seed is stable precisely because it contains all its possibilities inside itself and doesn't interact with the outside world much at all.  In short, the levels are defined by the density and distribution of their causal connections.  [The modern analogy for the same idea would be Tononi and Koch's Intergrated Information Theory of consciousness, with the machine playing the role of the high-Φ conscious entity.]

This rigorous separation of element, individual, and ensemble is the foundation of Simondon's theory of technical evolution.  Individuals don't directly produce new individuals (which, given their definition could seemingly only happen as some sort of asexual budding?).  However, when integrated into ensembles, they do produce new elements that have all sorts of potentialities latent within them.  One simple example would be something like steel.  It takes a pretty serious ensemble to produce steel.  You need supplies of iron and carbon produced by various machines, as well as a complicated foundry machine.  But what you get out of this process is not just a hunk of metal.  The result is a special material with a certain "technicity" built into it.  By itself, the steel won't do anything, but, because of all the properties engineered into it by the ensembles which goes into its production, it can be integrated into all kinds of new machines that could not be constructed in any other way.  It takes a village to raise a skyscraper. Thus, technology evolves through element-individual-ensemble-element cycles that gradually bootstrap whole new types of technology into existence.  

The clear distinction between levels of technical objects also allows us to understand where the confusing analogy between man and machine comes from.  As Simondon repeatedly points out, humans and machines are only superficially similar, and coincide only when we consider them solely from a functional utilitarian standpoint. Since the underlying causal structures that accomplish these goals are totally different, its only under very narrow and artificial conditions that the two will function identically.  Consider the contemporary case of "artificial general intelligence" in this light.  When we call a large language model like ChatGPT 'intelligent' we are actually comparing two very dissimilar objects.  On the one side we have a statistical model of human language encoded in silicon. When we give it a set of plain english input symbols it will give us another set of plain english output symbols that we deem relevant or satisfactory in some sense.  On the other side, we have an adult hairless chimp whose neural network is capable of performing a similar input-output task.  And all we know about what these two have in common is that a hairless chimp named Turing cannot tell which input-out relation belongs to which side, no matter how much time he spends typing into a chat window.  Is this result surprising though?  Turing is testing the difference between these objects in the most narrow possible way.  I won't say its uninteresting or irrelevant to look at a human being as solely a language processing algorithm, but you'll have to grant that it is a tad reductive, no?  Is human intelligence really reducible to statistically likely language processing?  Are humans really reducible to their intelligence?  In this comparison, we're treating humans in a way that Simondon would refuse to treat even a machine!  

Why would ever we take up such a narrow mode of analysis of either human or machine?  Simondon answers this question by pointing to the history of technology -- we confuse man with machine because, historically, man machined himself.  Consider the technology involved in pre-industrial, artisanal production.  At this level of technology, humans used discreet tools that were mostly incapable of directly interacting with one another.  How did these technical elements come together into a self-stabilizing technical individual in this era?  They only came together as a machine in Simondon's sense through the human individual, the artisan or craftsman.  It was the craftsman who understood the potential of his tools and materials and who provided for their mutual causal interaction in his workshop.  Thus the craftsman was a technical individual at the center of an associated milieu.   That is, he was a machine.  Of course, in some cases, it was a group of human individuals who coordinated their actions to form a single machine (consider, for example, the rhythm of harvesting with a scythe).  In either case the point is the same.  Humans made themselves coextensive with the causal network that accomplished the task.  Naturally, then, when ensembles of these various human machines began producing new technical elements that would later coalesce into new industrial machines, the human individual found his role as a technical individual replaced by the material machine.  In short, we can only imagine the machine replacing us if we have already "machined" ourselves.  And when this replacement happens, the human individual is forced to move either up or down the technical hierarchy.  We either move down to become elements of the new machine, ancillary parts serving a single role in its functioning, or we move up become overseers of the ensemble of machines, coordinators of information produced by a system of machines held as distinct.  I assume that it's something like this latter role that Simondon will commend to us as the book unfolds, but that's the subject of the next post. 

Some Preliminary Comments on The Fold and a New Reading List

After dipping my toe into the source material, I proceeded on to Deleuze's discussion of Leibniz in The Fold.  Not surprisingly, this is a pretty difficult book.  Not only does Deleuze try to make a consistent system out of Leibniz's scattered and fragmentary work, but he also tries to connect it to Baroque painting, architecture, and music.  The first task alone would be relatively monumental, since Leibniz not only wrote quite a lot, but he wrote in a number of different contexts -- pure mathematics, physics, religion, philosophy -- which we would now consider incompatible, but which Leibniz clearly saw as harmoniously related.  The second part could likewise be a study in itself, especially since Deleuze does not confine himself to historical Baroque figures such as El Greco, but extends to concept to include "neo-Baroque" artists like Simon Hantai, Dubuffet, and others.  And then the basic thesis of the book is that these two sides, while they are completely distinct and each possess a complicated logic of their own, are nevertheless so inseparable as to be two sides of the same coin.  This, after all, is the concept of the fold -- two things that are doubled or folded over one another to form the non-dual.  So it's a lot to pack into a 137 page book.

Early on in reading the book, I decided to take a different approach than I usually have to reading Deleuze.  Instead of live blogging it line by line, I read the whole thing through relatively quickly and superficially (ie. in under a month).  The plan was to immediately begin again with a more detailed second reading.  Along the way, however, I began to feel like I hadn't read quite enough Leibniz source material to fully appreciate what was going on.  Since Deleuze makes frequent reference to Leibniz's New Essays on Human Understanding, and since this was one of only two complete books Leibniz ever wrote, I thought perhaps I should go through it before returning to Deleuze.  Unfortunately, what makes the essays New is that the they are commentary on Locke's mammoth: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.  And Lord, you can imagine where it goes from here.  I obviously enjoy reading in the history of philosophy, but 800 pages of Locke is a bit much even for me (though one interesting shortcut of sorts might be to read Dewey's commentary on the two works together).

Anyhow, after pondering the extent of this detour, I decided against it.  Instead, I've planned an even longer background reading list, but of exclusively modern authors.  There's a group of contemporary authors that Deleuze refers to frequently throughout his work, particularly when the context involves the question of individuation, which is one of the clear themes of The Fold.  Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Leibniz's monad is the way that each individual somehow contains the entire world.  In fact, containing everything is almost synonymous with being a true or unique or perfected or completely determined individual.  But how do you pack the infinite world into the limits of a finite being?  Obviously, you fold it up. -- infinitely many times.  Not only is this folding a way of packing many things into a small space, but the process of folding itself creates an inside and an outside from what was previously a continuous fabric.  

Whenever Deleuze discusses this process of folding, which we might equally call a process of differentiating or of selecting, ordering and filtering the world, three names inevitably appear -- von Uexküll, Ruyer, and Simondon.  I already have Simondon's On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects sitting on the shelf.  I've been intending to read von Uexküll's A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning for at least a decade now because, well, how can you not want to read something with that title?  And while Ruyer is a more recent addition to the list, my interest in his work was piqued after reading Daniel W. Smith's review of Neofinalism.  So first I'll try to deepen my understanding of the concept of individuation by reading those three texts.  After that, I'd like to check out Bernard Cache, an architect who Deleuze mentions repeatedly in The Fold, as well as to finally read Daniel W. Smith collected Essays on Deleuze.  From what I've gathered over the years, Smith seems to be the best English language commentator on his philosophy.  Though given that Deleuze's US reception skews towards wanky literature department types, this is admittedly a low bar to hurdle.  

The Structure of Emptiness

What can we actually say about the concept of emptiness?  Does the experience of the non-dual have any structure we can identify?  Not that identifying something systematic here would resolve this experience, or be any sort of essential or fundamental description of it.  The question is simply an experiment in what more can we say and what new possibilities these thoughts open for us.  

This post is an experiment inspired by the sense that I keep reading about the same thing over and over again in different guises.  Clearly then, there are many names for this thing and many approaches to it.  My inclination is to describe this object in abstract form so as to better recognize it in various contexts, as well as to see more aspects of it in each of the contexts in which it appears.  Let's provisionally call this object "emptiness".  The simplest observation I can make about this 'object' is that it's more like a verb than a noun, more like a process than an object.  And the simplest description I can give of the process of emptiness is that it is like a vortex.  Things are empty when they arise in the manner of a vortex.  A vortex seems like a good image of emptiness for two reasons.  First, it is simultaneously real and capable of affecting other things, but is in itself also somehow essentially unreal, only an effect produced the relations of things that are not-vortex 1.  A hurricane is 'just' moving air.  Second, the vortex is a dynamic system that can't be thought of in the absence of time and movement.  It is a process that essentially involves circulation.  The vortex is the simplest image I can think of that describes what the ego in Lack and Transcendence, the gift in The Gift, the continuum in Mathematics and the Roots of Postmodern Thought, and différance in Of Grammatology have in common.   

Since I wanted to explore the line of thinking that has led me from each of these books to the next, and the connect this thought back to its (for me) Deleuzian roots, I reread Deleuze's essay "How Do Recognize Structuralism?".  Back when I was reading Difference & Repetition, my attention was drawn to this particular essay by Levi R. Bryant's comments.  It functions almost as a summary of Deleuze's ideas in DR and LOS.  It also fits particularly well in the context of Tasic and Derrida.  Since (contrary to perceptions here in Amerika) I find Deleuze a very systematic thinker, I thought that perhaps this essay could help me flesh out my rather simplistic metaphor.  And indeed in the essay Deleuze does indeed describe something that acts very much like a vortex, which he calls "the empty square".  But the way he approaches this idea -- by putting it at the end of his discussion of structuralism, despite the fact that he considers this element the very foundation of structural thinking -- encourages me to approach the question from a new angle.  Let's see how that process unfolds.

Perhaps the place to begin is by examining the problem that Deleuze addresses in this essay.  He says that we can only recognize structuralism by asking what it is that the structuralists themselves recognize in their various domains they study.  In answer to this question, Deleuze points out that linguistics is always considered the foundation of structuralism for good reason; what structuralists recognize -- regardless of whether this is in a culture (Levi-Strauss), an economy (Althusser), an epistemology (Foucault), or the unconscious (Lacan) -- is always a language.  Indeed, "language" and "structure" are almost synonymous.  Consider our commonplace notion that there is a "genetic language".  What we mean by this is that the genome is not simply a random collection of A, C, G, and T base pairs, but a structured one, where differences in this code are systematically tied to differences in phenotype.  Because of this structure, we can see the genotype as a different way of describing the phenotype.  Basically, a language is something that puts two different levels or orders into correspondence.  This is also exactly how spoken language works -- by correlating some vocalized sounds with some ideas in our heads.  And this correlation is the basis of our language's ability to mean anything at all.  We might say that it is the "condition of possibility" of meaning in general.  So, ultimately, the problem Deleuze addresses is how something any meaningful language is possible.  

Traditionally, at least when it comes to spoken language, we have a simple answer to this question.  Meaning is possible because there is a subject who understands what words represent.  Today, it's obvious that this explanation is a cop-out because it packs all of the mechanism of meaning into the mysterious interior of the subject.  So we can refine Deleuze's question a little further: how can a meaningful system be constructed in a world where the concept of meaning is not already given?  One of the presuppositions of Deleuze's whole philosophy is that things like meaning, identity, and the subject must be constructed, that their behavior must be explained by the working of some mechanism that does not invoke them as a principle.  In this context, "mechanism", "structure", and "language" are all synonyms.  And all of these will have to operate below or prior to the level of meaning.  They will seek to explain how we build the meaningful out of the meaningless.  The analogous question in a Buddhist context would seem to be: how is form possible in a world of emptiness?

When I state the problem this way, I see more clearly how superior Deleuze's essay is to Derrida's contemporary reflections on structuralism.  Derrida spends many pages deconstructing Saussure's linguistics and demonstrating how he relied on some idea of the interior "thought-sound" that spoken language was meant to represent.  While I haven't read any Saussure, this seems to all be valid criticism.  But it risks missing the forest for the trees.  Saussure's major contribution -- the founding idea of structuralism -- was to point out that there is an actual mechanism to this representation.  Spoken language consists of a series of arbitrary phonemes distinguished only by their differences from one another.  So it doesn't represent thought by assigning each complete thought or each concept an external marker in some one-to-one correspondence.  This would obviously require the understanding or thinking subject that we just discussed.  Instead, language works by coding thought in a string of different sounds.  It's true that Saussure seems to have sometimes taken for granted the simple unity, presence, and reality of the original internal thought.  But just reading Derrida's account doesn't allow us to appreciate the huge step forward that Saussure has made by observing that the signifiers in language are not words but phonemes.  These units don't directly represent or correspond to anything.  Their only role is to differ from one another.  Hence Saussure can famously say, "there are only differences without positive terms".  Despite his criticism, Derrida's philosophy owes its whole existence to this idea.

What's more, all this deconstructing, all this obsession with crossing out the presumed origin of language in "pure" thought, leaves us almost completely unable to see how language could actually be, you know, constructed.  And wasn't this the original question?  Because, actually, language does carry meaning.  It just doesn't do it the way we naively presume it does when we take the concept of meaning for granted.  Deleuze tries to give us something like a new meaning for "meaning", whereas Derrida comes close to abandoning the concept altogether (while of course continuing to use it "sous rature", which is a fancy way of saying 'with scare quotes').  In fairness to Derrida, towards the end of his essay Linguistics and Grammatology, he does make some allusions to a positive theory.  He suggests that what he calls "the trace" or "arche-writing" provides for the fact that language does actually distinguish an interior signified from an exterior signifier.  

If the trace, arche-phenomenon of "memory," which must be thought before the opposition of nature and culture, animality and humanity, etc..., belongs to the very movement of signification, then signification is a priori written, whether inscribed or not, in one form or another, in a "sensible" and "spatial" element that is called "exterior." Arche-writing, at first the possibility of the spoken word, then of the "graphie" in the narrow sense, the birthplace of "usurpation," denounced from Plato to Saussure, this trace is the opening of the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of the living to its other and of an inside to an outside: spacing. The outside, "spatial" and "objective" exteriority which we believe we know as the most familiar thing in the world, as familiarity itself, would not appear without the grammé, without difference as temporalisation, without the nonpresense of the other inscribed within the sense of the present, without the relationship with death as the concrete structure of the living present. Metaphor would be forbidden. (pg.70 in this edition)

The takeaway from this monstrous prose is that "difference as temporalization" (différance) works as a sort of absence-within-presence or an unoriginality-within-origin that gives birth to both sides of these conjoined opposites in a single movement.  Derrida, again with fairly vague allusions, relates this non-dual différance to Heidegger's concept of time and Freud's idea of repression.  Time, it seems, is some sort of ongoing distinguishing process that literally produces a structured stream of differences and differences within differences, the most fundamental of which is the two sides necessary to constitute a language.  I think Deleuze's concept of fractal time better describes this structure than Heidegger's analysis of the temporality of dasein, but these are clearly at least related ideas.  

At its core, the structural mechanism that Deleuze uses to explain the possibility of meaning shares some similarities with Derrida's theory of différance.  Both hypothesize that the two sides required for meaning are produced by the differentiation of a single, structural, element.  Signifier and signified, subject and object, interior and exterior are the effects of the operation of the structure.  Both also characterize this element as a sort of paradoxical object.  Derrida's "nonpresense of the other inscribed within the sense of the present" corresponds to what Deleuze's essay calls the "empty square" that is always missing from its place.  Throughout his writing Deleuze gives many names to his object.  It's the aleatory point, the dark precursor, the BwO, and the plane of consistency.  This variety of names is fitting for something that does not have a stable identity of its own.  Ultimately this element is difference-in-itself, which keeps on differing from itself.  The fact that difference is never what or where or when it is, so to speak, means that it is always displaced from itself, always circulating and moving.  We can see the same structure in  Hyde's gift or Loy's lack.  Such circulation is the animating force of the structure, and this movement draws up an abstract space of spatial, temporal, and semantic possibilities.   We might sum up by saying that difference corresponds to the one (or better the zero) that becomes two -- the thing which all the non-dual awareness philosophies seem to point at.

So far, we've made some progress relating Deleuze to Derrida, Hyde, and the concept of emptiness.  The vortex we started with is created by the continual circulation of an empty place.  As soon as one instantiation of this element fills in the place, the element itself, as a sort of placeholder, moves elsewhere.  There's a sort of permanent disequilibrium or asymmetry involved in emptiness which creates a sense of motion that isn't in time so much as constitutes time itself.  In this way, a single element, albeit paradoxical and multiple within itself, breaks down into a whole series of places, an entire field of differences.  As I mentioned earlier, Deleuze does not begin with this analysis of the empty place, but build up to it as a climax (in "The Sixth Criterion: The Empty Square", pg. 184).  Now that we've seen how the story ends, we can see better that his real contribution here is the whole apparatus he creates to help us understand how emptiness can structure form.  All of the first five criteria were about the structure of this field of difference and the ordering of places within a series.  If emptiness itself can't be described, we can instead spend most of our time discussing the way that it informs form.

Since I don't know whether I'm going to describe Deleuze's structure in detail, I want to make sure I state the takeaway upfront.  Though he doesn't mention it in this essay, the basic metaphor here is embryogenesis.  The undifferentiated egg gradually becomes the adult organism through a cascade of increasingly fine differentiations.  There is a fractal cascade of difference from the difference in-itself of the empty square, to the qualitative difference between relations and singularities in the structure, to the field of quantitative differential relations between the elements themselves, and all the way down to the differentiation this structure provides to the actual.  The goal of this complex theory is to allow us to say some more about difference-in-itself, to help us see how this idea of emptiness has a structure of its own, a recursive, nested, hierarchical structure that allows it to 'take form'.  Deleuze creates concepts that allow us to express the idea that emptiness cannot be only a single, smooth, undifferentiated thing.  Difference in-itself must contain difference, in itself.  This recursive and non-dual structure is a requirement of any theory of immanence.

The whole sequence is encapsulated in Deleuze's idea of a T versus C spectrum of difference that stretches from the virtual to the actual.  On one end, emptiness is a pure differential flux, an instantaneous cut or missing piece that rejoins the two asymmetrical sides of time.  It is highly differenTiated in the sense of a mathematical derivative or singularity.  But in itself, it is a nothing that can become everything, a sort of degree zero or un-differenCiated egg.  On the other end, forms fill the structure and become fully differenCiated and reified into static objects.  Time is then reduced to the un-differenTiated laminar and linear flow of a subject.  I've presented this as moving from the empty egg as cause to the full forms as effect.  But of course we can also think of it the other way around.  At each level, distinct forms are joined by the emptiness between them.  It is the empty square that animates the structure, establishes a continuity between the differentiated parts, and allows us to ascend from the actual to the virtual.  In this context we might speak of a Deleuzian 'deconstruction' that always shows us a third thing, a transcendental precondition of the distinct things posited at each of the levels.  In fact, this is how he opens the essay, by considering the way structuralism adds the symbolic to the commonplace distinction between the real and the imaginary.  

And I think I'll leave it at that.  There's a lot of apparatus in "How do we recognize Structuralism?".  It's all interesting, but to really do it justice, I would need to read each of the structuralist writers he discusses as well as reread parts of Difference & Repetition and The Logic of Sense.  But this apparatus changes again and again in the development of Deleuze's philosophy.  The only crucial thing that is conserved in every iteration is the idea that: 1) a paradoxical element structures a nested field of difference, and 2) the first 'level' of this field (beyond the degree zero of the field of fields itself) is a distinction between its differential relations and its singularities.  These seem to function like alternate perspectives on the same field which "symbolize with" one another (pg. 177).  Perhaps these two are the minimum requirements of a philosophy of immanence?

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1.  This description is inspired by my vague memory of how Tucker Peck once described not-self or emptiness or lack of essential nature or something like that.  Everything is made up of stuff that is not that thing.  I imagine that this description was aimed directly at the problem of infinite regress entailed in our typically homuncular sense of self.  It's another way of stating Nozick's idea that the only explanations that actually explain anything are invisible-hand explanations.  Since a vortex is in some sense nothing but moving particles, this description applies well.  However, on another level we might argue that the constituent particles themselves are vortices as well, made up of the interaction of even smaller particles, and so on ... This strategy makes a virtue of infinite regress by suggesting that it's turtles all the way down.  This idea of a "good infinity", the infinity within the finite, is fascinating to me.  A simple iterative process produces the astonishing complexity of a fractal or the continuum or the results of a meditating on "who am I?".  What theoretically seems like a boring copy of a copy of ... turns out to be remarkably fecund in practice.

The World Is Neither True Nor Real But Living

Well, devoted readers, we have finally reached the end of the Nietzsche bender that began exactly a year ago.  It's ridiculous to try and sum up what I've learned this past year in just a few lines, but it seems important to try.  First, I learned that I didn't really understand Nietzsche well at all back in college.  Back then, I adored and romanticized his polemic poetry of the lone individual.  Most of this is actually just there as an initial goad to thinking, but also a trap to ensnare the unwary.  There isn't really any individual person in Nietzsche's philosophy; everything is the will to power, the ever-productive and affirmative emptiness.  Seeing his philosophy in light of the concept of not-self completely changes what you get out of it.  Second, Nietzsche's main point is that nihilism is inevitable and necessary, but that it overcomes itself through action.  The world always looks meaningless.  It is neither true nor real, but is made through living.   The important thing is to live creatively, affirmatively, and joyously, by producing our meaning and reality as we go.  To do this, we have to continually overcome the 'objective illusions', like the self, that fool us into thinking that the world is, or should be, any particular way at all.  Freedom lies in the glory of making it all up, including making ourselves up.  Nihilism is not a problem, but merely a derivative consequence of our joyful creative power.

Of course, in this final post I also want to organize my thoughts about the final chapter of Nietzsche & Philosophy.  However, I don't think I'll proceed with the exhaustive detail that I've devoted to the rest of the book.  Chapter 5 -- The Overman: Against the Dialectic doesn't really add anything new to the framework that Deleuze has built over the course of the book.  Its purpose is to show us again the way the will to power switches valence from negative to positive at the height of nihilism.  Nihilism overcomes itself when the negative will, the will to nothingness, targets reactive forces and leads them into a becoming-active self-destructive that, rather then ending in nothingness, actually ends up affirmatively producing something new.  This whole cycle is part of the positive and affirmative will to power.  Accordingly, the chapter is divided into two parts.  Subsections 5.1-5.9 tell the story of the history of nihilism that leads up to the point of its self-destruction.  Then, subsections 5.10-5.13 bring us back out of the abyss and look at the some story from an affirmative perspective.  The whole thing, then, is a theory of the relationship between affirmation and negation and th way these are not really opposed to one another but interconvert.  

When we conceive of the story in this big picture way, however, we risk confusing it with the other great philosophy of the union of opposites -- the Hegelian dialectic.  So throughout the chapter though, Deleuze works hard to show us how Nietzsche's story is precisely not a form of dialectic.  Instead, we finally realize, Deleuze sees Nietzsche's whole philosophy as a species of radicalized Kantianism.  Here we come back to a point that I earlier found completely obscure -- Nietzsche is a rejection of Hegel and and a development of Kant.  

Although this supposition must be verified later we believe that there is, in Nietzsche, not only a Kantian heritage, but a half-avowed, half-hidden, rivalry. Nietzsche does not have the same position in relation to Kant as Schopenhauer did for, unlike Schopenhauer, he does not attempt an interpretation which would separate Kantianism from its dialectical avatars and present it with new openings. This is because, for Nietzsche, these dialectical avatars do not come from the outside but are primarily caused by the deficiencies of the critical philosophy. Nietzsche seems to have sought (and to have found in the "eternal return" and the "will to power") a radical transformation of Kantianism, a re-invention of the critique which Kant betrayed at the same time as he conceived it, a resumption of the critical project on a new basis and with new concepts. (NP, 52)

Kant's critical project was still content to take for granted and reconstruct unities like God, self, and world.  This left it open to hijack by the dialectic, which packed the entire history of the world into the self-development of these a priori unities.  Instead of dealing with the tiny concrete differences that actually change the world, the dialectic is always rearranging the big abstract oppositions that are merely symptoms of underlying mechanism.  And if we ask why anyone would interpret the world through this philosophical lens, that is, if we apply Nietzsche's question of "which one" id the dialectician, we discover that the dialectic is always the philosophy of the slave.  Deleuze's idea is that Nietzsche rejects the dialectic completely and returns to deepen Kantianism by deconstructing these unities and their development into varying configurations of the will to power.  Though Deleuze spends a fair bit of this chapter tracing a history of the various avatars of the dialectic, and distinguishing Nietzsche philosophy from it, I'll mostly skip over this theme.  While I can follow the story of the development of the dialectic because it is really just another version of the story of nihilism, my knowledge of Hegel, Feuerbach, Stirner, and Marx is not deep enough to contribute anything useful here.

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Subsections 5.1-5.9 tell the story of the history of nihilism as progress through three phases -- negative, reactive, passive -- culminating in a fourth -- self-overcoming.  Deleuze tells the story in several ways in order to flesh out its drama.  

1) First, there's the abstract schematic version.  It begins when an alliance is formed between the negative will to power (negation -- the will to nothingness) and reactive forces.  The result is a negative nihilism where values beyond life are invented, but only as a way of denying this life.  While negating this life, positing values beyond it, is the essence of nihilism, this stage doesn't look like 'nihilism' as we usually understand it.  In fact, it's characterized by an intense belief in certain values.  It's just that these values are always valuable precisely because they constitute a (fictitious) escape from life.  In the second stage, the negative will leads reactive forces to triumph over active forces and separate them from what they can do.  The result is a reactive nihilism in which reactive forces take over ownership of the previous ideals as if they alone had invented them -- ie. without any help from the will to negation.  This stage looks more like what we usually call 'nihilism' because it begins to consider the supposedly transcendent ideals of stage 1 as mere projections of human desires.  But while the triumphant reactive forces reject the need for these external ideals, all they've done is take the same ideals into themselves while remaining completely reactive.  The value of these ideals still depends on an escape from suffering, so it's almost as if the reactive forces try to escape from themselves through themselves.  In the third stage, the final one in the history of nihilism, reactive forces finally see that all values they have created have served the same purpose -- a will to nothingness.  The result is a passive nihilism, where reactive forces simply try to stop willing, to stop valuing.  Rather than continue to will nothingness, they would rather not will at all.  This is the abstract framework that Deleuze has used throughout the book.  

2) Second, we can tell this as a historical story about the development of religion.  We might think of it as a sort of play in three acts, each of which begins with the stage direction and setting, "God is dead".  This famous phrase is not at all meant to deny the existence of God.  It was never an ontological proposition, but, as Deleuze puts it, a dramatic proposition.

Speculative propositions bring the idea of God into play from the point of view of its form. God does or does not exist insofar as the idea of him does or does not imply a contradiction. But the phrase "God is dead" is completely different: it makes the existence of God depend on a synthesis, it synthesizes the idea of God with time, becoming, history and man. It says at one and the same time: God existed and he is dead and he will rise from the dead, God has become Man and Man has become God. The phrase "God is dead" is not a speculative proposition but a dramatic proposition, the dramatic proposition par excellence. (NP, 152)

The question is: what does "God is dead" mean?  To understand this we have to stage a drama that illustrates the effect of this event.  The death of God means different things at different stages in the history of nihilism.  

The first act is a negative nihilism that characterizes the judeo-Christian response.  If it still sounds strange to call Christianity a form of nihilism you're missing the point.  God is actually the great symbol of nothingness, of the 'beyond' life that the reactive life invents to escape its suffering and make itself livable.  However, it may at first sound strange to claim that the judeo-Christian tradition dramatizes the death of God.  Until you stop and actually take it literally for a minute.  Christianity, at least, is clearly all about the death of God.  God sends his own Son down to die.  The Father is killed in the form of the Son, and then he is resurrected.  "God on the cross" is precisely a dramatization of what the death (and rebirth) of God mean.  Here, as the three scenes of this act, Deleuze would insert the entire psychological history he traced in From Ressentiment to Bad Conscience (the existence of ressentiment as a raw illness is sort of taken for granted, so the four moments he discusses reduce to three).  

The second act of the play takes place in modern Europe.  In Nietzsche's understanding, modernity is characterized precisely by the vacuum that takes place when we no longer believe in God and claim only to believe in ourselves (as if we knew who that was).  It dramatizes a reactive nihilism where reactive forces now think themselves strong enough to reject the need for the explicit will to negation that led them to triumph and spread their power through a universal becoming-reactive.  If God is dead, it's now because we have murdered him.  We no longer had use for him and were ashamed of the witness he bore to our reactivity.  We claim to be nihilists and 'free thinkers' who believe in progress and science and disavow these old middle-Eastern superstitions.  But these are just more ideals that tell us how life should be and reject how it is.  

[As a side note to that last sentence, it's important to hear the valences of the two terms.  We always think that life should be better, more objective, more stable, more rational, etc ... We think of all of the latter as positive terms.  But actually these concepts are just a way to discipline or correct a life that we actually experience as somehow lacking.  Their positive valence is inseparable from a negation of this life -- life is impermanent, subjective, irrational, etc ... Nietzsche's whole point is that we should reverse these valences.  The positive thing is life as it is -- messy -- and those other adjectives describing how it should be are all insults.  Life always should be a particular way, but it never is any particular way at all.]

Perhaps surprisingly, the third act of the Broadway hit God is Dead is set in ancient India.  Nietzsche conceives of Buddhism as a passive nihilism that arises when we no longer believe in anything, will anything, do anything.  This appears to be the terminal point for reactive forces.  The thousand gods they believed in, but who were ultimately revealed as their own personification, are finally well and truly dead.  It would be best not to reinvent them.  It would be better not to will at all, to simply get off the merry-go-round of existence.  In Nietzsche's story, Buddhism is actually a more advanced stage of nihilism than Christianity or Europe, one that modern Europe is only just beginning to catch up to.  

3) Finally, the very way that Deleuze has told this story of the history of nihilism forms another dramatization of the idea that God is dead.  He has given us the history of God as a concept -- the story of his judeo-Christian birth, his replacement by European Man, and the inevitable quiet death of these interchangeable synonyms for nothingness.  It seems that the first two parts of this story bear a similarity to Hegel's dialectical self-development of absolute Spirit, and the final step to the developments in the concept of the dialectic from Hegel to Stirner.  As I said before, I'm not going to go into the details here. But in a sense, Deleuze's message is simply that the dialectic is dead.  For Deleuze, the dialectic is the epitome of negative thinking, reactive thinking that begins with abstract negation and only proceeds through the negation of negation.  It's the philosophy of slaves.  There are many avatars of the dialectic, in fact, every step of the history of nihilism could be seen as an avatar of the same will to nothingness.  They all have the same form -- essence moves from in-itself to for-itself by alienating itself in negation and then reappropriating this alienation.  It doesn't really matter what initial essence you choose (God, Man, Ego, Proletariat). The story is always that this a priori essence is an internal property that is lost and recovered.  

Having told various versions of the story of the first three stages of nihilism, Deleuze is now ready to move on to the climax.  Since he's used the same framework throughout the book, the idea that nihilism culminates in overcoming itself shouldn't be too surprising by now.  This is the moment when the will to nothingness, which was only temporarily allied with reactive forces as a means of spreading ressentiment and making it universal, breaks this alliance and begins to lead reactive forces to their own self-destruction.  Nihilism completes itself by converting into affirmation -- the affirmation of destruction that constitutes the becoming-active of previously reactive forces.  We might call this final stage, paradoxically, active nihilism.  

But before Deleuze describes this climax, he gives us two curious chapters (5.7 and 5.8) that deal with the theory of the "Higher Man".  I might pass over these chapters as some sort of elaboration of stage 3 if it weren't for the fact that they try to recuperate Part IV of Zarathustra as, "... the essence of the published Zarathustra" (NP, 164).  The idea seems to be that the higher men of Part IV correspond to the various avatars of the dialectic.  In a sense, each of the higher men represents a version of the story of nihilism, and yet each is simultaneously conscious that their own story is just another failure, just another dead end, just more nihilism.  They all thought that the essence of humanity was X (God, Man, Morality, Species Being, Science, Freedom).  But they are all disgusted to see that as X develops dialectically, it just results in some new form of nihilism.  So they are each representatives of the highest product of human culture and simultaneously conscious of the fact that this culture only reflects a reactive human essence that always develops into nihilism.  Here we need to remember the long digression on the ambiguity of culture in chapter 4.  Culture is species activity, precisely the characteristic activity that trains humanity and makes us human.  The 'higher' men are the fruit of this activity.  But they always discover that this activity is founded on a reactive conception of the essence of humanity.  Which begs the question: If humanity is essentially reactive, how can it have a species activity?  Or, conversely, if there is a species activity, why isn't its highest product an active and affirmative human, instead of these failed higher men?  In fact, what the ruin of the higher men are showing us is that the essence of man lies not in his reactivity, but in the way his characteristic activity is to make forces (including his own forces) become-reactive.  Man's essential activity is spreading reactivity.  Thus culture is not accidentally diverted by ideologies, but every end product of culture will necessarily be reactive.   Everything human culture aims at and selects for will be essentially botched even if it is achieved.  This is not because humans are essentially reactive, but because the human-to-human mechanism of culture makes every human become-reactive.  How could human cultural activity have become-active and affirmative if the reactive force of man is always working to make everything become-reactive?  The highest values of human culture, even the Buddhist value of passive nihilism, always end up devaluing themselves when they sees how they make everything become sick and reactive in practice.  In a way, I think Deleuze is trying to explain why we never have a utopia, and why Nietzsche's overhuman doesn't represent a future utopia of the species.  

With that we can return to our story in progress ...  While the higher men are disgusted with themselves, their activity does not go as far as self-destruction.  So they never progress to the fourth stage of active nihilism.  In Part IV, Zarathustra is tempted to pity the higher man (to tolerate their reactivity), when they need to be overcome -- this is the point where reactive forces would become-active by turning against themselves.  Zarathustra doesn't want just another goal for human culture.  The overhuman is not the highest human, but something inhuman, what results when the human in us dies off.  With that in mind, we can see that the whole of TSZ is explicitly (Prologue, 2) another dramatization of "God (Humanity) is dead".

The final step in the history of nihilism is its self-overcoming.  The will to nothingness has to be taken as far as it can, to the point of completion where it transmutes into its opposite -- affirmative will.  At this point not just the values change, but the whole way in which we value changes sign.  The value of values now derives from the power they give us to affirm life, rather than from the power they have to negate life and preserve a reactive life.  This isn't just a change in valuation but a trans-valuation, a transmutation of valuing.  

But Deleuze points out three ways in which it is still a form of nihilism.  All values based on the will to escape life -- which is to say all values up this point in history, all the values of history -- are hollow.  Transmutation therefore represents total nihilism.  Up till this fourth stage, the will to power has only been known to us through its negative form.  The motor of our story has been the will to nothingness and its shifting alliances with reactive life.  But transmutation shows us the unknown and unknowable (ie. ungraspable by ego) affirmative form of the will to power.  It is not about knowing or believing in 'better' or 'truer' values, but about creating values, 'believing' in the (self-fulfilling) power of the false.  So transmutation is nihilistic in the sense that it believes in the nothing.  Finally, transmutation is completed nihilism because it turns against the reactive forces that earlier helped it spread.  The Buddhistic last man of passive nihilism becomes the man who wants to perish of active nihilism.  The will to negation converts into a positive and affirmative will to destruction.  Reactive forces are thus (self) selected away.  

----

Now that Deleuze has showed us the full story of how forces become active and the will to power converts from affirmation to negation, he can spend the remainder of the chapter (5.10-5.13) examining what this implies for our understanding of the concept of affirmation.  The key point is that affirmation does not mean that something re-places the values denied by nihilism. The history of nihilism and the dialectic was a long parade of different values that all ultimately ended up occupying the same place.  Now the place has been done away with entirely.  Affirmation is not a new solution to the old problem of nihilism.  Affirmation begins when we reach a nihilism so extreme that nihilism itself ceases to be a problem.  Instead of retaining its negative sense, the idea that nothing is inherently true or meaningful suddenly acquires an affirmative and liberating sense.  This is seeing emptiness.  And it frees.  When we reach the true depths of nihilism, it suddenly loses its power over us, and instead a 'belief' in nihilism becomes an expression of the fact that no power can block us from creating new values.  Deleuze draws a bunch of consequences from the character of this moment of transmutation.  

1) He discovers that there is still an important place for negation within affirmation. Instead of being opposed to it, negation is revealed as a part of the development of affirmation.  The negative no longer has any power on its own, but just serves as a tool to clear the decks and allow for affirmation.  Destruction is the means by which creation happens.  

2) Almost as a corollary of this newly subordinate position of the negative, Deleuze points out that an affirmation which does not know how to say no is somehow defective.  In TSZ, this is precisely the affirmation of the ass, who throughout Part IV says nothing but "Yea-uh".  Because the ass does not no how to say no, he can't truly affirm and create but can only accept things as they are.  Like the camel, the ass just patiently bears the load of whatever reality comes his way as his inevitable burden.  This purely passive acceptance of reality isn't the same thing as affirmation because it is always founded on the heaviness of the reality we must accept.  We always end up accepting all the negative within us, but letting it persist as negative, as a burden we bear or a problem with 'human nature'.  Acceptance of the negative truth of the real is not the affirmation which transmutes this negative into a positive falsehood or fabrication.  Really seeing emptiness does not merely mean seeing that you are doing something stupid, but also letting go of the idea that what you're doing is stupid.  The best tool for this is humor and lightness that lets us see the human within us as a contingent piece of nature we need not identify with.  Man accepts Being as it is, but the Overman affirms Life as becomes. 

3) If affirmation doesn't affirm things as they are (Being), then what does it affirm?  At its highest point, affirmation affirms only itself.  The activity of affirmation (a becoming-active) is also the object of affirmation.  True affirmation is double.  Affirmation doesn't affirm a pre-existent Being and Truth but affirms becoming and falsehood, the affirmative power of creating or fabricating.  We've seen this same theme before as the affirmation of the being of becoming (or making an affirmation of becoming).  Creation is the affirmative power of difference (not opposition) and this power is itself affirmed.

All of these characteristics of transmutation lead us to an idea of pure affirmation that we can read in several senses.  Affirmation is pure because its only object is itself and it therefore endlessly redoubles itself as the affirmation of affirmation of ...  But affirmation is also pure in the sense that it is total, with nothing falling outside it or opposing it.  Because nihilism overcomes itself, even negation is a part of the power of affirmation.  In a sense, its not even 'true' negation since its will to nothingness is put in service of the affirmative will to power.  Finally, pure affirmation is the affirmation that purifies itself.  The will to nothingness leads reactive forces to become-active and actively self-destruct, which results in the transmutation of this will into affirmation (the Nietzschean, rather than Hegelian, version of the negation of negation).  Negation burns itself up or selects itself away, so to speak, or in this conversion, a process which, if repeated, has the power to convert all of negation into affirmation.  This is the secret of the eternal return.  We substitute a positive for a negative feedback loop, a runaway train for an equilibrium seeking machine.  Reactivity can only spread itself so far before it has made everything become-reactive.  But when everyone has been infected the sickness has nowhere left to go and no activity of its own.  A grand nihilism is the inevitable consequence.  But also the point at which we encounter a becoming-active.  This new affirmation can spread like wildfire, and because it actually creates activity as its goes, it has no limits.  Of course we could imagine some sort of population dynamic here, with active and reactive agents acting like predators and prey or the zombie apocalypse (if there were some anti-zombie antidote).  We might wonder about the evolution of these populations over time.  But I suspect that we're not talking about the same kind of time in the two cases.  Maybe just one becoming-active is enough to transmute the whole world into affirmation all at once?